The world turned.
Spring crept across the Threian kingdom in soft advances of green and gold, warming the scarred earth and coaxing life from soil that had been kiss by the cold harsher than any in living memory. The fields that fed the kingdom's population were planted on schedule, their furrows straight and deep, their seeds selected for resilience by farmers who understood, in the marrow-deep way that agricultural people understood all things, that the world they worked in was more fragile than it appeared.
In the capital, the rhythms of governance had stabilized into something that resembled normalcy, though the word carried a different weight than it had before the crisis. Normal no longer meant comfortable. Normal no longer meant unquestioned. Normal meant something harder and more honest: the steady, vigilant functioning of institutions that understood, now, how easily they could be corrupted and how quickly corruption could metastasize into catastrophe.
