They walked south along the stone-hard trunk for two miles, suspended in the middle air of the great upright deep gap.
The highway was fifty paces wide, arched gently along its centerline like the deck of a royal treasure ship. To either side, the rounded flanks of the ancient trunk dropped into the green twilight, flanked by massive guard-collars of hardened wood that had grown into natural low roof walls over uncounted hundreds of years. Far below them, three hundred deep-water lengths down through the emerald mist, lay the shadowy floor of the deep gap. Far above, the ceiling was lost in the warm, spore-laden clouds of the upper canopy.
The scale of the construction was staggering. These were not bridges thrown across a gorge by human masons. They were the main level roots of world-trees that had grown across the void before the sea was born, their wood stone-hardened so fully that they possessed the load-bearing strength of mountain ranges.
Here in the middle air hung the Sepulchers.
They weren’t built of mortared blocks or hollowed vaults of granite. Every hundred paces. There, the massive branch branched or formed a lateral knot, the ancient foresters had hollowed out vaulted alcoves directly into the heartwood of the living tree before the deluge. Within each nook, a figure sat in quiet repose.
