Twenty years after the end of the Fourth Shadowwar, Thomas Gown is a happily married family man with a beautiful wife and a perfect son. When he takes his son back to Lexandria University to arrange for his wizardly education, however, he learns tha...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The city of Kronosia, excavated out of the solid rock a hundred yards below the barren, lifeless surface of the smallest moon, was now inhabited mainly by construction workers and their families, employed by Belthar and Lexandria University to build the ship of space. Most of the city's original inhabitants, the descendants of eight of the Agglemonian Empire's wealthiest families who had pooled their fortunes to build the moon city to escape the fall of Agglemon, had returned to Tharia the moment the Beltharans had opened the way for them.
Some had remained, of course, Chee Noko mused with annoyance. Mainly the old who had no wish to pull up their roots and endure a complete change of lifestyle at their late time of life, and others had returned after a few days or weeks, unable to endure the wide open sky above their heads after having lived their whole lives in confined spaces, but these were the exception. Fully ninety percent of the original five thousand inhabitants of the moon city were now living down on Tharia, the fallen world that had risen again. The nobles made wealthy beyond imagination by the treasures, the remnants of their family fortunes left over after the financing of Kronosia, that they had taken up to the moon city with them, and the others, who had been their servants during the centuries in Kronosia, all given a good start in life by the hundred gold pieces a head that their former employers had paid them before their return.
Some of them still served the six noble families, especially the Traldians who had been the most highly regarded of the noble houses, and most of the others were now in the service of wealthy Tharian families. A life of service was the only life they knew. It was the only way they had of making a living, so long as they were able to remain indoors, out of sight of the terrible open sky that they were still having trouble coping with. Probably their children or grandchildren would be capable of leaving and making lives of their own, but Chee Noko couldn't help but wonder whether they and their ancestors had been so long in the service of the noble families that they were now genetically incapable of any other kind of existence.
The five hundred or so of the original Kronosians who, for one reason or another, had chosen to remain all now lived together in the part of the city that had once been known as Traldia Sector. Life for them was easy and comfortable. It was always pleasantly warm. They had no need to work to earn a living and the pantries, no longer controlled by the noble houses, provided unlimited quantities of food and drink, powered by the intensely magical Lifegiver in the centre of the city which also provided the hellishly strong gravity that these Tharians preferred.
It was their idea of paradise, Chee Noko knew. All their needs were met and they had no need to do anything to earn it. If the Beltharans had not controlled all access to and from the smallest moon it was very probable that a flood of immigrants would have poured in to share this utopian lifestyle, so there was that to thank them for, if nothing else. That many people, many times the population that Kronosia had been designed to accommodate, would soon put an end to the perfection, of course, which was one reason why the Beltharans tried so hard to keep the place a secret. They couldn't stop the Kronosians who returned to Tharia from talking about the moon city, of course, but the moon trog had heard that they had agents telling nonsensical stories about the place to make people dismiss the tales of the repatriated refugees as equal nonsense.
