Six thousand three hundred and seventy miles beneath the crust of the earth, gravity didn’t pull toward a center. It radiated outward toward the mantle, suspending the hollow inside of Gaia in an inverted sphere of stone-hard silence and ancient light.
Above Arthur Vance’s head, continents of crystal-clear dark rock and veins of liquid jade arched across the void, bound together by rivers of glowing ancient aether that flowed through the air without riverbeds. Below his boots lay something far older than human history: the skull of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent.
The serpent was five miles long, coiled in an unending ring around the roots of the world-size throne. Its skull plates were jagged sheets of rainbow-bright jade-black hard shell, each plate sixty meters across and thick enough to withstand earth-shaking crust-sink. Yet beneath the sole of Arthur’s left boot, the bone didn’t hum with the steady, ringing heartbeat of a world-guard.
It shuddered with a sick, irregular tremor.
“Root depth is eighteen meters into the parietal stitch,” Arthur said aloud, his voice flat and measured within the open aether of the core. “The parasite has anchored three main blood-vessel drain tubes directly into the dorsal sagittal sinus. It’s using the serpent’s own brain blood pressure to pressurize its rotting venom sacs.”
