The map of Earth hanging over the obsidian desk was huge, detailed, and nothing like the one I had studied as a student at Mythos Academy. It was a map of a world that had healed, and of a world that had got crowded.
Wide stretches of land once marked as Black Zones, held for centuries by the five great dark cults, now glowed green. The reclamation work, led by Rose's Vakrt Corporation and the soil-singers of the Verdanel Greenwatch refugees, had done what no one thought possible. Ground that had been poisoned for generations was growing cities and farms, and new towns where humans and the peoples of the Seven lived street by street.
I pulled the view back. The Moon, once a lonely watchtower, was a glittering web of domes and orbital rings. The Cantari and the Navarii, peoples at home in sky and void, had made it a second home, and turned the grey dust into a shipyard and a market.
It was a golden age.
It was also an administrative nightmare.
