Nero's Banquet

The Alps were a summer retreat for herders. The grasslands there were fertile, ideal for grazing cattle and sheep.

An altitude of two thousand meters was not considered high in XZ, but in the Alps, anything above 2,000 meters counted as high altitude. Most travelers stayed in hotels at the foot of the mountains. These highland wooden cabins were rudimentary, mainly used by locals in summer to escape the heat and follow the pasture.

As more and more people hiked in the Alps, aside from a few primitive wooden huts, some "cabins" could now accommodate over a hundred people, providing overnight shelter for high-altitude travelers so they would not have to descend the mountain at night in search of refuge after watching the sunset.

Cars could not reach these cabins; only cable cars and helicopters could. Of course, they were nothing like the "cabin villas" wealthy people built in the Alps. They had no toilets, no bathrooms, let alone food or bedding. Unless they encountered a mountain disaster, ordinary people would not stay in such houses, which were sturdy but utterly devoid of comfort.

Mountain folk had turned tourism into their main livelihood and livestock farming into a side business. Some cabins built by herders away from the roads had been abandoned. Pomona chose a crude wooden hut surrounded by gentians as their lodging for the night.

Like Wolfsbane, Alpine gentians were a vivid, jumping blue. Their blooming season came after May and before the snow fell, so they would not bloom in weather this cold. But magic could solve that problem, and soon a sea of blue flowers spread before the cabin.

The towering snowcapped mountains and delicate blossoms complemented one another, creating a fantastical beauty, though they did absolutely nothing to lessen the exhaustion from climbing.

Fortunately, this