Oakhaven did not smell like jasmine. It smelled of stagnant water, rotting timber, and the lingering, metallic tang of old fire. As the carriage they had hired at the rail terminus crested the final ridge, Vane looked down at the town he had once ruled from the gutters. It was a grey, broken thing. The Imperial cleanup crews had done the bare minimum, clearing the main boardwalks and leaving the rest to the encroaching mud.
Valerica sat beside him, her presence a silent, warm weight in the cold morning air. She was dressed in traveler's grey, her violet hair tucked beneath a heavy hood, but she still looked like a creature from another realm. She looked at the ruins with the quiet, analytical eyes of a strategist, but there was a flicker of something else there. It was the first time she was seeing the world that had birthed the Usurper.
