The snow that fell upon Solaris that night was not white. It fell in gray, greasy flakes that smelled of scorched ink, charred bamboo slips, and burnt sheep fat.
By midnight, the courtyard of the Grand Imperial Academy was lit up by a roaring bonfire twenty paces wide. Ironclad cavalrymen of the Imperial Vanguard smashed iron crowbars through the carved pine doors of the Great Library. He hauled armfuls of hundreds of years-old scrolls, geographical atlases, and agricultural treaties out into the freezing slush.
“Treasonous texts! Pacifist rot!” barked Colonel Song, mounted upon a snorting black warhorse at the edge of the courtyard. “The Crown Prince has decreed that any volume advocating conciliation with the eastern wilderness is an act of high subversion! Throw them on the pyre!”
Dozens of elderly scholars and young students, clad in nothing but their thin white sleeping smocks, were driven into the snow at the points of iron spears. An aged historian with a wispy white beard threw his frail body across a stack of handwritten dynasties’ chronicles. Then, a soldier’s iron-shod boot slammed into his ribs without mercy.
“Brutes! Vandals!” shouted a young scholar, his glasses knocked askew as two guards twisted his arms behind his back. “Those books contain four hundred years of flood-control records! Without those maps, the spring floods in the Eastern Basin will drown fifty counties!”
