Location: Vor'anthel — Western Edge
Date/Time: 3-4 Emberrise, 9939 AZI
Realm: Demon Realm
The desert had a taste. Alkaline and dead. It coated the back of Ren's throat as he stood at the western boundary where Vor'anthel's obsidian paving gave way to cracked hardpack and then to nothing — the flat, pale expanse of wasteland that had been farmland once, and forest before that, and garden before that, when the queens who'd tended it were still alive.
Three days since the arrival. The city behind him hummed with eight hundred thousand lives settling into spaces built for them by hands that hadn't known they were coming. Ahead of him, the desert stretched to the horizon under the brightened twilight, and the twin moons hung pale and indifferent over ground that nothing would grow from.
