The central square of the Southeast Province's Provincial Capital seemed to have been dragged into a melting alchemical furnace.
The sky was no longer blue. Thick smoke rising from burning wood and grease had stained the heavens a sickly waxen yellow, making even the sunlight seem murky and hesitant.
A nauseating smell filled the air: the charred stink of roasting flesh, the acrid odor of scorched cloth, mingled with the excessively potent fragrance of Golden Feather Flower.
That fragrance, meant to mask the stench of corpses, had instead become the first note of death, enough to make a person's stomach cramp at a single whiff.
Three black iron execution frames stood in the center of the square.
Beneath them lay heaps of alchemically treated firewood. The grain had been coated a uniform dark brown; clearly, it had long been used repeatedly for occasions like this.
Three old men were bound to the frames.
Though disheveled, their hair tangled and their faces smeared with soot and sweat, they still retained the distinctive dignity of nobles.
Tattered formal clothes barely clung to their bodies. The fabric had been torn, but fragments of ancient patterns remained at the edges.
Medals symbolizing generations of family honor hung on all three men's chests. Those emblems belonged only to the old nobility, and they gleamed with a dim, stubborn light amid the smoke.
At their feet lay evidence of their crimes, seized from their families' secret chambers.
An ancient stone carving of the Dragon Ancestor had had its nose smashed off. Scrolls made from dragon hide had been trampled into the mud. Several Ancient Dragon scale amulets, revered for generations, had been tossed carelessly onto the firewood, reflecting a faint, cold light.
These sacred relics, once regarded as sources of glory and protection, were now trampled