The glow in the ice-slow mirror was an inverted sea of fire hanging beneath a deep pit of black stone.
Across the vast expanse of the Glacial Nave, the star-sapphire floor—polished to sight perfection by the tidal waters of the First Epoch—mirrored the blazing bright storm raging forty arm-lengths above. Every jagged fissure in the dark rock dome, every jet of yellow sulfur gas. Every molten drop of falling iron melted rock waste was duplicated with flawless clarity upon the dark blue crystal beneath Qiao Ming’s bare feet. He stood as though suspended between two colliding worlds: an upper hemisphere of clockwork fury and a lower hemisphere of starlight calm.
High above, the clockwork assault had reached its zenith. Zhu Heling’s four drill stems were driving downward with six hundred and eighty sea-weights of high-pressure thrust. The backup shafts—Beta, Gamma, and Delta—were grinding into the outer edge stone props of the vault, their star-iron teeth cutting wide nested grooves to strip away the lateral support of the dome. The screech of diamond cutting stone was a nonstop, ear-splitting scream that shook through the marrow of the water mapper’s bones and made the brass rings on his instruments hum like struck tuning forks.
