As the final surge of rust-colored fire steam roared out through Daro’s carved stone groove and faded away against the barren outer retention wall, the oppressive Jade-scale pressure crushing the treatment courtyard vanished between one breath and the next. In the center of the shattered basin, the eight-foot knot of white-hot limestone and screaming vapor shuddered from crest to root. Deprived of the foreign test-needle return loop that had been forcing its channels to clench in self-defense, the Mineral Spring Guardian lost its rigid battle shape.
The linked slabs of sulfur-veined rock unknotted without a final explosion. It slid gently back down into the flooded water tank. Meanwhile, the towering plumes of scalding white vapor cooled into a soft, ankle-high mist smelling of clean mountain rain and warm chalk. Beneath the twisted iron drainage grates, the natural four-beat pulse of Ash Reed’s earth-heat vein resumed its steady, ancient rhythm. Unbroken, uncorrupted, and alive. That was because the people standing around its rim had refused to kill its center to stop its rage.
Nobody cheered. The treatment courtyard looked as though a siege engine had been fired inside a walled garden. The wooden porch of the sick room was a heap of splintered cedar posts. Half the flat stone slabs around the central basin were tilted or cracked. Three overturned straw pallets floated in puddles of warm stone mud. And twelve smashed casks of requisitioned ash lay scattered across the lower steps like drifts of grey snow.
