The final bridge was a single beam of fiery dark rock, two handspans wider than a man’s shoulders, thrown across a deep pit of lightless starlight ice.
Entry hall 848 was known in the ancient charts as the Narrow Isthmus of the Void. Here, the floor of the Glacial Nave ceased entirely, falling away into a transverse rift five hundred arm-lengths deep that isolated the central island of Empress Yan Huaisu from the outer plains. Spanning this gulf was a single massive stone beam of black dark rock, three hundred paces long, barely an arm-length and a half in width, balanced upon two soaring pylons of star-fallen iron that rose from the bottom of the deep gap.
Through the gap between the pylons roared the Cryo-Gale of the Absolute Nadir.
It wasn’t a wind born of sun and cloud. It was a gravity rising heat draft, generated by the huge thickness of the freezing air sinking toward the lower ballast drain pits. The draft roared vertically upward through the rift. It screamed with the ear-splitting shriek of fifty iron sirens, carrying a heat of ninety-four point eight degrees below zero.
Yet along the top of the dark rock beam, a thin, miraculous ribbon of warmth persisted.
