The middle folios of the future ledger laid bare the terrible anatomy of the cycles.
Qiao Ming read by the steady light of his oil lamps, his bare feet pulled up onto the rung of his stool. His oilskin coat wrapped was tight around his shoulders against a chill that came from the center of his spirit. For four hours, he didn’t stir, his eyes moving across the dense columns of black silt-ink like a diver exploring the drowned hull of a royal flagship.
This was not the first book. It was Book Twelve.
On folio one hundred and twelve, his own future hand had written an extensive technical treatise titled: A Survey of the Preceding Inundations.
Let the reader know—though that reader will only ever be myself, when the water has washed my mind clean—that this is the twelfth time I have held the sounding lead in these galleries.
The Ark is a sky-high pocket watch of living stone. It was built at the dawn of the First Cosmic Epoch to preserve the deepest sharp-angled constants of existence when the sky high sky undergoes its periodic collapses. When the outer stars burn out, the cosmic ocean falls inward, crushing the outer realms into cold melted rock waste. Only the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues, anchored into the basal foundations of the void, resists the collapse.
