The creature that breached the intake channel of Sluice Six didn’t look like an animal. It looked like a castle that had learned how to crawl.
It was a titanic glass-like decapod—the Goliath Shard-Shell—its monstrous shell thirty feet across, formed of linked plates of rainbow-bright, smoky quartz that refracted the torchlight into blinding sharp-angled sheets. Its eight walking legs were thick as bridge timbers, tipped with hardened stone talons that gouged three-inch furrows into the solid granite flat stone slabs.
From its thorax extended two huge pincer claws, each twelve feet long, capable of shearing a town water main in half with a single high-pressure snap.
The monster pulled itself into the water tank vault, water cascading from its many-sided shell like an oily waterfall.
Its two carriage-wheel eyes locked onto the three thousand refugees fleeing across the eastern ramp. It opened its level maw, releasing a high-pitched sound bellow that shook at such violent intensity that every glass pane within three hundred yards shattered into powder.
The blast wave hit the northern gallery like a physical hammer.
Ren Vale was knocked to his knees, his ears ringing with high, piercing agony as blood trickled from his left nostril. Beside him, Ren-the-Cinder curled into a tight ball on the flat stone slabs, clutching his ears and screaming into the sawdust.
