Three days had passed since the fall of the Lux Sovereign. The Sunken Crater had become a city of quiet glass.
The three hundred refugees from the Vulcan foundries and the low-city purges had not fled back to the freezing plains. There was no reason to leave. Here, four thousand feet beneath the howling blizzards of the Razor-Spires, the volcano bowl floor was a sheltered oasis of unending warmth and light.
They had transformed the grounded wreckage of the dreadnought into a thriving town castle.
Miners armed with heavy iron chisels had dismantled the ship’s lower brass plates. It used the metal to pave irrigation channels from the warm stone springs into the black sand terraces. The vessel’s massive steam boilers had been converted into communal bakehouses and grain mills, powered by the natural underground steam venting from the fiery fissures.
Women were hanging laundry from lines strung between the singing quartz trees, while children ran through the glades, their laughter echoing against the crystal trunks like silver bells.
At the center of the Glass Forest, perched upon an outcrop of smoky quartz overlooking the agate springs, sat Mira Vale.
She wore a clean wool tunic of undyed cream wool. Her hair was tied back with a strip of blue linen. In her left hand, pale, nimble, and warm, she held a needle of polished bone. On her left thumb rested her boxwood thimble. Across her lap lay a child’s linen smock that she was carefully embroidering with tiny violet…
