For forty moons, the northern world had known only the black surf of the drowned deep pit and the cold, unbending twilight of the polar winter.
The sun that had once warmed the ancient continents had been put out in the elder cataclysm, leaving the shattered sky shrouded in permanent strata of rotten-egg clouds and frozen ash. To the ten million souls sheltered within the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues, morning had ceased to exist as an event of the heavens. It persisted solely as a shift of lanterns—the slow brightening of stone-oil wicks along the vaulted arcades at the change of each watch.
Yet at the third watch of the seventeenth day, a terrifying dawn broke across the frozen crags of the mountain.
The phenomenon possessed none of the gentle gold of a natural sun. It burst forth as a blazing bright, man-made inferno of blinding brass soft glow and scorched ozone that tore through the northern cloud deck with world-ending fury.
Four leagues in length and a full league across its armored beam, the sky dreadnought Celestial Sovereign had ignited its main sky steadying burners. To arrest its descent and lock its monstrous bulk into low hover, the flagship boiled away and ignited forty thousand barrels of hyper-refined spirit-oil every minute through its belly pipe hubs. The resultant heat updraft blew away the polar gale like dry leaves before a fire, creating a roaring heat column three leagues wide that heated the outside air to nearly three hundred…
