The final hours of the Royal Storehouse of Yan-Luo were recorded in Yan Zhiqiu’s mind with the total, indelible care of diamond carved into black glass.
The peat fire in the salt-kiln was burning with a steady, quiet warmth, casting long, solemn shadows across the glow-stone bases as she completed her settling.
“The breach occurred on the fourth watch of the winter solstice,” she said, her voice regaining its steady, skilled rhythm. “Grand Elder Yue Feng did not come with an official decree or a court audit. He arrived with three hundred armored void-executioners and four heavy-duty void-borers—massive clockwork drills tipped with black diamond heads that could chew through thirty arm-lengths of heavy granite in an hour.”
Qiao Ming sat upon his stool, his soapstone pencil resting across the top of his slate workbook, listening with his whole being.
“They didn’t want the books of poetry,” she continued. “They didn’t want the tax registers or the treaties of peace. They had discovered that my father possessed the First Epoch Ark Blueprints—the true stone-built plans of the Nadir, which had been deposited in our vaults before the Great Flooding. The High Council was desperate. Their void-engines were failing. The spiritual energy of the stars was collapsing faster than their counts had predicted. And their escape arks were too heavy to break through the outer void-barrier without collapsing under their own mass.”
