The silence that followed the sealing of the First Cycle lasted one hundred and eighty thousand seasons.
In the unsealed memory of Qiao Ming’s soul, that vast gulf of time did not register as days or nights. It passed as the slow, barely noticeable sedimentation of white diatomaceous silt pooling upon the black glass skin of the Ark Nadir. Two miles beneath the surface of the unmoving, lightless aether sea, the vessel rested upon the coarse grey rock floor of the trench like a dormant giant beast carved from fiery glass. Inside the hull, the ten thousand stone statues slept in their alcoves, their dark rock brows cool, their stone lungs unmoving, while upon the high roof ledges, seventy ages of mortal refugees were born, grew old, scraped lichen from the damp arches, and died without ever seeing a single ray of sunlight.
Then, the amnesia had washed over him.
It was the law of the deep silt. The human brain was never built to endure more than eighty seasons of conscious memory. When a mortal lived beyond that span in the high-pressure dark of the lower tiers, the neural spirit veins hardened. It dissolved past identities into a gray, calm fog that smelled of wet slate and old well-water.
