Buildings remained about the same no matter where you went, though these seemed somehow more crude, more rectangular and haphazard than what Winterwing was used to. Shorter. They were squat and square, as child’s forgotten wooden blocks, sorted in a row that was both uniform and mismatched. The constant movement of skiff and hovering traffic was absent. It was just a dull sky above that seemed more a dark brown than black.

There was heat from the burning building, yes, but there was a warmth more insipid than that in the air, as well. A natural looming heat that he had never felt before in his life, that seemed to radiate from the very pavement. The air carried a smell with it, something that sat thick and felt heavy to breathe. The glow of city light beyond combined with the fire to bathe everything in a strange, ruddy yellow and orange, that washed out all other color.

The immediate threat—’the ship’—vanished in the night, and he had the time to stand there, on hot pavement, and take all these new things in. It was all so recognizable, but somehow just a little bit off. There was something fundamentally wrong with what he saw, though he couldn’t quite grasp what it was.

He tried to catch sight of something familiar, looking toward what little he could see of skyline between rows of mismatched block structures. A building, a landmark, a mountain, something that gave him idea of how far he was now from where he had been.

There was a slow, creeping panic that washed over him.

The Ashta Belt had disappeared from the sky, but that was not a thing that could disappear. He did not know of a spot on Puckworld where, at the very least, the globular forms of the Belt was not visible at all times of the day. It was a thousand thousand kilotons of rock. It was going nowhere. If it was gone, that did not mean it had vanished.

He turned quickly. The rationalizing half of him insisting that he must have been wrong, mistaken, must have just missed it, behind a building or dimmed by the light of the fire. The air was wrong and the lights were yellow and the ground pounded and unnatural heat and the buildings were squat and dull browns-

Winterwing stopped in his tracks. His eyes rested on a bright, pockmarked, pale yellow, full moon that he never seen before in his life.