The twenty-fourth bedrock pylon stood at the edge of the great northern salt flats.
It was a massive stone tower of heavy dark rock concrete, eighty feet in width. He rose one hundred feet above the blinding white crust of the dry lake bed.
Embedded within its crown sat the massive forged-steel end-post shoe of Node Twenty-Four.
Connected to this shoe was the final converging cluster of thirty-six silver-steel-aether struts. He dropped like the ribs of a sky vault from eighty thousand feet.
Across eighteen hundred miles of land-wide mountains and valleys, twenty-three other pylons stood in an unbroken three-sided chain. He waited for the final closure of the northern circuit.
Before climbing the pylon, Giles Croft walked the outer edge of the refugee encampment with Brigadier Kenneth Drake and Inquisitor Malric Ostrander.
Across ten square miles of the salt basin, two million people lived under canvas wall-tents arranged in rigid, numbered city blocks.
Every block was bordered by a gravel drainage swale and serviced by a raised timber water chute delivering five gallons per minute from the mountain aqueducts.
