The slaughter of the wardens was the final blood-price paid to purchase ten thousand years of silence.
The third light-projected projection rose from the Chancellery Altar. Then, the walls of Entry hall 850 were replaced by the very room in which they stood. Not bathed in calm starlight, but shadowed in the dim, emergency amber of failing power channels ten thousand years ago.
In the projection, twelve thousand four hundred Grand Wardens of the Yan-Luo Dynasty—dressed in ritual diamond scale-armor and bearing heavy star-fallen iron poleaxes—stood drawn up in defensive ranks around the twelve steps of the dais.
Behind them, seated upon the water-lily throne, sat Empress Yan Huaisu in the early stages of her turning to glass. Her living body slowly turned into see-through starlight diamond as she started the deep frozen stillness protocol.
And standing on the twelfth step, his hands drenched in oil and sweat, was Grand Chancellor Yan Wenhua.
“Look at my ancestor,” Yan Zhiqiu whispered, her fingers reaching out toward the phantom image of the ancient high judge.
Yan Wenhua was an old man with high cheekbones and fierce, sorrowful eyes that matched Yan Zhiqiu’s down to the line of his jaw. In his hands he held the original royal scepter, nine arm-lengths of black star-fallen iron crowned with the complete shale tablet of the Ark Nadir.
