In the eight hundred and ninety-first entry hall, at the exact geographic nadir of the Axis Mundi, the underground universe experienced the complete and terrifying cessation of motion.
For ten thousand nonstop years, the four-hundred-and-eighteen-second breathing cycle of the First Sovereign had governed the underground world beneath the four drowned continents. Every four minutes, the huge chest of star-black glass had swelled. He lifted the land-wide shelf three point one seven five tiny fractions of an inch with earth-shaking patience, before exhaling through the high ice-slow spillways to settle the bedrock back into its hadal cradle. That slow, titanic breathing had been the solitary heartbeat known to forty leagues of dark water, the silent rhythm that kept the mountain peaks above from shearing off their roots and tumbling into the oceanic trenches.
Now, without warning or shudder, that eternal breathing stopped.
It was neither an interruption caused by clockwork seizure nor the ragged pause of tiredness. It was the deliberate, sovereign apnea of a deep-sea diver pausing at the bottom of a fathomless trench before turning his upward gaze toward the light. The huge chest of the seated giant statue froze exactly at mid-spreading. The sixty-four thousand internal channels, which had been humming with thirty-two cycles of ice-slow breath flow, halted their high-pressure flow within a single split second. The dark water in the Heart-Vein Sluice did not splash or ripple. It turned as flat and hard as a slab of polished green beryl.
