Soon they arrived in front of a massive city.
Even from a distance, it demanded attention in a way that most cities simply didn't — not through any single overwhelming feature but through sheer accumulated scale, the kind that took several seconds of looking before the full scope resolved into something the mind could hold. Buildings stacked behind walls stacked behind more buildings, the arrangement carrying the deliberate, sedimentary logic of something built and rebuilt over centuries rather than planned from scratch.
Leon didn't need the compass to identify the destination. The needle pointed straight to the center, and the center announced itself — a temple structure around which the entire city had organized itself, every street and district radiating outward from it the way roots extend from a trunk. Everything else was context. That building was the point.
