Chancellor Morn tapped the heavy brass bezel of the master pressure gauge mounted against the granite pier.
The gauge was three feet in width, machined from solid naval bronze with an etched silver dial that recorded heat units in increments of ten thousand. The needle—a four-foot strip of hardened spring steel painted bright vermilion—sat at ninety-four percent of maximum scale. It trembled with every stroke of the deep high-pressure ram three hundred feet below them in the mountain core.
“Look at the needle, Ivara,” Morn said, his voice dropping into a harsh, urgent whisper. “Look at the curve. This isn’t an office secret anymore. This is physics. The quartz block has absorbed four thousand three hundred and eighty days of sky-high noon. The energy doesn’t fade. It doesn’t decay. It compresses. It changes phase. It isn’t light anymore. It’s a high-thickness star-fire held in place by seven magnetic anchors.”
Ivara leaned forward despite the painful fire in her out-of-joint wrist, squinting through the green quartz slit in the floor.
In the depths of the pit below, suspended within a huge cage of lead-shielded copper bus-bars, the quartz collector hung like a blazing bright heart. It was no longer the see-through six-sided prism that the Survey Office had installed twelve years ago. It had turned a solid, pulsing violet, swelling like an infected lung within its bronze holding collars. The surface of the stone was covered in tiny shock-fissures that shed tiny. It spat sparks of purple light every time the…
