======Luat na-Bonswi======

//The nip of a fresh winter morning. The docks crunch with frost and salt alike under the synchronised footsteps of an eight-strong group of fishermen and women tugging at the ropes of a free-floating sailboat. At long last, her side slams up against the stone wall of sea -- the employees give a unified cry, triumph and relief in equal measure. New recruits, fresh from a graduate scheme, bump clumsy fists with seasoned workers.//

//On its own, a sailboat is replaceable, a school of fish can be re-harvested, one person's business is a mere fraction of the net value of this trading post. All together, though, there is a sense, as workers' satisfied laughter and serious discussions turn to vapour clouds in the air, and the trading post is officially opened for the day, that the individual units of this place come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts.//

Stations have lain here emptied of their vehicles for so long that the overgrowth claiming metallic infrastructure for its own would be disturbed if a train tried to roll back into Bonswi. Despite the weed density, not much else grows, nor lives here; floods, now figments of a long-forgotten national history, cleansed the land so thoroughly of nutrients that it serves as a home for absolutely nothing. It is a desert in every way that matters. 

The whisper of seawater against shores devoid of visitors is its own warning. Gone are the lots of thriving tourists that gave this coastal place its glow. But, in its place, no illness sits waiting; nothing but seaweed coagulates as it lies in wait under the surface. 

Instead, Luat na-Bonswi is completely, utterly silent.

There is no longer any such place as Luat na-Bonswi. //It is a wonder the place ever held any value at all, in light of recent technological developments rendering travel by land and sea both largely defunct. As to its economical importance, the reasons are fairly obvious -- in those times it was of course significant that the dense urban landscape was supplied workers by rural households, and the bilateral exchange was mutually beneficial in a way that ensured continuous outward expansion. That significance does not remain, evidently, the ever-stretching row of once-military outposts now a broken-down feature of the land remarkable only insofar as the rare and daring tourist decides to embark upon the challenge of visiting all three hundred and something towers. Many remark as they do so on the bizarre delusion the people of the past must have suffered. They must have thought themselves mightily important, to need so much protection. And, anyway, what from? It did not save them.//
{[]}{{tag>writeupeternity gm_tara complete}}