The skeletal hooves of Argus struck the damp, uneven earth with a hollow rhythm as the horse and its master crossed the threshold into Oldmarsh.
Oldmarsh was a quiet little settlement. Stagnant water, cooked meat and burning peat were the most present smells in the air. Wooden houses with sagging, moss-eaten thatched roofs dressed the muddy main road, looking more like sinking ships than proper homes.
It was, by all visual accounts, a perfectly normal town. Closer to a village than a city, and there was a reason for that.
In the kingdom of Evernia, the line between a town and a city was not merely drawn by population size or landmass.
Structurally, towns were almost identical to villages—simple, agrarian, and quiet. Cities, however, were entirely different beasts, and they were defined by a single, highly coveted commodity: Awakeners.
Simply put, Awakeners built cities.
