BREAKING NEWS: Ardennes

The air reeks of scorched oats and something that used to be lavender.

What used to be the community gruel pot—that great iron belly that feeds half the shire through lean winters and poorer summers—lies in twisted black shards across the cobbles. A low crater smokes where it once sat. Nermal the chemist, that thin nervous man with the permanent ink stains on his fingers, still stands in the middle of the mess, hair singed into a crown of frizz, muttering about “viscosity coefficients” and “an unfortunate catalytic cascade.”

Nobody is laughing.

The pot is gone. Not cracked. Not tipped. Gone. The only vessel large enough to feed the working folk of Ardennes in one go has been blown to hell by a man trying to make the gruel “more efficacious.” Now the square is full of people staring at the wreckage the way a man stares at an empty purse when the rent is due.

Talk in the taverns is already turning ugly. Without the great pot there is no mass production of Saint Drogo’s Nutritive Gruel. The smaller cauldrons in the cathedral kitchens cannot keep up. Stocks of the prepared slurry are measured in days, not weeks. And the harvest is still six weeks off.

You can feel it already—the low, animal fear that settles into a town when the staple food supply just vanishes in a single orange flash. Mothers are counting the bags of oats in their larders. The gong farmers and the cathedral laborers are calculating how long a man can work on thin broth and stubborn pride.

Nermal keeps saying the recipe can be recreated. The people in the square keep looking at the smoking hole where their dinner used to live and wondering how many of them will still be standing when the next batch is ready.

A gruel famine is no longer a dark joke told over the third cup. It is the thing walking toward Ardennes with its coat collar turned up and its hands in its pockets. And it is walking fast.