The chamber at the top of the black bronze pillar contained no furniture, no fire bowls, no wall tapestries, and no lamps. It was a circular vault of dressed gray mountain granite twenty paces across. Its walls curved inward overhead like the inside of a beehive kiln. At the very apex of the dome, fifteen feet above the floor, the stonework didn’t close into a keystone. Instead, an upright stone tube no wider than the shaft of Ilyra’s spear pierced straight through the roof to the open winter night.
Through that spear-width sky-slit fell a narrow, razor-sharp metal tube of starlight and a draft of mountain wind so cold that a thin rime of white hoarfrost coated the center of the floor. Every few seconds, a few dry ice crystals drifted down through the hole, glinting like salt in the starlight before settling on the shoulders of the woman who sat cross-legged directly beneath the opening.
Nara Soth sat inside a circular thicket of dark, matte-iron needles that rose from the stone flags around her knees, hips, and shoulders like the bristles of a winter hedge.
For eleven years at Ash Reed, whenever Seyun had passed the outer ancestor pavilion or cleaned the frames in the guest hall, he had seen how sects painted legendary fighters of the high realms. In temple scrolls, a master who had crossed Jade into the fifth realm of Crown was always depicted with smooth, unlined fine china skin, jet-black hair untouched by winter, and…
