Arriving at Mratic, the last village before the wilderness proper, the party makes haste to a general store to sell their loot! The village is nigh abandoned, and the first person on the (only) street is a lost-looking village elder mourning the recent decrepitude. The magistrate, Divinity of Pride, has recruited any idle folk able to bear arms for the war up north. No time for a chat, however, it's payday!
The general store is run by an elderly lady, who is rightly suspicious of the blood- and mud-caked teenagers hauling in a bunch of armour and scimitars. Not a big market for this stuff right now, as the war is already far up north. She buys some of the armour anyway, probably to placate the threatening mercs barging into her shop, and sells us some potions and salves and such for the road. As she has no strapping help as they're all gone a' fightin', she asks us to do some lifting and helping around, which is a nice wholesome thing to do for once. Wulff, our stalwart moral backbone, stiffer than the locals' hips, is particularly happy that we're doing something heroic for once. We drop and break some bags of flour, attempt to hide our mistakes and probably cause some auld ones to lose their last teeth on the coarser-than-usual grit in their loaf.
Anyway, victory drinks - where's the pub?
A grizzled firbolg gladly pours us drinks at the local alehouse, now bereft of paying clientele. The barkeep does kind of recognize our description of the childhood village, and confirms it is probably around Nusfara Daora, faaaaaar to the north. We're gonna need bigger badgers.
Sprigg decides, after a few ales, that maybe he should do a service to the wizened locals and dig ready some graves, as they've one foot in already. Being attuned to flora at a symbiotic, rather unhygienic level, he determines the soil to be fucky. About a handspan deep, the soil is entirely dead, inert, devoid of the normal layers of biota and appropriately digested detritus. While channelling the energies of nature to purify the soil of whatever poisoned it, he feels that this layer extends all over the land around us. As if something killed everything a long time ago - certainly before any of these folks were born. While Sprigg does a digg or two around town to confirm his hypothesis, the rest of the gang sets camp around their caravan and Tanny sings some golden oldies.
Surely whatever mass extermination event covered the land in death and despair way back when won't happen again right now, this very night. That would be entirely too cruel a fate for these hard-working, defenceless elderly folks.
Right?
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Correction, nothing is too cruel a fate for curmudgeon elders