The inside of Progenitor Vault Six was not built of cold metal and dead stone. It was a stonework of frozen starlight and living crystal.
The squad stepped past the massive iron-hard metal threshold. Then, the silence was broken only by the soft, rhythmic hum of thousands of crystal memory spires that lined the grand nave. Each spire was a six-sided pillar of pale quartz thirty meters tall. It glowed with an internal, amber eerie glow that pulsed like a slow, sleeping lung. Beneath their feet, semi-clear channels filled with liquid cyan aether coursed through the polished floor, converging on a huge six-sided dais at the center of the work-yard.
Arthur Vance walked down the central aisle, his boots clicking with measured care against the ancient floor plates. His fingers brushed the smooth, cool surface of an iron-hard metal frozen stillness console.
Inside the heat-proof glass metal tube, preserved in total ice-cold frozen stillness, hovered a double helix of genetic material nearly two meters tall. It blazed with pure, sky light. It was surrounded by streams of light-projected annotations written in the extinct ideograms of the First-born great realm.
Beside him, Grimm’s heavy paws made no sound on the glass-smooth deck. The hound’s broad head swiveled from side to side, his single notched ear twitching as he took in the strange, sterile scent of the vault. There was no rot here, no dust, no metal tang of blood. It smelled like pure snow falling on high alpine glaciers—clean, ancient, and…
