Kole looked to Thackeray, who nodded.

Aelyn stepped through an ironoak door and out onto the flat rooftop of the mercantile guild house. The view took her breath away, even dominated as it was by the bloated Bad Moon. The city spread out below, stretching away for miles around. Over there, Gallowhill loomed, smoke still drifting from the blasted crater on its peak. In every other direction she saw district upon district, street upon street, turning the foul colours of rot and ruin as fungi and squirming things overtook them. Up here, in the shadows of the looming volcanoes, one could truly appreciate the corruption that had taken root throughout Draconium. This was not a city they could save, she thought despairingly. It was already dead.

Still, Aelyn and Thackeray followed watchman Kole across the rooftop to where a pair of lookouts stood next to a bulky brass telescope. Others were dotted around the roof’s edge, she saw, concealed behind its bulky crenulations and watching silently as their city perished around them.

Kole issued brisk orders, and the two men at the telescope retrained it then stepped smartly aside. The watchman gestured, and Aelyn stepped forwards to stare through the telescope. Initially everything was blurred, until she realised that the watchmen had adjusted the device for human eyes. With their guidance, she gently turned the sighting wheels until the ruins of Fountains Square leapt suddenly into focus.

Aelyn almost recoiled from the telescope.

The square itself was still littered with heaps of corpses and piles of rubble, and the gnawed and blackened ruins of tree trunks lay strewn like discarded sticks. Fungi and insects were everywhere, and dirty water washed across the square in waves. She noted that it was still flowing in the direction it always had, and she winced at the thought of the poison and filth it must surely be emptying into the canal, thence to be borne south towards the settled lands and Hammerhal Aqsha.

The waters now bubbled up not from an ornate fountain, but from beneath the twisted remains of the Bad Moon meteor that still jutted thirty feet into the air at the square’s heart. Grots were indeed swarming across it, chiselling and working frenziedly. Figures in shamanic robes capered and shrieked as they directed the work, brandishing their staffs or riding about on huge, lumbering mushrooms.

The grots had graven a leering visage into the meteor, whittling it into a moon-like shape. It was this monstrous grotesque that had caused Aelyn to recoil; its eyes were alive with deranged madness, and as she stared down upon the square she had felt those eyes stare back.