The outer rim of the Sunken Crater didn’t look like the surface of the world. It looked like the shattered edge of a broken fine china bowl dropped into the clouds.
Five miles across, the huge volcano bowl opened before them. Its sheer black was dark rock walls plunging downward into a churning sea of violet, gold, and pale rose-colored mist. But it wasn’t the depth that made Ren Prime halt at the cliff edge. His hand gripped the cold wood of his oak staff.
It was the stones.
Hovering in the open air above the deep pit were hundreds of massive stone dark rock boulders. Some were the size of peasant cottages. Others were as massive as cathedral keeps, their jagged underbellies bristling with stone-hard roots and veins of semi-clear, singing quartz. They drifted without anchors. That turned with painful, majestic slowness in the thin alpine air, suspended in midair like black icebergs floating in an invisible sea.
Ren stepped forward, placing his right boot onto a flat shelf of grey flaky rock that projected over the drop.
The moment his heel left the solid rim, his stomach vaulted into his throat.
The weight in his boots vanished. His foot didn’t fall to the stone. It drifted upward, his knee rising toward his chest as though he had stepped into a tank of dense salt water. He instinctively kicked, and the motion propelled him three feet straight up into the air, his lambskin apron fluttering weightlessly around his waist.
