447 words on Hellion Prince.

Night Class, like my coffee, is still percolating.  Not too much else to say, pre-caffeination.

Today's excerpt: 

It was an hour after dusk when the towers of Heartscore, like candles, lit the horizon. Almost the whole of the duchy was part of the city, creeping outward along the spoke-roads year after year, as all the surrounding towns and villages crept in. When the city was founded, it had been called Heptivalle; but that name had not been used except by history tutors in generations.  It was synonymous with the Duchy itself by now.  It was Heartscore, and vice versa -- but Damalien, and others among the Marginalists, had taken to calling it simply 'the capitol,' to distance it from the politics it was mired in.

Chrysinthe watched out her window in fascination as the houses and shops grew closer together and stretched upward, piling on stories, as the packed gravel of the road became rough cobbles, then smooth cobbles, then flat and tile-smooth; as the scattered lights went from being flickering firelight and oil lanterns to pale blue-silver magelamps like a thousand little echoes of the full moon. Damarhis loved to watch the city as it seemed to rush by, and every year he could remember he had been as rapt as she was now, ensorcelled by the sight of it.

This year, he watched her watch it instead.