Six thousand three hundred and seventy miles beneath the land-wide crust, the concept of a horizon ceased to exist.
Arthur Vance stood upon a floating shelf of glass-fused quartz. He peeked across the vastness of the Crystal Genesis Throne. The world-size core was not an ocean of molten melted rock waste as eighteenth-century geologists had theorized, nor was it a barren sphere of tightly packed nickel-iron. It was an inside sky geode fifteen hundred miles in width, hollowed out by ancient earth-shaking stonework during the ancient formation of the world. Giant pillars of hyper-dense green emerald and violet tourmaline, each five hundred meters thick, spanned the cavernous deep pit like the ribs of a sleeping cosmic titan. In the center of the geode, bathed in the glowing blue radiance of the world-size spirit vein line, hung the core itself—a waving sphere of pure, liquid crystal-clear aether.
And coiled around that beating heart was the guardian.
Arthur checked the wrist seals on his Vance Cryo-Pneumatic Transfixer Mk. IV, his gloved fingers moving with deliberate, cold and exact smooth speed over the brass-milled pressure regulators. The air here was hyper-dense, soaked with raw aether at one hundred and eighty parts per million. Every breath felt like inhaling cold menthol spiked with powdered flint.
