The highway of carved stone sloped gently downward, leading the squad deeper into the silent expanse of Stratum Five.
At minus eleven thousand two hundred meters, the cave walls began to reveal the secrets of Earth’s ancient dawn. Embedded directly within the glossy black dark rock were the stone-hard skeletons of titanic ancient organisms. Creatures whose scale dwarfed anything recorded in the fossil records of modern paleontology.
Arthur walked alongside the right canyon wall, his hand resting on the smooth curve of a huge rib bone that arched forty meters into the gloom above.
The bone was not brittle white calcium. Over hundreds of millions of years in the hyper-dense aether of the deep mantle, the organic tissue had undergone total mineralogical transmutation. It replaced every cell with a composite of iron-hard metal stone-glass and tightly packed star-iron. Arthur tapped the bone with the brass handle knob of his cutting-open knife. Then, it rang with the clear, deep chime of a cathedral bell.
“These aren’t dinosaurs,” Arthur murmured, adjusting the sight zoom of his Monocle Loupe. “These are the ancient titans that fought during the First Cosmic Dawn. The Sovereigns who laid down their physical bodies to seal the core.”
