To touch the flank of the Void-Giant beast was to touch the cold, unburied corpse of an iron great realm.
The armor plates covering its segmented ribs were each twelve arm-lengths broad and four feet thick, cast from a brutal, leaden alloy of void-iron and melted rock waste that bore the crude hammer-marks of Zhu Heling’s clockwork foundries. Encrusting the plates were millions of stone-hard void-barnacles, their razor-edged iron valves clicking in an agitated, rhythmic chatter that shook through Qiao Ming’s coral-jade palms as he brought himself within arm’s reach of the monster’s hide. The beast smelled of rancid machine grease, scorched coal-dust, and the ancient sour rot of stale ballast-water that had festered in darkness for ten thousand seasons.
Between the armor plates, the articulation seams were sealed with thick, black cords of stringy void-kelp and curdled thick tar. Every time the Giant beast drew breath to vomit its bile into the Well, these seams swelled by two inches, revealing the underlying skeletal framework. Stone-hard dragon-ribs bound together by massive bronze studs the size of millstones.
The Giant beast’s hide was an unholy museum of slaughtered fleets. Embedded in the void-iron plating were the shattered figureheads of pre-flood royal flagships, the bronze gun-ports of siege engines. The hardened navigational compasses of three hundred sunken expeditions. Zhu Heling had dredged the deep-sea dead-zones of the outer void, binding the iron detritus of fallen kingdoms with his own stone-hard bile to create an armor of pure, piled up historical spite. On…
