The city was built inside a crater — a scar the size of a sea.Its towers of black stone jutted upward like the ribs of a dead god, each crowned with empty braziers and spires of smoke that rose into a red-gray sky.
This was Ashura, the last kingdom of the Emberless Age.
Its people moved like ghosts through heat-cracked streets, their eyes dull, their breath pale. They had forgotten the scent of warmth. The only glow in the city came from the molten rivers that flowed beneath the stone — sluggish veins of fire bound in chains of obsidian and prayer.
When Cintiyue walked through the gate, every head turned.
He should have been consumed instantly by the heat. Yet the air cooled around him, balanced — as if the world itself remembered how to breathe.
The Queen of Chains
The palace rose from the crater's center: a pyramid of basalt, its peak wreathed in smoke.
