>>172511>>172501>>172499Sure.
Mason pulls around front, and offers Posey a seat.
Driving out, the car takes a left turn away from the city, rather than right towards the city as Posey has seen before. The car passes rows of citrus and other trees as it moves south, swiftly coming upon a town with brick buildings and the smokestacks of a couple large mills, just removed from the road. The signs announce this city as "Maregate." The two pass this city, and move further south on a two lane highway that moves straight through lines of plantations. Eventually, the road forks and turns left, and crosses bridges across innumerable unnamed ravines and rivulets, and through an ocean of mostly-bald deciduous trees - hickory, cypress, and soapberry - dotted with scattered pines. At some points, the ravines run through crevasses and channels in the ground taht expose red clay along their banks. But after a while, the land is flat in a great plain. The two pass through a town that the sign calls Bristleboro, though it looks nothing like Maregate before, as the houses are all older and made of wood, as if by travelling some miles the two had gone a hundred years back in time. Periodically, tiny little roads branch off of this one, soon swallowed up in the ocean of leafless trees.
Mason turns left onto one of these roads, which is a small non-paved road with gravel coated grooves where the tires fit, with grass growing in the middle, big enough only for a single car. The road is sometimes muddy, as the flat land increasingly encroaches on the miles of inundated forest that sometimes border the road, or past large, shallow lakes. A few cypress trees have not lost their leaves, and increasingly, even the broadleaf trees retain their green, such that the roadway is often sheltered from the oppressive blue cloudless sky which seems scarcely separate from space, by green tunnels that almost threaten to make the car disappear. Mason pulls over to the side at one point to allow another car, a red pickup truck with a decaying paint scheme, to pass, though Posey cannot fathom why anyone would be out here. The road occasionally passes along small wooden bridges, or more often, along built up berms of clay and gravel across large flooded fields.
Many of the trees passed are massive and surely centuries old, older perhaps than pony settlement in the region. But not every elder cypress in this virgin forest is unscathed, as some are inexplicably turned over, or even burst at the trunk, leaving a presumably valuable log behind to rot. Perhaps this is the action of some great hurricane wind, though any storm reaching this far inland must surely be terrifying in its own right to deliver such destruction, though the varied angles and varieties of damage are suggestive of some other, not necessarily as natural cause.
But even in these primeval forests, there are signs of old habitation. One or two roads branch off, and a couple old houses are passed, though one has a hole in the roof, and another is but foundation. The two pass a lake with the ruins of old wooden houses, and a water mill sticking out of water that could only be a few feet deep, and a roofless stone church on a small island next to it.
Mason says
"We're not far. The battle occurred in this area. Not that far from the road as that is how much equipment was moved. You'll recognize signs of battle when you see it."