The hall opened outward like the belly of a stranded giant beast.
Entry hall 265 was three hundred paces wide from east to west, its barrel vault supported not by single columns, but by huge flying stone props of black dark rock that sprang directly from the side walls, arching eighty arm-lengths through the gloom to lock into a central lengthwise spine of star-fallen iron. Along this vast nave, seated upon thrones of stepped hard speckled rock twelve arm-lengths high, sat twenty-four giant statues of the First Epoch.
Qiao Ming stood between the second pair of thrones, the cold water of the retreating tide swirling around his ankles like liquid slate.
Each of the twenty-four figures held a scepter.
These were not the fancy batons of the later dynasties, adorned with filigree wire and carved jade pendants. They were huge rods of forged star-fallen iron, thick as a man’s thigh and eight arm-lengths long, held upright between the two-handed grips of the seated kings. Tipped upon the summit of each rod was a jagged, irregular mass of glass-fused star-fire. The stone-hard physical leftover piece of ancient sky fire that had been seized and frozen into solid matter at the instant of the ancient deluge.
