Semina looked around at the terrified faces that had turned to her. She stared back at them, speechless.

She was accustomed to commanding attention. She expected to be looked for when problems arose during the normal operations of one of her many enterprises, when someone of will and authority was needed to banish indecision and drive progress. She expected to be notified when her lieutenants had made decisions that could affect the course of any of the ViPADua houses. She expected to be recognized when moving through the city, and when she arrived at parties where she might encounter any of the other few Logisters she considered to be her peers. Semina ViPADua had built herself up, stone by stone, to stand as one of the great pillars of Siana and she had learned not only to weather the scrutiny that came with her prominence, she had learned to leverage it. Attention was just another tool for managing the value of her capital and the exceptional products of her enterprises.

But looking around her then, at that collection of fearful, expectant faces that had just watched the End of Days descend on their home, Semina felt uncomfortable receiving the attention of a room full of people for the first time in many years.

She looked from face to face, noting absently when she looked at Athrofonte that she had never known you could see so much of the whites of a man’s eyes.

What do you want from me?

In one corner of her mind she knew it was only natural that many of them would turn to her, even then in the silence of whatever came after the End of Days. For years she had determined the course of every life in that room, directly or indirectly. Many of them had followed her for decades. But why, after the land itself had begun to crumble, after the roiling gray sky swallowed first the green sun and then the yellow–why would they look to her? What could she do? What could she offer them?

I can't order the suns back into the sky.

Semina looked away, ashamed, in an absurd way, to have nothing to offer them.

Her crisis of indecision lasted only a handful of moments, but she would remember each of those moments for the rest of her life.

She knew even as the unfamiliar emotion blossomed in her chest that shame was an absurd reaction, but it didn’t matter. She had spent long decades transmuting problems into opportunities, earning the gratitude and admiration of less capable Logisters by taking their intractable puzzles and breaking them into a series of recognizable and manageable challenges that she could overcome. It was mortifying to have the Logisters who reported to her, her lieutenants and their subordinates, huddle around her Great Table and look to her for guidance she couldn’t provide.

As she felt the expectant gazes of her Logisters begin to drop away from her, Semina looked at the sunlight filling the cracks around each of the shutters. The ravenous, all consuming mist had receded. She was sure it had not only because the sun had begun shining again, but because the nothingness no longer pressed in on her in a way that she could feel in every fiber of her being. And Aiol had returned. That meant something other than the Tower ViPADua had survived the storm. It meant there was still a sky for the sun to hang in. It meant maybe the city had survived as well, and the lands beyond. The hinterlands with their mines and fields, vineyards and estates. Their people.

Or maybe not. Anything could be waiting for them beyond the shutters. Or nothing at all.

Semina imagined the Tower floating in a sunny void, or meandering through an impossible, cloudy dreamscape. As the people around her Great Table began to shift and mutter, she imagined them all drifting together through the clouds until the Tower’s modest food stores ran out. Then, she imagined, the hunger would set in. Her friends and lieutenants would begin to squabble over the few resources that remained to them. Their entourages would divide the Tower between themselves and skirmish on the spiral staircase as they attempted to steal from each other. They would hurt each other–kill each other–so they could–

Semina straightened in her chair as she pushed the momentary, fatalistic fantasy out of her mind. It was an unproductive self-indulgence. It couldn't help her understand the nature of the present challenge or how she could rise to meet it.

But it did, at least, bring Semina back to herself. The possibility that her Logisters could descend into chaos ignited the indignation she always felt in the face of a disorder. It reminded her that she was a woman of action, and if any moment had ever called for confident, decisive action, it was this one.

If the city had survived but left broken, ravaged, who better to assess the options available to the survivors? Who better to manage what resources that remained? To organize the surviving laborers and identify the tasks that most deserved their effort?

That was, essentially, the task she’d been tackling when the storm had found the city. Semina had been demanding that her managers provide clear assessments of the state of the ViPADua houses so that she could decide how to effectively manage what resources that remained to them. Appropriately apprised, she’d been convinced she could not only plot a course that would allow them to resume production in the houses that sat idle and maintain production in the houses that were faltering, she could ensure that every ViPADua house thrived even as their unaffiliated peers continued to struggle. She'd intended for her houses to not simply make do with less, but to thrive and continue to rise.

Semina took a deep breath and looked again at the nearest shuttered window as her embarrassment gave way to conviction. She would go and see what had happened to the world beyond the Tower ViPADua. After she had seen what there was to see, she would decide what was left for any of them to do.

If there was anything to do, and a world left for them to do it in.

She didn’t trust herself to speak and command the shutters be thrown open again, so she placed her hands on her crimson Great Table and pushed herself up out of her chair. The room went silent again as she walked slowly, purposefully, to the nearest window. Someone gave a little frightened gasp when Semina gripped the handle of the shutter.

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The twisted wood resisted Semina’s first tug. It creaked and groaned as she pulled on the handle, but it refused to open. Looking up, Semina realized the shutters had shifted during the earthquake and become wedged against each other. She briefly considered calling for help, but the words were crushed in her throat as a fierce, irrational fury erupted within her. She gritted her teeth, wrapped both hands around the handle, and wrenched at it with all the strength she’d accrued in her five decades of life.

