It had been seven days since the Great Dam cracked, and the world had changed. The beautiful, sprawling capital of Solaris looked different. For hundreds of years, the royal palace had been illuminated by lingering, smokeless magical lanterns that shone with a warm, endless light. Those lanterns were all dead now. They hung from the high ceilings like useless glass ornaments.
Instead, the palace corridors were lined with crude iron brackets holding normal wooden torches. The torches smoked heavily, filling the pristine marble hallways with the harsh smell of burning pitch and actual soot. The air itself felt wrong. It was thin, cold, and empty. Breathing felt like trying to pull oxygen from the top of a freezing, high altitude mountain.
The Great Reservoir was leaking. Half the continent's mana was gone, and the Dawn Era of easy, free magic was officially dead.
