Nessantico… she was a woman exhausted by her struggles, worn by her cares, and clothed in the shredded tatters of her old supremacy. Her sense of security and inevitability was lost, perhaps-she feared-forever. The smell still lingered in her streets: a malodorous stench of rotting flesh, blood, and ash.

A lesser entity would have collapsed. A lesser entity might have looked at her sad reflection in the fouled waters of the River A’Sele and seen a skeletal death mask staring back. A lesser entity would have given up and ceded her supremacy to Firenzcia or to the unglimpsed cities of the Tehuantin.

Not her.

Not Nessantico.

She gathered the tatters around herself. She drew herself up and cleansed herself as best she could. She cloaked herself in pride and memories and belief, and vowed that one day, one day, the rest of the world would again bow to her.

One day…

But not yet today.

LAMENTATIONS

Allesandra ca’Vorl

Gschnas-the false world ball-swirled below Allesandra in the Grand Hall of the Kraljica’s Palais. The hall was still partially under construction, but that only lent depth to the ambience.

After all, the False World Ball was where reality was turned on its head. Costumes-the stranger and more creative, the better-were required of all attendees. The cracks in the walls had been filled with sculptures of demons or miniature pastoral landscapes, as if the foundations of reality itself had broken, the cracks providing glimpses of entire new worlds set at odd angles to their own. A flock of flightless birds had been brought in from Far Namarro: as tall as a man, with tufts of grandly colored plumage rising from their rumps.