Thornhaven was louder than the game had led me to believe.
The pattern was becoming reliable — every element of this world that the game had rendered as a backdrop or a loading screen or an atmospheric set piece was, in reality, approximately ten times more complex, three times more beautiful, and infinitely more alive than any rendering engine could capture.
The Imperial Capital sprawled across a river valley so wide that the opposite bank was visible only as a smudge of architecture against the horizon. Two million people. The game had described the number. Standing on the carriage platform at the city's eastern gate, looking at the urban landscape that stretched in every direction like a civilization that had decided to test the concept of "enough" and found it insufficiently ambitious, the number became a feeling.
