The watching bridge of the Lux Sovereign tumbled through the violet twilight of the Sunken Crater like an iron bird caught in an updraft.
Through the shattered quartz dome that formed the forward wall of the command deck, the landscape rolled in dizzying, upright sweeps. One second, the mile-high canopy of the Glass Forest filled the view. The next, the glowing, blazing bright sphere of the chained star rushed past. Then, the black dark rock cliffs of the upper rim tilted wildly across the horizon.
Because the warship possessed zero mass, there was no sound of tearing metal, no bone-jarring shaking. The ship floated in eerie, terrifying silence, save for the wild hiss of burst steam lines and the wild screaming of the four-legged brass exoskeleton clattering against the ceiling.
Ren Prime floated six feet above the dark wood floorboards, his oak staff held across his chest.
Opposite him, suspended from the dark wood rafters by his steel climbing claws, Grand Astromancer Vaelen Kael was weeping with rage.
“You have no power!” Kael shrieked, his bald scalp blazing with golden astrological tattoos that cast wild, jittering shadows across the ceiling. “I’m the Arch-Hierophant of the Seventh Sun! I hold the charter of forty provinces! You’re an unlicensed gutter-scribe who belongs in a lime-pit!”
