Catching the glint of metal on the roadway, Caleb lifted the red flag ready in his left hand, and felt as much as heard the convoy grind to a long halt behind him.  As soon as the first truck was stopped, the boys jumped down with their hand rakes and buckets, swarming out over the wide stretch of rutted, earth-and-gravel road and scouring every inch for anything the least bit dark or shiny.  From the far side of the road, the other spotter, Micah, nodded to Caleb and jogged further on ahead to start a sweep back to determine if this was an isolated patch or a more extensive hazard.  Thank the saints they hadn’t found any mines so far, but the sheer volume of caltrops seeded along not just this road, but every road leading into the city was staggering, forcing the Relief Effort to set aside the first truck in their convoy to act as a dumping ground for everything they were sweeping up as they crept along, rather than carrying more of the supplies that were so desperately needed.

The war was supposed to be over, but that certainly wasn’t the case for everyone still trapped in Cantilla, without access to food or basic medical supplies.  Caleb only hoped that once this road, at least, was cleared that the suffering would ease and life could begin to flow in again.

Along this stretch the trees pressed close, and the hills had been twisting this way and that well enough to block line of sight for the past mile.  But, as soon as the last sweep was done, and the convoy again moved out (going no faster than Caleb and Micah’s careful jog), they found the view suddenly opening up, and that below them stretched a broad plain, with the city of Cantilla rising in the distance, hugging the shore and the horizon.  They were too far yet to make out anything with clarity, but smoke rose from several places, smudging upward into a dirty, grey sky, and Caleb speculated that possibly some of the levees and sea walls had been damaged also, along with most of the docks already known to be destroyed—the blue haze of the sea was showing in smudges between here and the city, promising yet more obstacles ahead.

Yet, even as Caleb watched, eyes more on the view than they ought to have been, the lines of blue seemed to flood closer, and closer again, and to bloom outward, in dots and patches that eventually, as they rounded another curve and Caleb gained a better view, resolved into the pattern of the roadways that radiated outward from the city.  So, this was a new hazard for the roads, and Caleb raised his flag again, waving back the boys to instead call out Commander Cintenna to come forward with the binoculars.  The war was supposed to be over, but this had all the look of some new Fae enchantment.

Yet even as the Commander came forward, Caleb watched in horror as the mysterious blue force rushed closer, until surely it had swept over them as well.  And in that moment, the boys in the lead truck cried out, so that Caleb and the Commander spun back to see what had come upon them.  But the shouts weren’t shouts of fear or pain, and eventually resolved into shouts of amazement, and a moment later one of the boys pulled an armful of something blue out of the well of the truck that had been holding their caltrop dumping ground.  An armful of cornflowers, in all the shades of blue, of the sea and the sky.

And so, as the convoy crept once more down the road and toward the city, they found themselves driving sometimes over rivers of flowers.

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This has been your fly-by-story, starting from the prompt: Cornflower, Caltrop, City