Free Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon by Jeff Grubb, Matt Forbeck Page B

disappeared.
    Killeen stepped through without pausing. Dougal hesitated and looked at Riona. She made an “After you” motion, and it was clear that she wasn’t going to leave him alone on this side of the gate. Mentally noting the lack of trust in these dragon-haunted days, Dougal stepped through.
    It was no more difficult than stepping through the surface of a soap bubble. One moment he was in Divinity’s Reach, the rising sun just cresting the walls ahead of him, the city around him in deep shadow. The next moment he and the others were in bright sunshine, leaving him blinking and raising a hand to protect his eyes. The air itself was different, changing suddenly from the cool, damp morning air to something warmer, fresher, and smelling of salt. The quiet energy of a city awakening was immediately stilled and replaced with the clamor of merchants and townspeople at work.
    One moment he was in Divinity’s Reach, and the next moment he was here. Dougal did not want to think about where he was in the space in between.
    They stood on another low set of earthworks overlooking the merchant district of Lion’s Arch. Around them, in a slight arch, were other gates, some with golden energies in their arches, some bronze, and some with a purplish hue. Next to them, three more asura were squabbling about performance issues.
    Riona ignored them, passing Killeen and leading them down the steps into the Great Bazaar, following the other travelers.
    The Lion’s Arch of long ago was gone, its only remaining memory consisting of the battlements that survived the great waves from the Rising of Orr. When Zhaitan, the undead Elder Dragon, brought long-sunken Orr back to the surface, all lands surrounding the Sea of Sorrows were awash in great waves. Lion’s Arch was almost utterly destroyed, and in its place was left a swamp of broken ships, snapped trees, and dead creatures.
    Out of that morass, the new Lion’s Arch arose over the past hundred years. The town was re-established by pirates and corsairs looking for a safe haven, and salvage crews reclaiming the flotsam and jetsam that had washed ashore. It soon blossomed into a cosmopolitan trading center.
    The city showed its recent origin. Some of the newer buildings were stone, but most of the city was of wood. The original structures were built from the remains of wrecked ships tossed up on the beach, and that architecture so defined the city that even new construction was built along the lines of hulls and keels as opposed to walls and roofs. It was a scratch-built city, a lash-upmade permanent, a temporary site that might yet outshine Divinity’s Reach or the Black Citadel or even the asuran city of Rata Sum.
    The people of Lion’s Arch were as motley as its buildings. Before the Rising of Orr, it was a human city, a Krytan city. After the floods uprooted the houses and replaced them with shipwrecks, a transient population took hold, a brotherhood of the coast seeking nothing more than survival in an overturned world. The crews of the surviving pirate ships colonized the wreckage that was Lion’s Arch, and their captains became the first leaders. As a result, Lion’s Arch was ruled by a council of captains, and its morals and legality were always more flexible than in other great cities.
    The new population was also more diverse than anything else seen in Tyria. Here you found humans but also equal or greater numbers of norn, asura, and sylvari. The occasional bloated, amphibian hylek or hunched, bucktoothed dredge stalked through the streets. The castoffs of a half-dozen nations and a plethora of societies all gathered here.
    And charr. That was the part that concerned Dougal the most. The humans and charr were still at war in Ebonhawke, yet in Lion’s Arch charr and humans lived, if not in harmony, at least within sight of each other without open hostilities. That was something Dougal, who had spent much of his youth hating and fighting the charr, had a hard time