The boy looked up at Lan in half fascination, half fear: the expression of a child who did not yet understand the horrors this world could afford. At eight cycles old, he would have grown up post-Conquest, his life confined to this small village, knowing nothing of the outside world. Where once traveling merchants might have roamed the Last Kingdom, peddling wares and trading stories across the land, and imperial messengers might have arrived on horseback to collect taxes and bring news of the outside world, those lines of communication had long gone cold in the era of the Elantian Conquest.
