Night dropped upon Rookvale not with the sudden, bone-shaking plunge of an office curfew, but with the slow, violet gradation of an honest mountain dusk.
From the stone watching balcony of the Survey Office, two hundred feet above the valley floor, Ivara Quill watched the darkness reclaim the basin.
The sky shield was gone. For twelve years, looking upward at seven in the evening had meant staring into the terrifying, copper-meshed belly of an artificial ceiling. A high-pressure, shaking membrane of tightly packed lead and moving coils that trapped the smoke of seven wards in an unending, stale fog. On those midnights, the darkness had been an active fluid, dense with the threat of emergence. It pressed against the eyes like wool soaked in oil.
Now, the sky was simply the sky. A vast, cold dome of deep indigo that faded to pale lavender along the eastern serrations of the Guard range. The first stars were appearing—small, clean pinpricks of icy diamond fire that didn’t flicker with system runes, didn’t mark countdown intervals, and didn’t guide double-trackers along the ridges.
Below her, in the sprawling grid of the seven wards, the lights were coming on.
They weren’t the sickly green flares of Chancellor Morn’s copper-filament streetlamps. Down in the narrow residential cuts, yellow points of light were blossoming behind clean glass windows. Animal fat candles set in clay pot saucers, tin lamps burning vegetable press. The bright, crackling orange flames of domestic hearths stoked with mountain birch. The smoke rose…
