On the hillside, the common folk watched in awe as the Evergreen Empress and her witches reshaped the landscape at the center of the arena yet again.
The ice trees around the racetrack faded away to nothingness along with the tilt-barrier that had resembled a hedge grown of ice. These things had been replaced by two elegantly sculpted stairways to nowhere that faced each other from a distance of roughly a hundred paces.
The stairways had the same feeling as the tilt-barrier. Rather than utilitarian blocks of ice, it looked like rows of thin, spindly trees had grown from the frozen ground, weaving their branches together to form wide, stable steps that stopped at a frozen platform twenty paces above the ground.
