Two days later, a large caravan rolled slowly into Lunalia, a town on the southern border of the Loran Kingdom, along a road choked with yellow dust.
The town stood on the northern shore of a crescent-shaped lake, its architecture distinctly reminiscent of ancient Rome.
There were white stone arcades, a cobblestone square, and a half-abandoned temple whose Corinthian columns were covered in withered ivy.
At first glance, it called the Middle Ages to mind. Yet the people on its streets wore modern-style uniforms, creating a strange sense of dissonance.
The townspeople showed little surprise at the caravan's arrival at dusk. After a brief look, they returned to their work.
As one of the four great kingdoms in the Allied Forces, the Loran Kingdom saw plenty of large supply caravans during the war. Even this remote town lay close enough to the Brown Kingdom's border to see them pass through regularly.
And now a peace treaty had been signed. Peace had officially arrived.
With cross-border trade gradually resuming, the locals had long since grown accustomed to caravans like this one.
This caravan consisted of twelve heavy covered wagons, drawn by dark-coated beasts of burden common in the north. Their fur was black, and their eyes were amber.
The guards wore ordinary leather armor, but they moved with an almost unnatural precision and kept to the shadows.
Seeing that the caravan was large enough to qualify as a major trading party, Lunalia's sixty-seven-year-old mayor, Buller, came to receive it personally.
The caravan's leader was a tall woman who called herself "Kalia."
She wore a deep-purple traveling cloak. Its hood concealed most of her face, leaving only a sharply defined black jaw and pale-purple lips visible.
Buller wondered why these merchants were all dark-skinned Nickfolk. But after Kalia made a generous financial