The shift from the iron castle of the Sunder-Gate to the Inner Safe halls of Entry halls 851 through 950 was marked by a total absence of sound.
Here, the roaring impacts of the outer void ceased to exist. The walls were not made of metal or quarried cut stone. They were carved from massive stone blocks of solid, semi-clear selenite and pale Iceland spar, whose linked crystal-clear planes aligned the surrounding light into soft, milky halos. In this innermost core of the Ark Nadir, the laws of terrestrial physics did not operate by brute clockwork pushback. They were anchored by five ancient statues. Giant statues eighty arm-lengths tall, sculpted not in the likeness of mortal men or royal judges, but as the archetypal embodiments of the First Universe: Light, Mass, Time, Love, and Death.
These stones had been gathered from the ancient bedrock before the sky high sky was broken. In those pre-deluvian ages, the laws of nature had not been abstract exact equations written on paper. They were physical, stone presences that could be touched, sounded, and measured with a lead line. The First Builders had carved these five monuments to serve as the master pendulums of the cosmos, ensuring that if the heavens dissolved, the deepest constants of reality would remain anchored within these selenite vaults. Each crystal facet had been polished with diamond dust and cooled in freezing liquid to prevent heat warping.
