The avenue opened into Entry hall 582, a huge circular nave half a league across, where forty-eight titan-sized elders of the Verdant Epoch sat assembled in an unbroken ring of silent communion.
They were eighty arm-lengths tall, hewn from ancient hardwood trunks that had stone-hard into a dense, violet-black timber as heavy as cast iron. Each patriarch sat cross-legged upon a raised dais of living root-burl, their broad hands resting flat upon knees the size of temple altars. But what made the breath falter in the chest was their hair and beards. They weren’t sculpted with chisels, but formed of thousands of thick, stringy aerial roots that cascaded from their stone scalps and jaws. They plunged forty yards to the floor to braid into the very foundations of the earth.
These root-beards were not dead. They were living load-bearing columns. Each stringy cable was as thick as a man’s waist, crusted with pale green glowing lichen and dripping with slow, rhythmic beads of sweet vegetative sap that fell into stone water tanks carved between their feet.
The circular round hall possessed a sound perfection that was staggering. The vaulted ceiling, formed by the convergence of thirty-two massive world-tree boughs, curved eighty arm-lengths overhead like the dome of an inverted sky. Every drop of sap hitting the water tanks sent a clear, liquid chime echoing across the vast floor, blending into a nonstop, hypnotic rhythm that measured the passage of underground time.
