The air in Entry hall 987 possessed the dry, stone stillness of an unsealed underground library that had stood untouched since the stars were young.
This cavernous chamber was chosen in the ancient navigational rolls of the First Epoch as the Vault of the Lower Sights. Unlike the functional plumbing halls, drainage drain pits, and scalding valve galleries they had left behind, its sheer walls were lined from floor to ceiling with towering cabinets of blackened cedar, each secured with bronze hasps and fitted with thousands of shallow drawers. Within those cedar drawers rested the sky heritage of twelve drowned great realms. Tens of thousands of charts inscribed upon the tanned parchment of deep-sea manta-rays, recording the lost star-patterns of the Southern Cross, the Sunken Crown, and the Seven Pillars of the Pre-Flood Sky.
In the center of the hall, raised upon an eight-sided podium of dressed white red stone, stood the Master Astrolabe of the Ninth Tier. A huge star-ring sphere of openwork bronze, nine arm-lengths in width, encompassing seven nested rings that mapped the ecliptic paths of forgotten sky spheres.
The Master Star wheel was turning in the dark.
It didn’t move with the majestic, measured pace of honest sky-high progression. Its heavy bronze rings were spinning with an uneven, jerky driving force, wobbling on their gimbals like a child’s whipped top whose balance had failed upon an uneven flat stone slab. With every revolution, the bronze teeth of the driving gears clicked with an irregular, agitated rhythm…
