Across the two leagues of stone-hard liquid silver in Entry hall 894, the three huge drilling platforms of the Sovereign Conclave met their total clockwork total ruin.
It wasn’t fire that dismantled the great machines. Fire had been exhausted when the boilers collapsed. It was the nonstop, unrelenting application of ten mountain-crushing pressure of outward gravity ballast streaming from the footstool of the First Sovereign. The iron rigs, which had towered eighty arm-lengths above the liquid lake for four decades like defiant iron citadels, were subjected to shear loads that exceeded forty thousand metric tons per square arm-length.
The massive support legs, forged from four-inch layered steel plate and braced with cross-hatched angle-iron, yielded first.
With a series of low, bone-shaking groans that shook through the bedrock like underwater depth charges, the main tubular wooden support posts buckled outward. The load-bearing joints, held together by thousands of hot-driven steel rivets, suffered instant shear failure. Rivet heads snapped off in rapid, rattling volleys, bouncing harmlessly off the frozen liquid silver floor before being pinned down by their own amplified mass. The iron heavy beams bowed, twisted into painful spiral parabolas, and flattened toward the silver plain.
The central overhead frame towers, sixty arm-lengths high, followed the collapse of their foundations.
