tornado

The first clear sign that the Spire was failing happened in the city of Idreinen. Oh, there had been rumors, but there were rumors even at its peak--any time the wind inconvenienced a merchantman, or any time the rains made a farmer's life more difficult--but this time, neither the Order's truest believers nor its wiliest propagandists could deny it.

I spent more time in Idreinen than I did in the capital at the time, because it was more interesting. The Prince was boring, the future Princess was a dilettante--Idreinen, that beautiful city, that hub of trade and culture and scholarship, was the place where history happened. So it was that, standing on the Duke's gilded balcony, drinking his wine, listening to him dismissing these new philosophers' vanity and their jealousy, I saw the sky turn green.

It's odd, seeing thy sky in the wrong color. You immediately sense that something is wrong, but instead of withdrawing inside, the mind is drawn to the aberration, fascinated by it--it's not until the impossibly loud clap of thunder and the sudden roar of the descending funnel cloud that you realize you really should find shelter.

A ducal palace full of wealthy merchants and freshly minted nobility can still descend into a panic when they see their Duke, normally so confident, running for the basement with a look of absolute terror on his face. Wine glasses were dropped, tables of refreshments overturned, servants shoved roughly aside--some were quite badly injured. The tornado missed the palace, of course, though it did damage some of the nearby mansions.

Somehow, the story of the tumultuous retreat spread throughout the city, despite my repeated insistence to my friends that they not repeat a word of it to anyone. It was certainly never my intention for the people of the city to sneer at the Duke and those elite enough to attend his parties, much less to expose their hypocrisy as people who claimed to care about the people and yet quickly descended into chaos the moment they were threatened.

At least the palace was spared.