The ceiling did not hide the sky. It was the sky, frozen and held captive in thirty deep-water lengths of crystal.
When they crossed the threshold of Entry hall 780, the gloom of the lower rows of stone pillars dissolved into a vast, shimmering cathedral of blue radiance. The hall was two hundred paces wide and rose one hundred and twenty arm-lengths to a vaulted ceiling formed entirely from huge, linked lenses of glass-fused starlight ice.
These lenses were not flat panes. They were curved mirrors, ground with clean, steady care by the ancient water-scribes to capture the faint, diffuse light of distant galaxies and funnel it downward into the heart of the ship. Through the semi-clear medium of the ice, curtains of pale cyan, violet, and deep indigo aurora rippled and shifted in slow, silent waves. It cast long, liquid shadows across the polished dolerite floor.
And frozen inside the ice, suspended in unending flight forty arm-lengths above the floor, were hundreds of storm petrels.
They weren’t statues. They were the true birds of the ancient sea, caught in the sudden, flash-freezing of the third epoch thirty thousand years ago. Their white-tipped wings were spread wide, their dark eyes preserved as bright beads of black glass, their feathers lined up against an invisible wind that had ceased to blow before the mountains were born.
