The morning fog over Oakhaven smelled of fresh pine shavings, damp earth, and woodsmoke.
At the edge of the clearing where the old timber mill once stood, twenty village laborers worked alongside four off-duty Sunspire sentries. Heavy cedar beams were being hauled into place with thick hemp ropes, raising the frame of a two-story clinic designed to house both an herb drying loft and thirty treatment cots.
Elena stood near a stack of dry shingles, a rolled blueprint of charcoal-drawn floor plans resting across a flat wooden crate.
She wore a sturdy woolen coat dyed forest green, her sleeves turned back and her dark hair secured in a practical braided crown. The faint silver luminescence beneath her skin was quiet today, humming steadily as she checked the timber joints against her sketch
