When a five-half-mile world-serpent suffers a systemic neuromuscular convulsion, the physics of the surrounding environment cease to be theoretical.
Six thousand three hundred and seventy miles beneath the crust of the earth, the Hollow Core of Gaia was a closed, inverted sphere. The world-size mantle curved above like a huge dome of dark rock, studded with crystal-clear forests and suspended rivers of raw, liquid jade. Under normal conditions, the massive Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent lay in an eternal, calm coil around the roots of the Crystal Genesis Throne, its huge body acting as the living gyroscopic steadying fin for the entire world-size crust.
Now, that steadying fin was misfiring.
Beneath Arthur Vance’s boots, the skull plates of the serpent didn’t merely shake. They buckled. Waves of deep earth-shaking deep ring, born from millions of tons of coiling ancient muscle thrashing in agony, surged upward through the serpent’s spinal column at four thousand meters per second. The jade-black osteoderms—each one a huge slab sixty meters across and twenty feet thick—ground against one another with the screech of colliding freight trains, opening fissures six feet wide across the skull’s surface.
“Ground-shaking deep ring at eight point four!” Arthur called out, his boots sliding two feet across the slick jade before his air-powered magnetic dampeners caught the lip of a hardened ridge. “The parasite’s death-spasms are transmitting rotting shock directly into the serpent’s lower brain! If those skull stitches shear, the entire back-skull ridge collapses!”
