The silver wire coiled around the tip of Ren’s mammoth ivory awl bit half a tiny fraction of an inch into the cured grain of the thick parchment.
Beneath the polished tip, the liquid-gold script of the Great Solar Claim Promise seemed to pulse with sluggish, organic warmth. It wasn’t ordinary ink. It was a potion-made emulsion of powdered star-glass and sovereign animal fat, charged with high-hum ringing energy drawn from the dying core miles beneath the dark rock peaks. Every stroke of the High court uncials radiated a dry, feverish heat that caused the air above the cedar drafting table to ripple like water over hot coals.
Across the table, Chancellor Orin stood motionless. The gold-woven sleeves of his ritual vestments hung in rigid, tubular folds, fully hiding his frail wrists. Only his quartz-lens eyes moved, twin many-sided domes of ground crystal swiveling on delicate brass bezels, refracting the glare of the soaring glass prisms above.
“You hesitate, boy,” Orin murmured. His reedy voice carried the strange sound thickness of a royal judge accustomed to having his whispered commands carved into granite. “Don’t mistake the size of the choice for complexity. The math of survival is always simple. An empire of four million citizens needs thirty million heat units per diurnal cycle to prevent the frozen ground from reclaiming the lower river valleys. The dying star in the volcano bowl yields twenty-two million. The deficit is eight million.”
