A house could have an unmoving foundation, but if the roof leaked, the house would rot.
The five-hundred-ton Harmonic Core was mechanically locked to the iron-hard metal collar at Mile Twenty. But three miles above the Spire’s apex, the roof of the world remained torn.
The cosmic rift—a jagged, three-hundred-mile fissure in the upper mesosphere that had bled flat corruption, void beasts, and disaster tides into the mortal world since the Founding Age—still twitched against the stars like an open, bleeding wound.
Until that sky tear was hermetically sealed, the continent remained an open vessel exposed to the freezing breakdown of the outer void.
Cosmic heat wave continued to bombard the upper stratosphere, breaking atom-deep oxygen and invisible the upper cloud decks.
Giles Croft looked down through the open grating of the central running pulpit.
Twenty miles below, the vast skeleton of the Spire dropped like a needle of steel and light through the cloud layers.
Every level strut, every cross-brace, and every riveted gusset plate was carrying the huge static and dynamic loads of an anchored world.
