The sound of the world putting itself back together was not a roar. It was a sigh.
High above the Crucible, the fracture lines in the high sky began to knit shut. It happened not with magic, but with the quiet, inexorable weight of physical law reclaiming its territory after four hundred years of illegal occupation.
The hadal ocean waves that had crested over the southern crags didn’t crash upon the rocks. They thinned, turned to mist, and evaporated into the clean morning air. The rust-red dunes of the nomadic west smoothed away, replaced by the rolling, heather-covered foothills that had cradled Val-Khorat since the first kings walked the fens. The violet dead-space overhead tightened to a single pinpoint of starlight, then blinked out. That left behind only the vast, pale-blue dome of an ordinary winter sky.
Ren Prime stood beside the hard speckled rock stone base, looking down at the valley below.
For three terrible years of ash and bone, Val-Khorat had been a ghost province. A shivering, feverish landscape where three different hundreds of years overlapped in every square mile. A traveler would walk through an ancient spruce forest, cross a ditch, and find himself standing in the smoking iron foundries of Lord Ren’s war machine, only to step through a hedge and stumble into the silent, plague-hollowed alleys of Marrow-Deep.
