“When trade stopped, timber coming down from the North, a scarce commodity down in that part of the world, began piling up, awaiting transport to arrive from buyers in the South. That transport never arrived. Foods waiting to be moved rotted.

“With all that trade halting, people began to worry about how they would make a living. They worried, too, about what the distant signs of trouble could mean, not just for themselves, but for people they know to the south.

“I was the sorceress assigned to serve the people of Grandengart. People from the South, down in the Old World, didn’t hold much with magic. They always stayed well away from me as they passed through. But the people of Grandengart relied on me for my abilities, my skills, but mostly for protection from shapeless worries.

“To most people I possessed inscrutable abilities, so in a way I was not exactly one of them. As a result I sometimes felt that I was little more than their talisman meant to somehow keep shapeless evil from their door. People seemed to think that merely having a sorceress’s powers nearby was a vaguely beneficial thing, that it would somehow ensure good fortune, much like their prayers to the good spirits for a safe journey.

“Their worries about the increasing signs of trouble to the south, though, were not so shapeless. They looked to me for help with this troubling development.

“I didn’t know exactly what I could do about it. Magic didn’t offer any solution that I could see, although it seemed as if it must to those who knew little about it. In the end I traveled here, to the Keep, to see the council, hoping they could help. They told me that they would take the concerns of the people of Grandengart, as well as the details I had offered, under consideration, along with other reports they were receiving. They suggested that the unrest would likely soon calm down and trade would resume. One of them even suggested that perhaps a bridge had washed out and it was nothing more than that. I told them that from what I had heard from people fleeing from the South, there was a new ruler and his forces were the source of the unrest. They seemed disinclined to see such a change in rule as necessarily a bad thing, because the old rule was so fragmented and inefficient.

“While I could get no immediate help from the council, they did promise that as soon as troops were available they would send a detachment to investigate the situation. I decided that until the troops could be sent, it would be best if I returned home at once. I knew how nervous people were, and I wanted to be there for them.