Page twelve of the bronze ledger did not speak of the Ark. It spoke of the cosmos that was dying outside its hull.
Chen Yue had transcribed the sky-high observations brought down by the fleeing star-fleets, recording the death of galaxies with the cold, exact calm distance of a royal clerk:
The Southern Dipper has guttered out, the entry began. Seven stars of the third size, which had anchored the navigation of the astral seas for thirty thousand seasons, cooled into dark iron spheres within forty days. Their light turned from white gold to dull, smoky red, and then ceased entirely, leaving only a hole of total cold in the southern heavens.
The Great Withering is not an ordinary drought. It is the tiredness of the ancient fire.
When the ancient deluge drowned the lower worlds, the upper firmaments did not escape the balance. The heavens were starved of the dissolved Daos that rose from the continents. Deprived of the breath flow of spiritual moisture, the stars began to eat their own cores, burning through their sky fuel at ten times their natural speed.
Whole astral continents—realms where ten billion mortals lived upon floating plates of green jade—are breaking apart into clouds of freezing rubble. The great sect fortresses are drifting without power in the void, their heating engines choked with sulfur melted rock waste, their crews freezing into white statues within their silk robes.
