The farmer's name was Delen, and his crops were dying.
Not dramatically — not withering overnight or burning in the field. Dying slowly, the way things died when the force sustaining them withdrew by degrees. The wheat grew shorter this season. The grain heads were thinner. The soil, which had been rich and dark for as long as Delen could remember, had turned pale along the edges of his field — gray-brown, like the earth was tired.
He'd farmed this land for twenty-two years. His father had farmed it before him. The Rootmother's blessings had always been there, woven into the soil like invisible roots — the feeling of warmth when you dug your hands into the earth in spring, the sense that the land *wanted* to grow. Delen had never questioned it the way he'd never questioned rain. It was simply how the world worked. You planted. You prayed at the village shrine. The crops grew.
This year, the blessing felt thin.
