The sun that hung over the Blood-Crag bay was no longer the fierce, blood-soaked orb of the Sanguine Dawn. It was a cold, bleached white, like a bone left too long in the desert. It cast long, sharp shadows across the deck of the Iron Sovereign, turning the faces of my family into pale masks of exhaustion. We had survived the trenches, we had broken the Seven Kings, and we had watched Kaelum dissolve into the very fabric of the world's memory to save us. We should have been coming home to a world of green grass and open skies.
Instead, we were coming home to a nightmare of geometry.
