Location:Zhū'kethara — Kael'thoren Fortress
Date/Time:23 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — late afternoon
Realm:Upper Realm
Ren heard her before he saw the city.
Zhū'kethara is cut into stone and gives everything back, which is why nobody has ever managed to arrive there quietly and why the fortress has never needed a bell. Sound comes off the upper terraces and down the cut in long flat sheets, and a man on the approach road learns to read the city by what it returns to him: carts, water, the forge quarter, the ragged clatter of the eastern market at the hour it closes.
What came down the cut at him now was none of those.
It was wingbeat. High up, unhurried, and enormous, and it had the slow doubled sound that a very large body makes when it is holding position over one point of ground instead of going anywhere — the sound of something circling because it has been circling for some time and has nothing better to do.
