<blockquote>Once upon a time there was a swamp on the edge of the vast and trackless grassland known as the Rootveldt.
The swamp was not vast, nor was it trackless. It was actually a fairly small chunk of swamp where the coastal salt marsh oozed into more conventional wetland, so insignificant that it didn't show up on most maps. (The one map it did show up on listed it as the Ugbert T. Wamphit Memorial Swamp. There were a surprising number of topographical features with the Wamphit name on them, largely because the Wamphit family was a major subsidizer of the Guild of Cartographers.)</blockquote>
