In the ancient records of the First Scribes, it was written that when the world was finished, the master builder broke his measuring tablet into two pieces: one to seal the throne, and one to guide the steward.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood before the recessed socket cut into the left armrest stone base of the Obsidian Throne in Entry hall 878. The socket was three feet above the jade stone floor, carved into the star-black glass with such care that its inside surfaces were smooth as frozen oil. Inside the cavity, the stone was pale green jade, bearing the exact jagged contour of a broken fracture line across its center. For ten thousand years, that fracture had waited in the dark, open to the hadal drafts, waiting for its other half to return from the lightless outer reaches.
Yan Zhiqiu held the Broken Slate before her, her hands trembling slightly from the huge weight of the pooling sound energy. The slate had accompanied her family through six hundred years of flight, poverty, and sect persecution. Its corners were chipped from falls during winter migrations, its surface stained with the sweat of ages of keepers, but its core remained pure, dense, and alive. Her grandfather had carried it in his carpenter’s box, wrapped in greased pigskin to keep out the salt damp. Her mother had sewn it into the lining of her winter coat during the long marches across the frozen steppes. And Yan Zhiqiu had held it against…
