Several hours later: In the vast disfigured and sterilized plain where once stood the international airport of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, with its runways that had once welcomed millions of hopeful travelers, the black waterproof canvas tents and dark steel structures of the Central Sorting Camp now rose like purulent metallic warts on France's wounded earth. The very architecture of this place seemed designed to crush the human soul: electrified barbed wire, watchtowers where draconic guards kept vigil, windowless buildings with walls oozing humidity.
The air was perpetually saturated with a sickening mixture of metallic dust, rancid sweat, dried blood that stuck to the nostrils, and a burning, corrosive mana that only dragons could perceive without faltering. A cursed place where cries of distress had become the permanent background sound, where whispered prayers were nothing more than a lost echo in a sky perpetually covered with black clouds.
