When the light returned, Clementine was no longer in the damp, quiet ruins of the border kingdoms.
The blinding glare of a thousand artificial suns hit her eyes all at once. The air was thick, suffocating, and vibrating with the roar of an ocean of voices.
She gasped for breath, her head whipping around as she realized where she was.
She was suspended fifty feet in the air, chained to a massive pillar of obsidian thorns right in the center of the Grand Plaza of the Imperial City.
Below her, stretching out to the very horizon where the dark spires of the Dragon Empire met the violet ether-shield, was a sea of people.
Millions of citizens, former nobles, liberated slaves, and soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder.
The crowds were so dense that the grand marble plaza looked like a living breathing cradle of humanity.
