At six in the morning, timed together with the sky tides of the upper world, Arthur Vance stood before the Continental Core Gate.
The huge seventy-meter portal of starmetal-veined dense green rock rested in the exact sharp-angled center of the Kermadec-Tonga sub-mantle fault. In the soft, turquoise glow cast by Echo’s floating body, the millions of tiny bio-clockwork runes etched into the gate’s surface pulsed with faint, dormant power.
Arthur clicked his Zeiss monocle into careful archaeology mode. He knelt to inspect the giant stone engravings with high-resolution aligned light.
“Fascinating metalworking composition,” Arthur dictated into his audio log. He ran his gloved fingertips along the outer ring. “The base substrate is dense green rock harvested from the Earth’s shift zone, heavy with an alloy of crystal-hardened starmetal and deep-mantle conductite. The pulling strength exceeds ten thousand tons of pressure. The aetheric flow rate is three times higher than zero-pushback graphene. This structure wasn’t built by human hands. It dates back at least one hundred million years.”
Beside him, Grimm sniffed the ancient starmetal with deep canine curiosity. The Netherhound’s scarred nose twitched as he sampled the scent of ancient epochs preserved in the metal. Grimm let out a soft, inquiring chuff, looking up at Arthur as if asking whether this giant stone disc was safe to walk upon.
