The air on the Middle Walkway tasted of rain, cold mountain wind, and burning cedar.
They had emerged onto a vast, terraced park that had once been the private botanical safe hall of the Grand Duke’s consorts. Now, its marble rows of stone pillars were chipped by shrapnel, its exotic orange groves trampled into black mud. The delicate glass pavilions that housed tropical ferns had shattered into acres of sparkling, lethal debris.
Above them, the sky was a terrifying, world-ending canvas.
The Grand Barrier Dome—the massive crystal hemisphere that had protected the Upper Spires of Val-Khorat for seven hundred years—was eighty percent shattered. Massive, jagged shards of glowing blue force-field were peeling away from the mountain peaks like peeling paint. He drifted through the lower clouds and burned out with thunderous, electric booms.
On the mountain terrace above them, the palaces of the high nobility were burning, their gold-trimmed roofs casting towering columns of black smoke into the rain.
Three thousand refugees spilled out across the ruined gardens, collapsing onto the wet grass, turning their faces up to the cold rain with ragged gasps of thanks.
Ren Vale knelt in the wet lawn beside Mira, his chest heaving, his fingers checking her pulse.
