In the Stone porch of Silent Waters, four leagues south and eight hundred arm-lengths below the belfry, the black salt water of Entry hall 001 began to boil with golden light.
The Patriarch of Seven Calamities sat eighty arm-lengths tall upon his squared cut-stone platform. For three hundred seasons, Qiao Ming had scraped the black mussels from the giant statue’s stone ankles with a flat copper hoe, washing the salt stains from his sculpted mantle with buckets of fresh cooled water drawn from the high water tanks. In all those years, the Patriarch had been an unmoving mountain of grey Pentelic marble—blind, deaf, and enduring the crushing weight of the rising tide with the stoic apathy of a dead world. The barnacles clinging to his stone toenails had lived and died in generation after generation of blind darkness. Their hardened shells formed thick, jagged encrustations that blurred the delicate carving of his sandals.
Now, as the sixteen-cycle pulse from the Great Acoustic Bell entered the water, the water around the Patriarch’s waist flared into blazing bright amber.
It wasn’t a surface glow. It came from deep within the crystal-clear grain of the marble itself. The micro-fissures within the stone, packed for thousand years with dormant solar marrow, began to discharge their stored potential. A soft, golden warmth diffused through the eighty-arm-length mass of stone, heating the cold salt water that swirled around his hips until thin ribbons of aromatic steam rose toward the coffered ceiling sixty arm-lengths above. The water…
