The freezing liquid entered the Chamber of Primordial Precedents through thirty brass water drops nozzles set into the high domed ceiling. It hissed like an army of coiled vipers.
It didn’t fall as mist. It poured down in dense, boiling white cascades of sub-zero vapor that rolled across the polished black glass floor plates like an avalanche of frozen milk. Within sixty seconds, the heat in the sealed round hall plunged fifty degrees below freezing. The air became so brittle, so devoid of moisture, that every breath Ren Vale drew felt as though crushed glass was being scraped across the ash-lined walls of his throat.
Frost bloomed across the black glass tiles in ferocious, jagged fractal ferns, creeping outward from the walls toward the central see-through quartz lens.
The twenty-foot astral thick parchment roll of the Crying Star Charter tightened in Master Ren’s hands, its gold-silver metal margins crinkling with the sharp, metal shriek of freezing silver. The Arch-Scroll-keeper stood rigid beside the pylon, his horn-rimmed monocle rimed with white frost, his heavy wool robes stiffening into rigid boards of icy cloth.
Ren dropped beside Mira on the see-through quartz floor.
He pulled his wool tunic off his back. He wrapped it around her shoulders, shielding her face with his body as the freezing vapor curled around their boots. His fingers were turning blue, the numbness creeping past his knuckles into his wrists, robbing him of the delicate tactile sensitivity he needed to wield his bone awl.
