Amarena gripped her sword.
In the time since she'd come to Isegart, she'd adopted a new blade, since her old one was presently lodged in the horn of the massive lake beast, below the frozen ice of Lost Lake, which was hardly lost, since everyone in Isegart knew where it was, but it did tend to disappear at times that weren't summer... which Isegart would not see for a long, long time thanks to the Eye of Hell's ash plumes, which were darkening the whole of Ayther.
Beyond the crenellations of the wall upon which they trained, a vast stretch of white spread unbroken - winter, come early because of the Eye. The sky above was clear, with the majority a semi-permanent orange and yellow, the only blue far to the south. Neither the red-black moon of Hell nor the green moon of Heaven were visible, and the darkened blue-purple far to the south indicated that it should have been night, if not for the perpetual day this close to Ayther's axis.