The night above Hell's Paradise Island had ceased behaving like night.
It had become a phenomenon in its own right, a vast and breathtaking transformation stretched from one horizon to the other until even people who knew nothing of cultivation could have stepped outside, lifted their faces toward the heavens and understood with instinctive certainty that the world was behaving differently.
The change was of greater serenity; it touched everything without harming anything, and the entire island seemed to have entered the kind of silence that came when creation itself wished to listen.
Billions upon billions of stars crowded the heavens until darkness struggled to find enough room between them. Every point of light burned brighter than nature should have allowed, some blazing in immaculate white, others in pale gold, silver, faint blue or deep amber, while entire constellations that should have been lost beyond distance suddenly stood sharp enough to be counted with naked eyes.
