The Seventh Pillar of Entry hall 055 was not merely a stone-built support; it was a huge deep-rock anchor.
Standing forty paces in width and eighty arm-lengths high, the massive column was carved from a single natural intrusion of dark green snake-like banded with veins of black dark rock. It bore the crushing load of three entire residential courtyards—Entry halls 054, 055, and 056—supporting four hundred thousand tons of vaulted cut stone ceiling beneath which half a million refugees had set up their living bays.
At the second hour after dawn, a total shudder ripped through the pillar.
High on the outer castle walls four hundred arm-lengths above, a heavy siege dreadnought of the Golden Sovereign Fleet had discharged a super-heavy air-powered giant crossbow. Designed for deep-mine penetration, the weapon had fired a five-foot heavy dark metal-iron penetrator dart. Striking through a narrow air-flow chimney, the dart had punched eighty arm-lengths down into the inside and embedded itself forty feet above the floor directly into the heart of the Seventh Pillar.
The dart was not inert. Powered by a tightly packed spirit-crystal core embedded in its tail, the heavy dark metal-iron projectile was shaking at twenty-four thousand cycles a second—a high-pitched hum designed to shatter the crystal-clear lattice of snake-like and induce total shear failure.
