There was a certain way most nations were built.
Not intentionally — not the way a house was built, with plans and deliberate decisions about where the walls went. More the way a body built scar tissue: in response to damage, over time, in layers, the outermost layers the ones that had taken the most. At the fringes of every nation that bordered the Shroud's influence were the places that absorbed what came through first. Villages and border towns with close to no safeguards against outside attacks. The people who lived there lived there because they had always lived there, or because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else, or because someone had to, and the someone-had-to was always distributed toward the people with the fewest options.
At the edges of these settlements, between the civilian population and whatever lay beyond the managed perimeter, were the outposts.
