The Chamber of Primordial Precedents didn’t look like any library Ren Vale had ever entered.
It was a huge circular round hall eighty yards across, paved with linked octagons of polished black glass that reflected the darkness like still, oil-slick water. There were no wooden shelves, no paper rolls, and no animal fat lanterns. The air was high-pressure, bone-dry, and freezing cold. He carried a sharp, electric ozone scent that made the hairs on the back of Ren’s arms prickle with static tension.
In the center of the round hall, suspended twelve feet above the black glass floor inside a ball-shaped cage of humming silver frozen stillness wires, hung the prize they had bled across four levels to find. The master, unredacted main codex of the Crying Star Charter.
The document was not an ordinary thick parchment roll. It was twenty feet of thick, rainbow-bright parchment that seemed to be spun from crushed starlight and beaten silver leaf. It floated horizontally in the air, slowly rotating within the frozen stillness sphere. Its margins glowed with a cold, pulsating violet-white soft glow that lit up the entire chamber.
“Look down,” Mira whispered.
Her voice was hushed. He carried that clear, double-toned crystal-clear chime that set the black glass floor plates humming in sympathy.
