The broken archway of the Middle Imperial Ring groaned under a sudden sky shear.
Lin Tao knelt upon the shattered granite castle wall, his left hand braced against the cold edge of a cracked drainage gutter. Five leagues to the south, the burning wreckage of the Imperial Firewall still smoldered against the jagged horizon, throwing thick columns of black, oily soot into the lower stratosphere. The Ninth Dragon Bulwark was gone, reduced to inert melted rock waste and grounded copper channels by the relentless mortal siege that had broken the dynasty’s outer wards.
Yet the silence that followed the fall of the emperors was not peace.
High above the shattered castle walls, the azure vault of the sky curdled. The familiar pale blue of morning dissolved into an angry, curdled copper-crimson. It wasn’t the organic glow of a mountain sunset, nor the wild crimson of forest fire smoke. It was a flat, uniform soft glow that painted every stone, every cloud. Every upturned human face in the matching shade of dried blood.
Lin Tao raised his right hand to his temple, pressing two fingers against the skull bone behind his left ear.
His test sight array whirred to life. The left pupil tightened, shifting from dark black glass to a rainbow-bright, glowing amber as the crystal-clear Precursor lens engaged. Aiming cross lines traced across his vision in sharp, hairline care. He measured surrounding luminosity, magnetic flux, and sky ionization.
