The barrier separating the hollow mantle from the central sanctum was not made of stone or metal. It was a ball-shaped knee pad of condensed, liquid space three hundred miles in width.
Titus’s dark rock belly shell crested the threshold. Then, the world inverted into pure, unbroken radiance.
The surrounding twilight of the Silicate Forest vanished, replaced by a blazing bright tiered arena of white-gold soft glow. Huge sharp-angled prisms of flawless alpha-quartz, each miles thick and rising into the curved void like frozen lightning bolts, refracted the light into sprawling curtains of emerald, violet, and solar crimson auroras. Suspended in the zero-gravity center of this crystal-clear sphere floated the foundation of the world: the Crystal Genesis Throne.
It was an impossible pillar of iron-hard metal crystal seventy miles tall and twenty miles broad at the base, its roots anchored directly into the five main world-size ley-lines. Liquid mana of blinding purity pulsed up through its semi-clear core in rhythmic waves, circulating vital life-force to the continents thousands of miles above.
Yet Titus drifted within four miles of the throne’s lower stone stand. Then, Arthur Vance’s gaze was not drawn to the crystal stonework.
His eyes locked onto the mountain that moved.
