The morning the wall went up, the city began to change. Looking back, this was rather inevitable.
It was not the wall itself, though three hundred feet of stone rising in a single day was enough to make anyone pause. It was what the wall represented.
A portion of the lower districts had been sealed, yes. A hundred thousand people were trapped, yes. But there was not much panic in the city because it had been brutally suppressed.
On normal days, it was easy for the people to forget that the society of Siphons was one where the strong eat the weak, and might make right, but it was on days like this that people fully understood that their existence was controlled by the strong.
Entire families were imprisoned with monsters, and no one protested; they were promised salvation, and that had to be good enough.
