Entry hall 251 was known in the ancient water-mapping logs as the Drydock of the Primordial Siphon.
It was a chamber of terrifying proportions: five hundred paces wide, three leagues long, and two hundred arm-lengths from the inverted keel beams to the bottom of the central canal. Here, during the final century of the First Universe, the master shipwrights had assembled the load-bearing spine of the Ark Nadir, fusing stone-hard black glass timbers with plates of soul-forged black bronze three feet thick. When the universal flood broke through the high sky, these shipwrights had refused to evacuate to the upper lifeboats. They had chained themselves to the keel blocks, allowing the molten bronze of the final welds to pour over their feet, turning to stone their bodies into eternal stone props. They chose to become the foundation rather than passengers upon a craft that might falter.
For ten thousand years, Entry hall 251 had remained sunk in total darkness beneath forty deep-water lengths of black salt water, bearing the entire water-pressure weight of the dying cosmos. The black bronze plates had rusted to a dull, velvety charcoal, crusted with dense layers of stone-hard tube-worms and hardened salt water sponges that muffled every sound. The huge crushing pressure of the outer ocean had pressed upon the hull day and night, waiting for a single rivet to fail or a single seam to gap.
