POV: Aphrodite
The King's domain is not ruled. It endures.
I feel the difference the moment we cross the boundary.
There's no visible marker. No wall, no gate, no carved warning in the stone the way the ruins marked their edges. Just a line in the earth that I feel through the soles of my feet as a change in the ground's quality, a shift from the drained and watching forest we've been moving through into something that has more presence than that. The forest was passively hostile. This is actively aware.
The ground pulses.
