Twilight fell across the Azure Cloud Realm, but darkness never arrived.
Instead of the usual pitch-black void of mortal night, the high sky twenty miles above the continents began to weave a living mix of light. It started along the southern magnetic spirit veins. There, the high-sky currents met the warm, spark-charged wake of the falling sky clouded eye.
A faint, ghostly shimmer of emerald green flickered against the twilight. It curled lazily like smoke from a burning stick of mountain incense.
Then, within three heartbeats, the southern sky blew up in an ocean of breathtaking color.
Huge, waving curtains of sky auroras draped across nine million square miles of open high sky. Ribbons of vibrant violet, deep royal jade, molten amber, and electric turquoise cascaded from the zenith down to the southern horizon, rippling in slow, majestic waves that looked like silk banners unfurled across the halls of eternity.
It was the Aurora Australis of the New Epoch.
Unlike the harsh, blinding glare of the Upper Realm’s war galleons or the bone-chilling cold of arctic blizzards, the cosmic light show radiated a gentle, soothing warmth. The surrounding heat across the southern archipelagos, the central agricultural plains, and the high northern mountain ranges equalized into an unending, temperate spring afternoon.
