The mountains finally fade into the distance. Even the pyramids and barrows wear down at last. Tobacco and swamp vegetation gives way to a dry, crumbling orange soil that tastes of blood. The winds picks it up and carries it from the land's scars, the empty pits where buildings or roads should be slotted into. It lingers in the air, barely kept aloft by a miserly breeze. A rain like an insult comes through, spitting just enough wetness to condense the dust out of the air and stick it to your hair and clothes. 

But then there's the wheat. Endless fields of dead gold, greedy roots holding the powder soil together. No orderly, cultivated grains are these - these are wild grasses and they are jagged, seed pods like needles so that they might tangle into the clothes and hair of passer-by who will carry them to new homes. Unlovely things, a glimpse of the vicious logic of Demeter even here - but for all that, the act of picking them out of each others hair is a curiously playful experience.

The worst are the thistle fields. There is no other word for these: these are cursed. These are a curse. Tall and thin trees made entirely out of spikes, leaves as sharp as their dull violet flowers. Many of them are dead according to their own strange causes but their desiccated grey husks maintain the same bloody-minded viciousness as they did in life. To move through these sharp forests you must walk in single file, and the one in front must swing a machete to clear a path. Your boots crunch under stalks heavy with pungent, vital sap.

But for all their ugliness these are liminal plants. As the hills fade into plains the eternally dead grass returns, as the plains fade into hills then the forests reassert themselves above the spikes. Now and then the curse fades into supple bamboo glades, or into paddies of sugar-cane whose fresh-sweet nectar seems like a gift. One time you even find a single apple tree, heavy with fruit on the jagged border of sweet and sour. It's an occasion to stop and feast and celebrate the end of a month of hard drudgery.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

It has never been fully decided how to accommodate a Great Sage. A grand temple to emphasize the power and respect society should have for their wisdom? A simple hut to suggest that their power transcended mere material possessions? Great Sage Ohlemi has split the difference. He occupies a grand monument - an immense statue to one of the Tyrants - but he has built his hut atop the ruined neck where the statue's head once was. The immense serpentine statue now looks more unsettling than it did when it was whole. 

The Great Sage has not descended from his place atop the statue for nearly a century, and that is not an achievement impressive merely for the dedication it represents. At the base of the statue are two crashed aircraft, four shattered Plovers, and a veritable carpet of broken weapons and the odd missing tooth or old bloodstain. Powerful warriors have been testing themselves by trying to get the Grand Sage down from the Tyrant's shoulders for as long as he's been up there. In the beginning it was Loyalists, those discredited old fascists, seeking to avenge the insult to their rulers. Later it became a sport for aspiring champions without political leanings, though they really could have thought a bit harder about the symbolism. 

Those less contentious make the Great Sage offerings. He descends a single bucket like a man might fish and people come by to pray and drop in food, ammunition, petitions, propaganda leaflets trying to convert him to a variety of political causes, and on and on. The bucket carries all of these things up and away. For a long time that's all it was, but then some penitent soul decided to give him a crystal dragon egg. A century of silent contemplation of the mysteries did not survive. Ever since he has been a combination of chatty, terminally online, and old person trying to understand technology and it has not done much for his dignity. There doesn't seem to be any part of society unchanged by the spread of the dragons.

But now that you're here, you're left at a loose end for how to approach. You could stand at the bottom and ask Brightberry to contact the Sage's dragon - Kissingsky - though that's a bit like phone calling someone within visual range, which is a bit awkward. You could put an offering or a... note or something in the bucket, like a good pilgrim. Or you could take the invitation on its face and just fly up to meet him and see if he unleashes the awesome cosmic power he's spent centuries mastering against you. Or you could just shout very loudly, but that might be a bit disrespectful.