The Seventh Portal of Vault Zero didn’t possess keyholes, bolts, or high-pressure hinges.
It was a solid slab of cold-rolled iron-hard metal iron, three feet thick and sixteen feet high, fused seamlessly into the living black glass bedrock of Mount Khorat. The surface of the metal was smooth and dark as a frozen winter lake, save for the massive stone carving carved into the arched top door beam above the frame.
The letters were six inches tall, carried out in the severe, razor-edged uncial script of the First Imperial Dynasty.
They hadn’t been painted with ordinary pigment. They had been inlaid with Blood-Iron. An ancient spirit alloy of star-fallen iron and the distilled blood of the founding Archons. During the First Dynasty, the royal alchemists took the bright red blood of the twelve founding patricians, calcined it with starlight salts, and cast it into molten ore. The metal possessed an active genetic memory. It could sense the iron in the blood of anyone who stood before it.
As Ren Prime, Scribe Ren, and the sneaking team approached within five paces of the threshold, the dark inlay began to stir.
The letters smoldered with a dull, cherry-red glow.
A faint, high-pitched whine rose from the iron top door beam, like the sound of water being poured onto glowing coals. The air in the entry hall grew instantly dry, smelling of ozone, scorching marrow, and burnt blood.
