 -Were sorcerers really going around bumping up crop yields?

While it's certainly a benevolent

endeavor, it seems like the sort of thing that a lot of First Age Lawgivers would assume someone
else had done or just really wasn't important anyway.

Of course, then you have the Contagion, and assuming that didn't sufficiently mess up the
working itself, you have so many people dying that magically arable lands are wholly forgotten
and overgrown in the present day.

Finally, you have the workings themselves. I honestly doubt that most Solars of the First Age who
did invest the time and resources to enhance farmlands did so with a simple "crops will always
grow good here" benediction. Sorcerous workings are rarely so straightforward, and were never
made with centuries of disuse in mind.

The fields that produced great crops is an overgrown jungle, and that magic has seeped into the
mice that ate the crops, the serpents that ate the mice, the weasels that ate the serpents, all the
way up to apex predators long since grown populous and titanic.

The fields that tend themselves do not take kindly to thieves, but the women and men who
harvested it knew the hours the tools rested, or the prayers that stilled the hungry earth. Those
folk died long ago, and the pristine rows of grain and fruit lie untouched, thought to be a wicked
Anathema trap, a bit of spite. It's carefully demarcated, maybe even walled off; capital crimes see
the guilty hurled bodily in.

Beasts go wild, fields go fallow. The results now are legend.

 Swar was a powerful Shapeless Raksha that was trapped in Creation. It took the form of a city by
merging with a manse and had its emanations protecting it. Either metropolis city, or looks like
ruins of a first age city (to draw in exalts and convince them to stop the realm defense grid).
 Sorcerer King and castle: Some of the doorways are Mirrors of Chiaroscuro glass. Stepping into
them places you in the reflection of the palace, and only the king knows the charm to release
those caught within.
 His majordomo wears a heavy cloak that obscures his identity. More than one clever thief or
assassin has tried to incapacitate the fellow, only to learn that the cloak itself is the servant, and
the would-be infiltrator finds themselves its newest host in a long line of people who thought they
were clever.
 The garden has a rule: either you tend to the blooms, or you bloom yourself. Even the sorcerer
only admires it from his balcony; though he laid the spells in place, he would likely set down roots
and join the exotic flora were he to set foot in there; only the groundskeepers tread there. Even
among them, those who the magics deem lazy may find themselves never leaving.