Entry hall 865 was the grand portal through which the ancient kings passed when their empires drowned.
The Arch of the Drowned Pillars was not carved from ordinary stone. It was formed from forty-eight massive stone columns of black hypersthene, each fifty arm-lengths in width and two hundred arm-lengths tall. He rose in twin rows of stone pillars that framed an avenue wide enough for eight sea-galleons to sail abreast. The stone was dark as midnight velvet, polished to a mirror finish that reflected no lamps, for it absorbed the light of torches and returned only the cold, distant shimmer of the sky star-patterns engraved upon its fluted facets. Each column was inscribed with the names of three hundred drowned dynasties, cut into the rock in ideograms so ancient that the grammar looked like the branching of sea-ferns.
Qiao Ming stepped across the threshold, his bare feet meeting the floor of the Axis Mundi.
The stone beneath his soles was seamless star-black glass. There were no joints, no mortar-seams, and no chisel-marks. For twelve leagues in every direction, the floor of the world stretched out as a single, unbroken sheet of fiery glass, cooled during the ancient consolidation of the First Cosmos. The surface was perfectly level—not by human grading, but by the gravity balance of the planet’s core. Walking upon it felt like treading upon the surface of an infinite, frozen ocean of black oil. But the glass possessed a tiny tooth that gripped the calloused skin of his…
