Northern Border of Northreach – Marshfield Village. Midday – Overcast.
The sky over Marshfield was the color of a bruised lung—thick, heavy, and suffocatingly grey. It was a mirror to the faces of the villagers below, whose hope seemed to have withered along with the crops in the surrounding bogs.
Marshfield was once a peaceful, albeit damp, settlement known for exporting the finest freshwater fish to the southern provinces. Now, it had been transformed into a grim fortress of sickness. An emergency quarantine zone had been established, marked by a makeshift perimeter of sharpened wooden stakes and coils of barbed wire. Desolate yellow flags emblazoned with a black cross—the universal symbol for biological hazard in the Sudrath territories—flapped listlessly in the humid, salt-tinged wind.
