The Boundary Demarcation

Standing at the Miliarium Primum and looking east and west across the Via Militaris: the Cicatrix Prima boundary is visible as a seam in the agricultural landscape. The pre-Rift fields to the south run on a Roman survey grid that was already established when the Permutatio happened, their boundaries oriented to a cardinal system the original surveyors brought with them from the old world. The post-Rift expansion fields to the north run on a grid that the XIV Gemina’s engineering cohorts laid out in the first years after Year One, oriented slightly differently because the surveying instruments used the new sky’s stars rather than the old sky’s stars, and the new sky’s stars are not at the same angles. Both grids are precise. They meet at a seam that has been ploughed over twelve centuries without closing. The farmers whose holdings straddle the boundary have been farming it for generations and find the question of which side is older somewhere between philosophically interesting and practically irrelevant.