The grand marble stairs of the Grand Synod was ninety paces wide. He dropped in three massive terraces from the high row of stone pillars down to the vast public forum of Low-Khorat.
For three hundred years, no commoner had ever climbed those steps without a copper servant’s tag around their neck or a court guard’s chain on their ankles. The marble had been quarried by indentured stone-masons, polished with the sweat of defaulted apprentices, and guarded by six hundred ironclad spear guards who kept the clean solitude of the ruling caste.
Now, as the morning sun broke over the eastern mountains, thirty thousand citizens stood packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the plaza below.
They were weavers in indigo-stained aprons, blacksmiths with leather arm-guards, wagon drivers, wagon drivers, laundresses, and thousands of former patients from the sanatoriums whose linen bandages fluttered like white pennants in the cold mountain wind.
The massive bronze doors at the top of the grand stairs swung open. Then, a breathless, cathedral hush fell across the entire city.
Ren Prime stepped out onto the top terrace.
He didn’t wear an emperor’s velvet mantle or a general’s plate armor. He wore his frayed wool tunic, his leather artisan’s apron stained with purple-black dark oak-ink. A clean linen wrap bound tightly around his bleeding right forearm. His dark hair was whipped across his pale, exhausted face by the wind, his eyes shadowed with the bone-deep weariness of a man who had burned eight futures to hold a single promise.
