Din Kol and Ana Dolabra endure a long, jarring carriage ride along imperial roads through hot jungle toward Talagray. Ana, blindfolded as usual, talks incessantly about the Empire’s hidden backbone—maintenance crews who keep roads and infrastructure functional—while Din focuses on memorizing Ana’s maps of Talagray, the Tala canton, the sea walls, and lists of senior Engineering officers.

As the terrain opens into misty plains, Din tastes salt on the wind and uses landmarks to judge they are nearing the sea. With a spyglass, Din finally sees the sea walls: an immense slate-gray cliff-like barrier crawling with growth. Din watches a lift hauling troops and equipment up the wall, including horses pulling a steel bombard, and realizes the wall’s scale exceeds anything Din has imagined.

Din reports the sight to Ana and notices many bombards on the wall aimed out to sea, with some aimed inward as a contingency. Ana explains how some bombards are moved by horses and rails and emphasizes the Empire’s extraordinary coordination to build and supply such weapons in quantity. Their discussion turns to leviathans; Ana confirms the creatures can be as tall as the walls and hints their growth each wet season is real but intentionally kept vague because “numbers would make everyone worry.”

Approaching Talagray, Din sees the plains crowded with Legionnaires, Engineers, horses, construction, and massive hauling animals, alongside many heavily augmented soldiers. Din describes enormous, altered men, and Ana identifies them as cracklers—muscle-grafted troops whose reinforced skeletons click as they move—and frames the Empire’s bargain as trading personal strangeness for collective security.

Talagray emerges as a quake-conscious utility city of fretvine towers draped in mai-lanterns, built to service the sea walls. Din notes the city’s eastern ramparts bristle with bombards pointed toward the sea, meant less to kill a titan than to slow it and buy time for evacuation behind the third-ring wall. Din admits fear, and Ana confesses this is new to her too, but urges Din to treat the crisis as a novel pattern to be observed and analyzed as they pass through Talagray’s gates.