If Firthengart had been a hard but beautiful land to be seen from the air, as Handy could recall, it was stunning when viewed unobstructed from the ground. The vast, low lying hills and plains were broken up by sparse rocky outcroppings and creeks, and the rivers looked pristine and virgin amidst the grasp of winter. Snow banks covered the land as far as the eye can see, shining in the sunlight and pale and misty in the cold of night, looking for all the world like a blanket of blue velvet when the moon was just so. The villages and towns nestled along the bowers provided by the sparse woodlands on the crossings, and junctions of rivers dotted the landscape with light. They were all the more stark for peeking out under caps of white and juxtaposed by skeletons of black belonging to deciduous trees, now stripped and naked of their autumnal glory.