The upper gallery of the abandoned Sluice Museum smelled of dry cedar shavings, aged beeswax, and sixty years of undisturbed museum dust. Built two hundred years earlier to display the original wooden scale models of the First Sluice, the long, box-shaped hall was lit up not by smoking animal fat torches, but by the soft, emerald soft glow of twelve thousand lantern beetles clustering along the carved sandstone top stone ledge.
Eren Tal stood at the center of the gallery, his woolen shirt drenched with sweat despite the chilly draft, his boots firmly planted on the wide, plain pine floorboards. In his hands he held a heavy iron crank-lever. It used his massive shoulder leverage to turn the brass screw of an eight-inch ash timber jack wedged beneath the central roof purlin.
Creak... Groan... Thunk.
The seasoned ash prop settled into place, taking twenty tons of roof weight off the sagging tie-beam.
“Give it another quarter-turn, Dan!” Eren roared, his knuckles white around the iron lever. “I want four tons of preload on this ash screw before we let the jack take the live deadweight! If this timber settles half an inch while the team is running copper wire along the rafters, the whole ceiling will sag into our hair!”
