The low ground came first.
The tumen was still a full hour's march from the city when the terrain dropped and the character of the earth changed. What had been worked agricultural land gave way to something different, the soil darker and more compacted, the grass shorter and sparse in the places it grew at all.
The waterworks that crossed the approach here were not for farming. They were older, running in the patterns of a city's infrastructure, serving nothing now.
The ground between them was periodically inundated and the flooding showed in the sediment lines across the stones and in the way the lower vegetation grew in dense horizontal rings rather than evenly.
The foundations were visible in places.
