The autumn that followed the battle at the Red Sand Delta brought an unprecedented golden calm over the entirety of the Verdant Reach. The catastrophic smoke of dark plasma engines had long cleared from the southern skies, replaced by the crisp, invigorating breeze that rolled down from the northern peaks. Across the fertile river basin, the transition from warfare to integration had begun with steady, cautious grace. The soldiers of Tartarus, stripped of their spiked obsidian armor and freed from Malakor’s tyrannical neural conduits, had laid down their weapons in the rich silt. Where an invading army of war-chariots once marched, hundreds of former laborers and soldiers now worked side by side with mortal carpenters, raising timber granaries, digging irrigation canals, and learning the s
