With a final, beautiful flash of silver sparks that turned the remaining grey soot on the terrace into a carpet of pale mountain wildflowers, the spirit of Sienna vanished completely into the sky. The starlight from her ascension lingered for a fraction of a second, casting long, soft shadows across the newly born green stems before dissolving entirely into the upper atmosphere.
The silence returned, but it was no longer the sterile, dead vacuum of Aurelius's palace. It was the loud, breathing silence of a mountain valley that was waking up from a winter that had lasted ninety years. The hum of the spatial gate was gone; the high-frequency diagnostic drone that had measured every mortal breath inside the palace walls had dropped to absolute zero. Instead, the cool, crisp mountain air rushed through the shattered marble valves, bringing with it the wild, untamed scent of wet pine, crushing ice shelves, and the dark, fertile soil of the low ridges below.
