“What’s going on?” Maanta asked, not really expecting an answer, as they pressed through crowds of Meridians engulfing Cardonea Tower in a sphere of befuddlement. Not a sole so much as glanced at Maanta and his companions. They were clamoring towards something close to Meridia’s front opening, a rather large crevice separating the East and West Shale walls.
Maanta was forced to squeeze past a man’s rotund belly above, a woman’s sleek back below, through a mother and her five whining children arguing and hovering together and various other things before seeing what the city had scuttled together to witness.
Cardonea’s gargantuan stone drawbridge boomed down upon the ocean floor; the seeweed draping it waving and swirling through the waters. Normally, most Meridians used windows to enter and leave the tower; giving the thick foliage a chance to grow.
Sand whipped up around the fallen stone and swept inwards toward the tower. Then a man, his wife, their son and two of their daughters, surrounded by eight hulking Meridian guardsmen, drifted through the swirling sand towards the distant wall’s crevice. The guards bore armor shaped from giant emerald-crab shells, wielding spheres and shield stones that depicted Gelu’s creation of the upper world. It was a symbolic waltz of pride.
Nicholea’s enormous guards parted the murmuring crowd with stern fists the size of the Zhar’s own head. The seriousness imbedded in their leader’s eyes rippled an awakening consciousness within the Meridians, a mutual inward knowledge that their Zhar, with his usual serious and gentle demeanor, was troubled by something this day he had awoken to.