Ask in the taverns of the ash-plains what broke the land into the shapes it holds now — why the earth stands in cooled black waves, why old roads end at cliffs of glassy stone — and you will be told about the Magma March. Every teller dates it differently. Every teller is certain.
They say the ground split first, the way ice splits — a sound like the world clearing its throat — and that the fire came walking. Not a flood, not a burning wind: a march. The fire-blooded, vast shapes striding in the molten glow with the patience of things that do not tire, and the land igniting at their footfalls the way kindling takes from a carried torch.
The Ashen Colossi — the fire-maddened giants that roam beyond the burning land, driven witless by their hunger for flame — walk through every version of the story. Whether they led the March, or followed it, or were it entire, the tale-tellers do not agree, and the scholars who might have settled it were not there, for the excellent reason that no scholar who was there survived to become one.
The honest record is thin. Settlements that stood, and then did not. Herds and harvests gone in a season. Refugee columns arriving in the river-cities with burns no campfire explains. A margin-note in a trade ledger, written small, that says only: the fire walked this year.
Whether the Magma March was one catastrophe or many, whether it is finished or merely resting — the chronicles cannot say. The ash-plains folk, who live on the ground it re-made, hold one opinion with perfect unanimity: it happened, it will happen again, and when the ground clears its throat, you run.
The march, set to music — relentless, molten, and not over.
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