The shutter shrieked as it burst open. The noise was answered by a chorus of frightened cries from behind her, but Semina ignored them as she looked out at the world beyond the shattered remnants of the stained glass window.

She expected ruin and death when she looked out at Siana, to see broken bodies in a city thrown down on itself as the earth shook. At worst, she expected to see a leaden sky still boiling above them, waiting to plunge down again and envelope everything she had ever known while a gray mist wafted through the streets. But she saw none of those things.

The streets were still filled with people. Not dead, she realized after a heart stopping moment, just frozen in the same silent shock as her lieutenants and their retinues.

That was the only reassuringly normal sight beyond the Tower ViPADua.

Semina didn’t turn when she heard slow footsteps approaching her from behind, but she recognized Victra’s scent–he’d always favored citrus and pine.

“Is it over?”

Semina shrugged and held both hands out toward the city, inviting her old friend to look for himself.

There was still a city beyond the window, but it wasn’t the one Semina had expected to find, ruined or whole. She recognized the distinctive red roof tiles and the white plaster walls, but all over the city there were entire buildings where there shouldn’t be.

And beyond the city stretched an alien landscape. Semina frowned at the red landscape that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Victra gasped and stepped in front of her to point down at the buildings near the base of the Tower. “That's the winery. That’s the estate.”

Semina stepped forward to crane her neck and follow his pointing finger. He was right. She recognized the grounds, the pale red tiles, and the decorative blue shutters of the ancestral Victra winery. It sat at the base of the Tower ViPADua as if it had always been there, and not perched on a charming hill overlooking the rolling vineyards the Victra family had tended for centuries.

Victra's voice was barely a whisper. “How is this possible?”

“There are others,” Semina said quietly. She pointed out at the rest of Siana.

Semina had been looking out at that skyline from that vantage for decades and she knew its contours by heart. What she saw then was something else, something new. Both in the streets nearby and in distant neighborhoods Semina could see gaps between roofs where old buildings were missing and newly obstructed views where taller buildings had risen up. Some of them she thought she might recognize, but others were too far away to study. Whatever they were, every building was unbroken by the storm that had just swept over the city. They looked like they had simply dropped in from above leaving no trace of the building that had been there before.

“There’s something wrong with the land–” Semina began to say, lifting her hand again to point at the strange red horizon, but she was cut off by the sound of another scream, this time from the street below. She looked down as the crowd began to point and murmur.

Semina had heard some of the other Logisters creeping slowly to stand behind her, but when they heard the scream and saw the crowd pointing at something in the sky, they rushed to other windows and pulled open the protesting shutters to look in the direction of whatever new menace had appeared.

Semina followed, but stopped to stand next to Casqat. The young woman stood behind the group now crowding around the open windows. She held both hands over her mouth, quietly weeping as she stared out through the broken stained glass.

Semina placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, then turned to look out the window. She froze.

A gargantuan structure dominated the sky beyond the window. It was like nothing Semina had ever seen before. Its walls were perfectly smooth and its base was as wide as a small lake. Its impossible bulk rose so high into the sky that its top disappeared into...

Semina’s heart tripped again in her chest. The boiling clouds that marked the End of the Days were gone and the sky was a deep, perfect blue. She couldn’t see the green sun Ytol, but the brilliance of the yellow sun, Aiol, touched everything Semina could see. Semina blinked and stared hard at the sight before her. The top of this impossibly large structure wasn’t lost in the clouds, it simply faded into nothingness, as if by magic.

Beside her, Casqat held her hands in front of her face and drew a tremulous breath. Her eyes were still fixed on the strange building.

“Are we dead?” She gasped in a short breath. “Do you think we’re dead?”

Semina squeezed Casqat’s shoulder and turned to consider the Logisters and their attendants as they began to pull the rest of the shutters open. Some wept at what they saw, while others stared in silent shock. Two young men jostled each other angrily as they both tried to look out the window that looked due south–or used to.

“I don’t know,” Semina said. “Maybe we are.”

Casqat moaned piteously and covered her face with both hands.

“But,” Semina said gently, squeezing Casqat’s shoulder again, “even if we are, it seems we still have our wits. And we can still look after each other. Casqat, look at me.”

Casqat balled her hands into fists and held them to her mouth, then turned her red eyes to Semina.

“Can you help me with something?”

Casqat blinked rapidly, then nodded slightly.

“Ask those two,” Semina said, pointing at the two young men whose jostling threatened to boil over into a fist fight, “to help you get the doors open.”

Casqat stared at her.

Semina inclined her head to the great oak doors that opened onto the spiral staircase that ran the length of the Tower. She waited to speak again until the younger woman finally turned to look at the doors. “Can you do that?”

Casqat swallowed twice then drew in a long, long breath. She nodded. “Yes.”

“Thank you,” Semina said. Then, when the woman continued to stare at her: “Go.”

Semina watched the young woman approach the bickering young men, then gave them both a short, imperious nod when they looked past her to Semina. They sobered and straightened slightly, then followed Casqat toward the door.

Satisfied, Semina turned in a slow circle to take in the shattered remains of the hugely expensive windows she had installed on every wall of her private sanctum. Then, steeling herself, she began a slow circuit of the room to look out at the strange world that had appeared outside, starting with the window the two young men had been fighting over.