The Barley Fields

The Barley Fields

Beyond the northern walls, where the wind smells of tilled soil and musk of brood, lie the @Barley Fields—no common farmland, but a living engine of Odrun Fell’s survival. Here, generations of @The Barleys breeders have coaxed colossal beetles, armored grubs, and the towering treebugs into lines as old as the guild itself. Treebugs stand like slow-moving orchards, their long, stick-thin legs rooted in the earth while fruit swells on the branches that sprout from their backs. Workers climb them with hooked poles, knocking harvest into woven baskets before the creatures are gently herded to fresh grazing plots.
The fields are kept as much by ward as by will. Breeding pens and hatchyards are marked with silk pennants denoting bloodlines, and the tenders—robed in ceremonial silks—watch the work with hawk-eyed precision. Outsiders are turned away at the hedgerows, for here tradition is law, and every brood, every sprig of grafted chitin, carries the weight of a hundred years’ craft. To cross a Barley in their fields is to be cast from more than land—it is to be cut from the city’s table.