When the lower jaw of the Void-Giant beast dropped to purge the choking solar light, the sky-slit of its maw swelled to eighty-eight arm-lengths. It exposed the central world-size gear-train that drove the fourteen hundred dark rock millstones.
There, nestled behind the third cam-shaft. He turned the Primary Drive Spindle—a huge shaft of solid void-iron, six arm-lengths in width, fluted with helical grooves that passed forty thousand horsepower of deep water pressure from the beast’s tail to its jaws. Between the teeth of the drive-spindle, greasy black thick tar churned like boiling tar, throwing off clouds of toxic sulfur-steam that hissed against the cold aether.
Beneath the snout of the monster, thirty arm-lengths of exposed drive-machinery thrashed with total clockwork violence. Sixteen massive brass cam-shafts, each thick as an old cedar and turned by an internal water-pressure turbine powered by tightly packed void-bile, rocked back and forth within bronze pillow-blocks that shrieked from lack of grease. Every stroke of the cams drove the fourteen hundred dark rock millstones together with seventy thousand foot-pounds of shearing force. As the dark rock wheels turned, their diamond-hardened carbon-iron edges struck sparks of white, actinic fire that lit up the creature’s gullet. A throat wide enough to swallow a three-masted war junk whole, lined with nested rings of jagged iron hooks designed to shred the rigging of passing reality.
