The shaking in the floor of Entry hall 015 was not felt by the ear. It was felt in the marrow of the shinbones.
Entry hall 015 was the Threshold Portal. A massive transitional hall six hundred paces long. It was flanked by seventy-two huge statues of the Law-Weepers, ancient Tier-2 stone-hard deities whose stone mantles were carved with the forgotten legal registers of the drowned heavens. Beyond this entry hall lay the wide, dry, barren drainage courtyards of Entry halls 016 through 080—the chosen safe hall where ten million refugees could be settled safely above the tidal line.
Yet at the very center of the threshold, blocking the processional avenue, the Jade Court had deployed their ultimate heavy-duty engine: the Gold-Bore Spire.
It was a towering, sixty-arm-length spire of beaten brass and load-bearing iron, supported by four high-pressure outriggers spiked eight feet deep into the ancient granite flags. Suspended from its central derrick was a massive upright drill column, three paces in width, tipped with thousands of revolving astral diamond teeth. Driven by a high-pressure potion-made steam engine that hissed like an enraged serpent, the spire was drilling into the bedrock at eight hundred and twenty revolutions a minute.
