The Zenith Arch was a natural bridge of black fiery dark rock, twenty yards wide and four hundred yards long, spanning the open void two thousand feet above the glowing volcano bowl floor.
Six hundred years of ground-shaking friction had cracked its stone spine. But the ancient Builders had heavy the span with massive staples of sky brass and iron tension rods. That turned the arch into the main watching gallery of the Sunken Crater.
The barge St. Mira drifted to a halt fifty paces from the southern bridge pillar of the bridge, held in a stable hovering position by Apostate Ren’s nearby counter-mass field.
On the narrow crown of the stone archway, surrounded by the smoking wreckage of her twin-hulled command skiff, stood Arch-Inquisitor Lyra Sola.
She was alone. Her four surviving acolytes had fled across the span or plummeted into the violet mist below. Her silver-leaf cuirass was dented, her white silk robes scorched black by the deflected sun-shot. Her right hand clutched a shattered three-foot crystal dress sword whose tip buzzed with dying, uneven amber sparks.
Yet she didn’t retreat.
She stood at the center of the bridge, her back straight as an iron lance, the crimson silk blindfold across her eyes fluttering in the rising heat drafts.
