Annie hadn't lied to that angel, Yan. She really had gone home—to her home in the Voodoo Lands of Valoran, to the Gray Order headquarters that had long ago been transformed into an iron jungle by the Terran and divine technologies of the Hero Federation.
Of course, it wasn't quite right to call it merely the Gray Order's headquarters anymore. It had practically become a massive city of science fiction and fantasy, all steel and sorcery!
Anyway...
When Annie came back, all she saw were towering steel walls, bright beacons, modern streets, and a collection of menacing Mage Towers that reached high into the clouds!
The little stream near her home, the one she remembered so well, was gone. The two large fruit trees outside the headquarters had been cut down, too. The stone mills, haystacks, fish and birds by the stream, the wisps of cooking smoke rising from every home—even the big yellow dog at the old Mage's house next door—were nowhere to be found.
Everything she remembered had completely disappeared!
This place had become something else entirely. It was no longer the home she knew, where she'd been born and raised, and where she'd lived until she was eight... But there was nothing to be done. She had brought this on herself. In a sense, she really had torn down her own hometown, her own home, and the Gray Order that belonged to her with her own hands.
Back then, she really had told her subordinates to tear down her home and build the steel mage fortress that now stood before her. It wasn't that there was anything especially good about the place, though she couldn't say it was entirely bad, either. She'd brought this on herself, so who could she blame?
It was a little absurd. In