The sky over the capital had forgotten how to be blue. A bruised, weeping violet had taken its place, the color of heavens grieving a doomed empire. High above the spires of the Imperial Mages’ Academy, the Ancient Gates pulsed with a sickly light.
Once, those colossal rings of stone and aether had been the pride of the Empirium, wrought by the first Council of Mages long before the rise of kings and long before the empire flung its banners across the seas. They had been raised to bind the heart of the empire to its farthest reaches, but now they throbbed like the failing heartbeat of a wounded god, for the Empirium itself was coming undone.
Its ruin had begun when the Council of Mages turned its ambition against Aethyra, the Mother of Magic. The Battle for the Weave had shattered their armies, broken their pride, and wounded the very force they sought to master, and when Aethyra died, the Weave fractured with her so that magic bled from gashes that would never wholly heal.
Rebellions came after, first in whispers, then in riots, then in open uprising across the provinces, until at last Abria, one of the empire’s oldest conquests, rose as well.
