"In the end, both realms were utterly destroyed. Valerian's fate remains unknown, but Kolibos was said to have been blasted from the face of the earth in some final conflagration so profound that its heat scorched all life from the Four Kingdoms for a time.
"What is not known is if these two powers contrived to destroy one another in some fatal cataclysm, or whether some other power intervened from elsewhere. This, I learned from Belloc, and Anest his young apprentice, who despite his youth is a worthy scholar of history.
"But I digress:
"Seemingly by chance, we stumbled upon the remains of a library on the far west side of the city proper. No manuscripts could possibly have been found, even were they buried far beneath the rubble, for it was obvious that a tremendous heat had once suffused the entire region, one that would have consumed all flesh and wood and leather. It is not possible that parchment would have survived. In any event, time would long have crumbled into dust that which might have escaped the
heat of the flames. Of he buildings themselves, what had once been glass was now a blackened scab that adorned the dead eyes of window ledges. They appeared to us as would the kohl worn by harlots, who yet beckoned to living men to join them, though in the everlasting solitude of death.