The absolution of the drowned does not arrive through words. It arrives through the sound deep ring of awakened stone.
As the black glass diving bell climbed through the nine-hundred-and-twentieth fathom. It walked into the underwater rows of stone pillars of Entry halls 925 through 915, the external water column underwent a sudden, staggering sound transformation. The low, clockwork drone of the hoisting engine on the upper tier began to fade, swallowed by a deep, oceanic hum that rose from the drowned galleries on both sides of the upright shaft.
Qiao Ming rose from the cedar chest, stepping to the north viewport.
Through the faceted quartz pane, the blackness of the Hadal sea had dissolved into a ghostly, milky emerald twilight. Along the giant stone granite walls of the shaft, carved into seven tiers of recessed alcoves, sat hundreds of gray granite statues. They were the masters, astronomers, hydrologists, and scholars of the pre-flood world. The men and women who had climbed onto their stone stands during the First Era and drunk the turning to stone draught, trusting that the Mapmaker would wake up them upon dry land.
For two million seasons, they had rested in the freezing, stale dark, their stone eyes staring blindly into the silt.
