The Price of Progress Part 1

The journey back to Helmarte was unusually quiet.

No one spoke as the heavy carriage rolled along the King's Highway beneath the fading afternoon sun. The broad, grass-covered basin they had spent the day measuring gradually disappeared behind rolling hills until it became nothing more than another stretch of countryside.

Yet despite leaving the site behind, none of them had truly left it.

Arthur remained absorbed in thought, occasionally opening one of Samuel's survey maps, tracing a line with his thumb, and then quietly snapping it shut again. Hollen stared absentmindedly out the window, watching the timber lines slide past while his brow remained furrowed in deep calculation. Even Ernest spent most of the journey silently reviewing the spatial geometry in his head.

The blast furnaces. The pneumatic converters. The continuous rolling mills. The residential worker grid. The deep-water river docks.