Ren Prime climbed out of the sewer manhole into the churchyard behind the Grand Cathedral. Then, the sky above Val-Khorat had ceased to look like a sky.
The light that filtered down through the clouds was not the light of any morning known to human history.
It was a tri-colorful nightmare. The pale lemon sunlight of the Grand Duchy produced cold, elongated grey shadows. The scorching brass glare of the Sun-Crown solar mirror cast sharp, amber shadows at forty-five degrees. And the dull, feverish glow of the crimson dwarf star produced a bloody, reddish penumbra that made every surface look as though it were weeping fresh blood gore.
Where the three lights overlapped upon the slate roofs, the physical matter of the city began to lose its load-bearing definition. Slate tiles dissolved into powdery grey ash, only to re-crystallize three heartbeats later as slabs of rotting pine or sheets of polished Carrara marble.
In the streets below, the air was dense with drifting, rainbow-bright spores. Tiny red filaments that drifted like dandelion fluff. But hissed with acidic heat whenever they touched cold iron.
It looked like curdled milk bruised with streaks of rancid violet and clotted crimson.
The two suns were still there—the watery pale lemon disc of Prime Khorat and the blazing brass mirror of the Sun-Crown Hegemony—but now a third sky strange flaw was bleeding through the clouds. A bloated, sickly red dwarf star that radiated no warmth, only a dull, feverish glare that made the skin itch…
