The peaceful quiet of the ancient writing hall didn’t last.
While Lin Xiao was still admiring the plush comfort of the green velvet reading chair and calculating how many barrels of sparkling plum wine they could ferment in the lower halls, a low, clockwork shudder traveled through the floorboards. The shaking rose from the deepest, shadowed nook at the southern terminus of the grand hall, far beyond the fifteen-story dark rock bookshelves.
It wasn’t the organic roar of a wild spirit beast, nor the blood-soaked battle cry of a demonic warlord. It was the horrific, shrieking friction of dry, dry, ungreased stone grinding against unbending metal. The painful sound of a giant clockwork joint being forced to turn through inches of stone-hard settled mud and hardened grit after ten thousand years of complete immobility.
THUD.
The gray flat stone slabs beneath their boots buckled upward by nearly three inches. Dust, dried mortar fragments, and crystal-clear flakes rained from the soaring ceiling arches as a huge high-pressure partition of massive stone dark rock slid slowly into the stone floor. It opened a shadowed vault eighty paces deep.
From the oppressive gloom of the inner sanctum, two glaring crimson lights ignited.
They weren’t warm, calm, or divine. They flickered with a violent, jagged, diseased scarlet radiance that cast ugly, blood-red shadows across the surrounding bookshelves and ancient scrolls. The air in the grand hall instantly grew stifling and cold, tainted by a foul, rancid stench like old iron soaked in stale swamp…
