The Auric Savanna announced itself before the ship reached the shore.
Owen smelled it first, from the bow where he had been standing in humanoid form since dawn, watching the horizon.
Something warm and alive came off the approaching landmass, a layered richness of the smell of of dry grass and mineral soil and the particular mana-saturated air of a continent that had developed its own relationship with ambient energy over millennia without human interference and industrial population.
Different from the human continent's density. Older somehow, less shaped. Like the difference between a managed forest and something that had been growing according to its own logic since before anyone thought to manage it.
"Land," Leah said, appearing at his shoulder.
She had been doing this over the nine-day crossing, materializing beside him at the rail without preamble, standing in comfortable silence, occasionally offering information.
