With no light pollution, the sky is as clear as pristine wilderness back home, its background color the deepest blue, with even the dimmest stars visible. You’ve never seen so many of them in your life. Bright moonlight provided the only illumination, bathing everything in a pale glow that lends an ethereal air to the cityscape. Its whites look blue. Its purples appear as darker shades that no longer seem to clash against the green forest and grasslands of lower altitudes beyond the city’s mountaintop siting, barely visible above the palace walls as a thin band below the horizon.