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PROLOGUE

On days when the air is clear, and through unmarked hours the sun lies long upon the grass, you may venture beyond the borders of the valley to reach and return from the ruins before nightfall. Many years have passed since the old city fell, and living memory cannot recall its height nor the whiteness of its towers, nor the greatness of its trade, art and song. It has been too long since flags flew and trumpets sounded above the battlements, and long, too, has it been since words have told its tale.
The people of the town that resides in the valley are a remote and insular community on the outskirts of the New Kingdom. They have for centuries maintained a silent sort of deference to the hollow ruins; their communal feeling is stronger, perhaps, than any understanding that knowledge could impart. It is a feeling that runs through their veins like some light substance of reminiscence. The ground they work and the crops they harvest seem rich with the suggestion of a strange and awful past. Such is the power of a half-known heritage for a people whose worlds never change horizons, and whose minds feed but rarely on the thoughts of different lands.
Today, many still hold that the valley people are descended from the last few who dwelt within the old city; those who fled after the final and bloody dissolution of the government over 500 years before. The city now slumps, disorderly, upon the white cusp of the land, the sea undoing its stonework, the wind unveiling its gilded rooms to the sky. Old alliances have perished; highways have overgrown; silver trading ships pass silently in the thick of the night.
Many waited for a time for the ripples of instability to subside, waiting for the city to  rebound as cities commonly do. They waited for word of Lindarin’s restoration for decades, never hearing more than whispered rumours of its fall. Eventually, impatient  and weary of the growing absurdities told by wandering story-weavers, the traders came back. They came to renew the old alliances, their ships laden with silks and spice and wine.
They found but a mound of luminous stone upon the shore, mirrored by a troubled sea. None had remained to revive the ancient way of life; none had stayed to watch over the noble resurrection. It had fallen hollowly – abandoned and unremembered. The traders who returned left sooner than expected. They spoke of a sorrow in the city, and of a nameless darkling presence. In haste they turned away and ventured on.