The white chalk-stone snow had washed away. That left the streets of Haven-Hold scrubbed clean and smelled of crushed quartz.
In the town council chamber overlooking the central terrace, Giles Croft sat at his wide drafting desk. He tested glass vials with a chemical dropper.
Around the table sat Lady Penelope Haze, Lady Millicent Croft, and Captain Kenneth Drake.
Outside the leaded windows, the autumn sky was a crisp, brilliant azure, fully free of the toxic yellow haze that had choked the province only forty-eight hours before.
Giles dipped a fresh blue litmus strip into vial number four, holding it up against the morning light. The paper remained unchanged.
“Precipitation across all four monitoring quadrants is holding at pH six point five,” Giles reported. He set the vial into its wooden rack.
“The wet lime plaster plume stopped ninety-nine point two percent of surrounding sulfur dioxide before it could hydrate into sulfuric acid.
The air is clean, the water is safe, and ferrous rusting rates have dropped back to normal baseline.”
