When the huge bulk of the Celestial Sovereign settled directly over the central mountain capstone, all light was banished from the sky.
The roaring inferno of the spirit-burners died away into a sullen, rhythmic thrum. In its place fell a darkness far more terrifying than the natural night—a cold, metal eclipse that swallowed the horizon from east to west. Four leagues of riveted brass and star-fallen iron hung suspended just one hundred and twenty arm-lengths above the granite crags. It cast a shadow so total that even the glowing spray of the sea went black beneath its belly.
The sheer physical mass of forty-two million tons hanging in low hover exerted a huge gravity depression upon the mountain peak. The air beneath the ship was tightly packed into a dense, stale cushion smelling of stale machine-oil, copper melted rock waste, and cold iron. Bird flocks fleeing the polar coast plummeted into the sea, crushed by the sky down-draft.
Then came the anchors.
With a sound like the tearing of copper sheets across the dome of the heavens, sixteen massive air-powered anchoring housings opened along the dreadnought’s centerline. Sixteen huge mooring claws, each forged from high-thickness silver-steel-hardened carbon-iron and measuring forty arm-lengths in length and eight arm-lengths in width, were driven downward into the mountain by explosive high-pressure pile-drivers.
