Chapter 8
The Glasslands/The City of Pearly
The Gramarye Region
Grand Quillia
June 1856
It was breathtakingly beautiful, like stars aglow on Earth.
Spicer didn’t notice the final Humps pass, the old and infirm, the children and the crippled, stumbling over the ground to follow their countrymen into the barrage of the Trade’s guns.
He saw spires reaching into the sky, illuminated from the inside so brightly it looked as though they had been built around towers of light. The architects and builders of Pearly were not slaves to gravity or other rules of nature. They used hyperphysics to let their skills and imagination run free. Structures arched over and tangled in on themselves forming great stone knots. Roofs appeared to float above their moorings, and walls bowed out like pregnant
