The deep-sea foul fog boiling out of the Void-Rift was not ordinary smoke.
It was a dense, oily, pitch-black vapor that smelled of rotting copper, sulfur, and cosmic oblivion.
The cloud rolled across the track ballast of the central switching yard. Then, the autumn grass along the ditches shriveled and blackened into crisp flakes.
A tendril of the dark vapor touched the polished steel web of a rail. Each time, the iron hissed softly, pitting with tiny acid lesions.
High in the swirling shadows above the rift, Shadow-Archon Malanthir hovered upon a throne of woven human bones.
His black silk robes billowed like raven wings in the supernatural draft, his pale, withered face split by a cruel, triumphant sneer.
“Cry, mortal builders,” Malanthir’s voice whispered through the gloom, cold and ancient as tomb stone. “Breathe the breath of the Void. Your iron will rot. Your lungs will fill with liquid shadow. Not one stone of Haven-Hold shall remain upon another.”
Down on the switching apron, Earlier in the week, Giles and Master Borin had inspected the outward-pulling fan impellers in the clockwork shops of Haven-Hold.
