Life of a political prop

Nero's eyes were glued onto the screen. The pressure on him had faded, and instead spread across the entire crowd. But maybe that was not the pressure of aether. Maybe that was just the pressure of laying eyes on something that could change the world forever.

It was the pressure of dreaming of a realm beyond that of sages, the pressure of an age changing before their very eyes. Whether what they sought existed or not was uncertain. But if it did exist, then the only place to search for it would be in the Eldrim ruins.

For nearly a thousand years, since the time the emperor brought forth the Eldrim cards and changed the course of history, people had been looking for new and unexplored ruins. For a thousand years they had been searching, and it wasn't as if more hadn't been found. But even if they were found, they were always out of reach.