The steam channel ended in a huge arched portal that opened onto the casting floor of Entry hall 673. Here, in the Foundry of the Iron Monarchs, the scale of the Second Epoch reached its most terrifying and amazing expression. The cave was an underground deep pit four hundred paces across, domed with eight-sided iron caissons bolted into the solid mountain stone.
Suspended in the center of the hall from an overhead frame of riveted box-heavy beams was a royal casting ladle of monstrous proportions. Forged from layered plates of star-fallen steel lined with six inches of heat-proof zircon brick, the ladle was broad enough to hold four hundred tons of molten metal. It hung tilted at an angle of fifteen degrees, frozen in the act of pouring its charge into a huge casting pit excavated into the floor flags below.
From the lip of the ladle, a frozen clouded eye of rusted bronze and star-fallen iron hung suspended in mid-air. A solid, rainbow-bright tongue of metal three arm-lengths thick that reached halfway down to the casting pit before tapering into jagged stalactites. The molten metal had been cooled in an instant. Just then, the first freezing deluge broke through the high vents, solidifying the pour mid-stream into an eternal sculpture of arrested fire.
