The city stood spread out behind him, and Vilon found he could not look away from it, not even for a moment.
The sun had long since slipped past the horizon, surrendering the sky to darkness. It was night now, certainly not his first, nor likely, and hopefully, to be his last, but night had always meant darkness before, black and formless and empty of much worth remarking on.
And yet, as he gazed past the window slit, the city came into view below him, and it was nothing at all like the darkness he'd known his whole life.
From this height in the royal palace, Yarzat appeared almost small, a toy city built for some giant child's amusement, and Vilon found he couldn't properly make out a single building among it, not a wall, not a rooftop, not a spire. Instead there were only lights, hundreds upon hundreds of them, scattered and shimmering across the black expanse like some fallen constellation that had lost its way and settled to earth instead of the sky.
