The Ashmark Plains

Grassland with nothing in it, and the reason Nilah goes there.

The Ashmark Plains stretched endlessly in every direction, a sea of golden grass that rippled in waves beneath the afternoon wind. No roads crossed this expanse, no settlements dotted the horizon. It was a place between places, perfect for someone who belonged nowhere in particular.

The grass grows waist-high. Wild Celosia blooms among it, which is what she collects. Nomadic herding families move cattle through it with the seasons and are heard rather than met.

She reaches it three days out of Millbrook, by the long route, "because the straight paths felt too much like running".

What becomes of it

Polka rises out of it in ch. 93 and drains everything living for twenty miles. Ch. 97 puts it back, and more than back. Six months later the same ground is Bloom Valley, a garden with pilgrims in it and a thirty-foot statue going up on its high point.

The saga never uses the name Ashmark again after ch. 92.

Why it is in the saga

One chapter, and it exists to be empty. Ch. 92 is a woman with no war left talking to the sun, and the location's whole function is that there is nobody in it to interrupt her and nothing in it to fix.

The saga's other empty place is used the same way. See ../lore/the-view-from-below.md for the chapters that step out of the plot entirely.