The Ash Famine

references

• ←Ashen Loper — The herds were halved in the Ash Famine; they have not fully recovered.
• →House Vandahl — The house emptied its surplus and never refilled it.
• →The Bonesung-of-the-Vale — The tribes made the first hill encroachments during the famine years.
• ←Ash Hound — The pack numbers swelled during the famine years when the culls stopped.
• ←Mere Gnasher — In the famine years folk hunted the gnasher and the gnasher hunted back.
• ←Bog Grub — The famine taught the vale to eat the grub, and it never unlearned it.
• ←Brine Wight — Most went into the mere in the famine, when boats went out too far for too little.
• ←Greatwood Tusker — A single tusker fed a camp through a famine winter, and the verse remembers it.
• ←The Vale Harvest — The Great Famine is the harvest's great failure — the proof, still in living memory, of what the Vale becomes when the farm belt breaks.
• →The Lean Years — The Ash Famine is reckoned where the Lean Years began — three winters that killed grain and cattle together and broke House Vandahl's surplus.
• ←quest.water-rights (unresolved) — The Ash Famine is the historical wound that makes the water-rights dispute personal and difficult to broker.

occurred_at

• →Valenfeld — The famine broke the town's grain stores first.
• →The Sunbones — The Sunbones holds the bones of the Ash Famine drovers — the event's most literal monument.
• →The Drover's Bones — The Ash Famine's most visible relic is this dry wash — where a whole loper-herd and its drovers collapsed chasing water that was not there.