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So, Valens thought, this is what the end of the world will look like.
The night-side was an eternally-sunless, frozen land of oddities and horrors. There could be sublime beauty here, in the radiant forests of massive treelike plants, bioluminescent ice geysers, and the star-strewn black sky. But the night-side could also be deadly.
Out here, the Trellis loomed in the sky in fragmented shards. Rather than the day-side net, the promenia—sickly greenish blue without the crimson sun to make the lattice appear golden—hovered as floating Isles of light. Each sat high over the land, tethered at regular points like buoys bobbing on a black sea.
In the in-between places where the Trellis's light did not touch, temperatures plummeted and bestias hunted. The frozen soil teemed with inedible crimson plants, thick cyan vines, and black flowers that crowded out food crops, constantly threatening the night-side provincias with famine.
But however harsh the night-side proved, these Blightlands were far worse.
No Trellis-light lit the sky here, not because there were no Isles of light in this region, but because rogue promenia had destroyed them. As the Blightlands expanded, bringing rogue promenia to fresh territories, each new Isle the twisted magic touched grew corrupted, unraveling from the Trellis and merging with the rogue clouds.
Valens spotted one of the clouds now, roiling above a mesa on the distant horizon. It was glorious, a stunning mass of writhing, brilliant golden light. It was also one of the most destructive forces in the world.
In the shadow of the mesa, a crop of hairgrass and pearlwort had been burned and uprooted. Not only uprooted but hauled five hundred feet into the air, along with an enormous chunk of the soil and bedrock beneath it. The mass of stone and scorched crops hung suspended over the mesa, and above it, rogue promenia writhed as the luminous ball crept across the landscape. In the floating promenia cloud's wake, the earth lay twisted, jagged, and broken.
"Have you been to Eiulatus Vorago before?"
Valens turned to glance at the Trueborn man who met him here a half-hour ago. The Rex's contact, a forgeholder in his early thirties named Ausus, stood dressed for the frigid weather in a heavy hooded paenula with a generous fur trim.
Something about the man, perhaps the expressions that passed over his wind-chapped face, kept giving Valens pause. Ausus seemed familiar somehow, but he didn't think he'd met the black-haired forgeholder before. He would remember someone who shared his own love of the wilds and commitment to the Rex's project there.
In fact, Ausus might love the wilderness more than Valens did. Valens performed most of his work in the day-side and night-side borderlands, whereas Ausus tended to receive assignments deep in the frozen heart of the true night-side wilds. One needed to love the wilderness to dare venturing over and over into such dangerous places.
