Through the heavy panoramic viewports of the Iron Vanguard’s forward watching gondola, the final moments of the Sovereign Splicer Citadel unfolded with world-ending majesty.
Cruising smoothly at ten thousand meters height, the four Vanguard heavy airships banked into a wide watching arc. Far below them, breaking through the dense undercast of cloud cover, the three-mile-wide floating mountain plummeted toward the lonely waters of the northern Abyssal Rift.
Stripped of its floating crystal ringing tones and cut from its earth-heat tap-roots, the ancient dark rock monolith could no longer defy gravity.
The mountain plunged into the open ocean eight miles south of the land-wide shelf.
The moving impact was staggering. Even from two miles in the air, the blast wave rattled the watching glass in its brass frames. A huge column of crushed sea water and white steam erupted five thousand feet into the sky. An earth-shattering blast echoed across the empty ocean, with a three-hundred-foot ring of displaced water that rolled outward into the uninhabited trench basin.
Under the crushing weight of forty million tons of collapsing rock and three miles of ocean depth, the Citadel imploded.
The blasphemous breeding pens, the rotting incubation vats, the cruel assembly-line abattoirs, and the dark laboratories where Apostle Vespera Nyx had tortured beasts for forty years were crushed into fine gravel, entombed beneath the seabed for the rest of deep-rock time.
