Alpheo had always harbored a quiet fascination with the nomadic tribes—their wandering lives, the absence of tilled soil beneath their feet, and the way their existence seemed to glide past the very concept of permanence. He had long struggled to wrap his mind around the idea that entire peoples could thrive without the bedrock of agriculture, that they could live untethered to stone walls and wheat fields.
And with confusion, of course, came curiosity—the lifeblood of every true historian. That hunger for understanding had only deepened over the years, especially since Egil—his stalwart companion and the only one among them born to a nomadic lineage—could recall little of that life. Egil's memories were fogged with time, and even those fragments stemmed from a period when his people had already been resettled under Romelian rule.
