Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Sixty Five

The northern edge of the Lost Quarter is marked by a wandering river. It has always been a border of sorts, going back to the time of the Iron and Blackfoot Confederacies, the great nations of Those Who Went Away. Before their cruel exile the river was contested territory between them.

Borders are always porous things and the borders of the Lost Quarter are no different. Always shifting and moving, impossible to define, though people always attempt to do so. A line drawn on a map, a fence or a wall constructed, an idea imposed. These things hold only so long as people choose to let them. The greater dominions and other realms, both near and far, exist only insofar as people choose to believe in them.

The Quarter itself is no different. It exists, as a place, in the minds of those who live there, those who have passed through and gone on, Those Who Went Away and Those Who Came. If it is forgotten it will dwindle away, absorbed by the greater dominions, and become a place like any other. Already many of the ways in and out of the Quarter are forgotten and lost, and time will tell what will happen to the place itself.

The river is a true border in one sense. It has always marked the edge of the great rolling plains that stretch through the Quarter and south, west and east. North is forested land and life has always been different there.