The waters of the Obsidian Gulf had never seen a fleet of this magnitude assembled without the smell of burning pitch and the screaming of dying sailors.
Moored in a perfect, staggering crescent moon within the deep-water harbor of the Blackfang Citadel were forty-two dreadnoughts of the Sky-Sail Coalition, their white-silk sails catching the crisp northern wind, alongside twenty iron-hulled paddle-steamers from the Southern Industrial Archipelago. The sea practically groaned under the collective displacement of the overseas empires. They had not come to conquer; they had come because the old machine of Saint Aurelius was dead, and the woman who had ripped its heart out was currently holding the global supply lines by the throat.
Inside the High Pavilion—an open-air stone terrace protruding over the sheer two-thousand-foot drop of the outer cliffs—the air was thick with the scent of unrefined sulfur, foreign spices, and tense, shallow breathing.
