The huge doors of Progenitor Vault Three swung inward. Then, a blast of dry, sterile heat washed over the raised stone road. It wasn’t the choking, rotten-egg stench of the open mantle. It was the crisp, clean warmth of pure solar heat wave. He smelled of desert stone at high noon and ozone-charged lightning.
Arthur led the squad across the threshold, his combat boots echoing loudly in the giant stone inside.
The vault was a huge underground tiered arena carved directly from a solid vein of black stellar iron. It measured over five miles across and three miles tall. Suspended in the exact sharp-angled center of the dome hung the Solar Progenitor Hearth. A dormant artificial sun three hundred meters in width, wrapped within a ball-shaped cage of magnetic holding rings that rotated in slow, silent orbits.
Arthur stopped ten paces inside the threshold, his magnifying glass panning across the soaring walls of the chamber.
Embedded in the dark stellar iron, preserved within see-through sheets of glass-fused aetheric amber, were dozens of huge, stone-hard feathers. Each feather was five to eight meters long, their golden quills as thick as tree trunks. Their barbs glowed with faint, frozen sparks of ancient stellar fire.
