The cold echo of Sera’s vow still lingered between the basalt cliffs when the midday sky above the Star-Fall Archipelago went completely black.
Twelve real hours had passed in agonizing tension since Moros had descended to the volcanic shelf.
Now, at high noon on Day Eighty-Nine, the blazing tropical sun vanished behind a creeping wall of total darkness.
High above the clouds, a colossal shadow eclipsed the daylight.
It was not a storm cloud.
It was an artificial ring of black obsidian and soul-steel, spanning three hundred miles across the upper stratosphere.
The ancient orbital megastructure linked the highest sovereign peaks of the Star-Fall Sea to the outer void.
Down inside the canyon throat, five hundred thousand allied troops looked up from their barges in stunned silence.
