The gardens had been green and gold for longer than most Dimensions had been standing, running in long terraces across a land that had no edges anyone had ever found, the green shading into the gold and back again as wide slow rivers cut through all of it carrying light instead of silt, and small things had lived there and none of them had ever been important, and that had always been the entire point of the place!
Now the terraces were burning.
The rivers had been broken open along their whole length as their light bled out into the soil in long spreading stains, and the gold had gone black in rings around a hundred impact sites, and where the gardens had climbed they now sagged, and where they had run they now simply stopped.
And above the ruin stood the armies.
