Rex Regis

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In the cool air of early spring, on the second Solayi in Maris, the man who wore the uniform of a Telaryn commander stood at the foot of the long stone pier that dominated the south end of the harbor at Kephria. Behind Quaeryt were only ashes and ruins, except for the old stone fort to the immediate south of the pier, and the rising trooper compound more than a mille to the north, situated at the corner of the old fortifications that had once marked the border between Antiago and Bovaria. He looked out onto the Gulf of Khellor, where patches of mist drifted above the dark surface.

Then his eyes dropped to the pier, once the pride of the port city that had been leveled by the late Autarch’s cannon and imagers. Most of the stone pillars that supported the pier remained solid-but not all. The stone-paved surface of the long pier was pitted, and many of the gray paving stones were cracked. A few were shattered. Almost every stone showed signs of fire, either in the ashes in the mortared joins between the stones, or in blackened sections of stone. The wooden bollards were all charred-those that remained. One section of the pier, some two hundred yards out from the shore, sagged almost half a yard over a twenty-yard stretch.

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