Last year, on the Lantern Festival night, the flower lanterns made the night as bright as day. The moon rose above the willow tips; lovers met after dusk.
This year's Lantern Festival—
This year, there was no Lantern Festival.
Shen Le watched quietly as Breeze Tower burned into a towering pillar of fire. The flames lit the entire long street, lit half the eastern city, and then, amid a groaning crash, the tower suddenly collapsed.
That pearl of Thorn City, that famed tower which had once stood above the harbor on Lantern Festival night, where the city's gentry composed and sang poems—was now destroyed by war, no different from the humblest commoner's dwelling.
Countless shattered beams and broken eaves flew outward with explosive cracks, pouring down like a rain of fire.
They fell upon homes, upon shops, upon fleeing crowds, stirring waves of cries and screams. "The tower's collapsed!"
"The tower's collapsed!"
"Breeze Tower has collapsed—"
Shen Le abruptly turned to look west. Far across the city from Breeze Tower, standing opposite it from east to west, was Sea Moon Tower—the building in the middle of Treasure Street, funded and built by foreign merchants, reserved for their feasts and banquets:
That Sea Moon Tower, crowned with a strange onion dome, "its vessels all silver, with Kunlun slaves performing between the tables"—
It stood quietly in the darkness, every floor ablaze with light, exactly as it had always been.
From its eaves hung high revolving lanterns shaped like sea vessels, their shades carved from hawksbill shell and engraved with ship silhouettes.
The images cast upon the walls like a fleet of boats breaking through waves.
It was still perfectly intact.
Still perfectly intact—and for the next ten years, twenty years, thirty years, perhaps it could remain so, could remain prosperous and