Night didn’t bring darkness to the Shattered Capital. It brought an eerie, fractured twilight.
In the southern sky hung the crescent silver moon of Prime Khorat, cold and whole, lighting up the slate roofs and soot-stained brick chimneys of the heavy-duty wards. In the northern sky, suspended three fingers higher, hung the shattered ring-moon of the Sun-Crown Hegemony. A huge halo of crushed sky crystal that glowed with pale, rainbow-bright lavender light. It cast sharp, double shadows across every street and alley.
Mira Vale sat on a low stone bench in the courtyard of the Old Customs Exchange.
The courtyard itself was a split seam of history. Half paved with damp river gravel where scrubby dandelions grew between rotting timber palings, half paved with polished white marble mosaic depicting a coiled golden serpent swallowing its own tail.
Mira held her curved steel needle in her left fingers, working a delicate hem of black linen around the edge of a small, hand-bound notebook. Her thumb, capped in the dark boxwood thimble her father had carved before the glass plague was ever named, moved with tireless care. Beside her, resting motionless on the stone bench, her right arm caught the lavender glow of the ring-moon.
