The promontory of the Pre-Gloom Primordial Forge ended at a sheer drop of black air.
Two hundred paces ahead, spanning the vast deep gap between the mantle fault and the deep pit, lay the Great Basalt Causeway.
It was an ancient earth-shaking bridge formed during the First Epoch. Just then, the planet’s crust was still young and cooling. Five hundred paces long, forty paces wide, and sixty paces thick, the huge dark rock span arched across the stygian deep gap like the stone-hard spine of a giant beast.
For ten thousand years, the rotting gloom of the underworld had seeped into the stone.
The dark rock was no longer clean rock. It was soaked with hardened specter-marrow and stone-hard dragon-vein melted rock waste. That turned the entire five-hundred-pace bridge into a solid, rotting barricade that radiated foul, numbing frost.
Deep beneath the span, ten miles down, the black rotting magma hissed and gurgled.
An Ni led the wagon forward, halting the two mountain mules fifty paces back from the edge. The beasts snorted, stamping their iron-shod hooves against the glass-fused diamond-slate.
She stepped to the cliff edge and shielded her eyes against the rising thermals.
