The scepter across the Empress’s knees was eight arm-lengths long and forged from black star-fallen iron that held the cold of the interstellar deep.
Its shaft was six-sided, three inches thick, engraved along all six facets with the complete water-mapping register of the Ark Nadir’s twelve outer floodgates. At its lower end-post was a heavy six-sided balance weight shaped like an eight-sided sounding plumb. At the same time, its upper crown ended in two coiling bronze dragon-flukes whose open jaws held a flat, box-shaped mounting plate.
In the center of that mounting plate. There, the royal seal of power should have rested, was a ragged, jagged fracture.
The iron had been cut across its grain by a sudden, deliberate shear ten thousand years ago. That left a jagged socket whose irregular, crystal-clear margins were cut with thirty-two tiny fracture facets. Each facet was sharp as broken flint, reflecting the azure lantern light in needle-sharp points.
Yan Zhiqiu stood two paces from the Empress’s knees on the cobalt terrace of the twelfth step.
The sheer scale of the statue towered over her mortal frame. The Empress’s knees were at the level of Yan Zhiqiu’s shoulders, her stone robes spreading outward in vast, sharp-angled cascades that looked like frozen ocean waves. Her face, twelve feet above them, was carved with an austere, massive beauty. High cheekbones, wide smooth brow, and eyes carved from two flawless spheres of deep blue star-sapphire that stared straight forward toward the southern horizon of the nave.
