GRASS STILL DID not grow on the central plain of the southern continent. Months of spring had come and gone, and the land flowered everywhere else from coast to coast, but still there remained a bare spiral of waste in the place where Kefka's tower had once stood. There, the sandy soil was as hard and nonporous as concrete. It didn't absorb water; rain would bead up, then run off in thin rivulets. Sometimes, after snowstorms, travelers would report that the moment a flake touched the ground there, it melted -- sometimes in a hiss of steam.
There was probably some exaggeration to the stories, as there was probably some truth behind them. But the place was indeed barren, and therefore avoided, as one avoids burial ground, or the site of some bloody battle. No one dared cross through if it could be avoided. No one set up camp nearby. And so no one was there to see when, one winter's midnight, the ground there turned to metal.