Mud clung to the wagon ruts of the Old South Spur like stubborn memories. Sharath squatted at the edge of a-pocked trench, pinching a lump of clay between ink-stained fingers. Behind him, civil-engineer apprentices waited, shivering in dawn mist.
"Eight inches of slurry," he announced. "A single axle sinks halfway on first pass. By the third, you're hauling a plow."
Jakob unrolled a parchment map across the tailgate of a supply cart. Red quill marks radiated from Darsha Valley to market towns and river ports. Yet huge swaths remained blank: steep ridges, marsh flats, dense cedar thickets—places horse caravans rarely braved.
"The cycle's reach stalls here," Jakob said, tapping an empty quadrant labeled *Greenbelt Wilds*. "No road crew wants to carve that mire."
Sharath's answer was a grin. "Then we don't carve it—we float above it."
That afternoon he convened the first "Cycle-Track Congress" beneath Riverbend's raftered hall. Farmers in mud-spattered boots squeezed beside guild scribes; road wardens rubbed shoulders with alchemists. On a chalkboard he sketched a raised ribbon of cedar planks, four feet wide, set atop stone pillars every ten paces.
"Boardwalks," he declared. "Light enough for cycle loads, cheap enough for local crews, high enough to laugh at the mud."
A murmur of skepticism rippled. Garrick crossed massive arms. "Stone piers every ten paces? Where's the quarry?"
"Under our wheels," Sharath replied. He flipped to a second board: modular concrete blocks—lime, river gravel, and a dusting of mana-activated feldspar to quick-set in hours rather than days. Henrik's apprentices had perfected the mix only last week.
Agreement came grudgingly, then enthusiastically. By month's end the first pilot track snaked across five miles of swamp, its surface humming beneath test riders. Villagers who once slogged half a day to market now glided there by noon, scudding along cedar planks that sang under steel rims.
Blank spaces on Jakob's map began to fill—thin green lines first, then bold strokes of ink that promised an empire of movement where mud had ruled. And everywhere the boardwalks reached, new demands followed: inns, smithies, way-stations. The road system was no longer a royal gift; it was a living skeleton, extending itself with each plank laid and every wheel that whispered across it.
* * *