The heavy obsidian blast doors of Sector Zero retreated into the bedrock with a deep, grinding groan.
Claire Vance stepped across the threshold, her white silk robes catching the dim amber luminescence of the vault. Sera Thorne walked half a pace behind her, the silver tip of her Storm-Pike held ready, while Deacon Vane followed with four armed clerks and a brass lantern.
The vault stretched for half a mile beneath the northern buttresses of the citadel.
Towering aisles of black iron shipping crates rose thirty paces toward the vaulted stone ceiling. Each container was bound in cold-iron bands and stamped with the unmistakable five-pointed wax crest of Seven-Tower City.
In the center of the vast cavern, a massive industrial grinding mill dominated the floor.
Colossal obsidian rollers, each the size of a warship’s hull, churned inside a reinforced bronze basin. As the rollers turned, thousands of unrefined spirit stones and mineral tributes were crushed into coarse powder.
A sickly gray haze seeped from the mill’s exhaust vents.
It carried a bitter, metallic stench that made Deacon Vane’s eyes water and cough into his sleeve. It was the unmistakable odor of condensed Pill-Poison, distilled from hundreds of continental alchemical furnaces and tribute shipments over the span of centuries.
