Book One – Chapter 2

In ordinary ruins, even total devastation left behind a grammar of making. Remnants of foundations, anchor points, or an outline of where a wall had once met the ground; some trace of load-bearing logic always remained. Even when the original surface lay buried below layer after layer of collapse, repetition endured somewhere; regular intervals of similar remnants where structures such as columns or buttresses had once established some deliberate order. With devastation on this scale, some evidence of this order should have survived.

Here, there was none. All the way from the Veil to the base of , Yves had seen no street-line, no buried foundation, no drainage cut, and no threshold worn by passage. Whatever shattered here had been massive, perhaps as grand as the main tower structures of Emery Thurm. And yet, there was no evidence that any such a monument had ever been rooted within and risen from it. Load-bearing surfaces pointed into open air. Sections that ought to have belonged high upon walls lay buried beneath pieces that should have supported them. Immense fragments of some sort of circular roof were submerged upside down and now held an array of molten metal rods that stuck out from it like dragon-hunter spears. This was scatter without sequence or settlement; a vas accumulation of displaced structures without intelligible relation to one another, or to the land that held them.

It did not look as though these structures had been built and broken here. They were not the remains of buildings that had collapsed where they stood. The longer Yves studied their distribution, the more disturbing the alternative became. They looked as though they had fallen from a great height, struck the desert with enough force to shatter, scattered on impact, and had then been left to burn. Or perhaps the fire had come first. Perhaps they had already been burning as they fell. Some fragments had fused together beneath temperatures far beyond any natural scale: stone drawn into stone where impact had forced their surfaces together, and metal smeared into blackened seams. In places, materials that could have never belonged to the same structure had cooled as one mass; collision warped into formations no craftsman could ever replicate.