The silence of death now hung over what had once been the Middle Kingdom. In the weeks following the massacre at Black Dragon Valley, the last pockets of human resistance were methodically crushed under the iron heel of draconic rule. Ignivara's armies, galvanized by Syléane Ignivara's imperious assumption of command, swept across Chinese territory with the relentless precision of a perfectly oiled war machine.
The new Patriarch had inherited her late father's tactical genius, but had added to it a cold, calculated cruelty that surpassed even Varnor's. Where her predecessor sometimes sought to spare non-combatants out of pragmatism, Syléane made no distinction. For her, every human represented a potential threat, a seed of rebellion that had to be uprooted before it could germinate.
