The shadow of the Lux Sovereign didn’t fall like ordinary darkness. It fell like an eclipse of burning brass.
Two hundred feet above the black glass floor of the volcano bowl, the seven-hundred-foot dreadnought held its position on screaming steam thrusters. The sheer, overwhelming bulk of the warship blocked the violet soft glow of the Glass Forest. It cast the tiered arena into a twilight of hot, rotten-egg haze. Around its armored hull, eighteen solar turbines churned the air, sending waves of white-hot draft rolling across the black sand like desert siroccos.
At the bow of the dreadnought, a massive hatch of cold-rolled steel ground open with a screech of shearing gears.
From the vessel’s belly dropped the Primary Siphon Array.
It was a heavy-duty monstrosity that made the stationary ground pumps look like toys. Four massive high-pressure drill-rams, each eighty feet long and tipped with spiral heads of diamond-cut star-quartz, dropped on thick chains of cast iron. Flanking the drills were twelve high-pressure copper drain tube-lines, their intake mouths gaping like the lamprey-mouths of iron sea-monsters.
Mounted upon the dreadnought’s open command bridge. He stood at the brass rail with his stitched golden mantle whipping in the turbine backwash, stood Grand Astromancer Vaelen Kael.
