The duel for Vault Zero transformed the black glass chamber into a butcher shop of warped shape.
The six junior calligraphers bent over their dark wood desks. Then, their styluses moving in timed together, rhythmic frenzy, they began scribing nonstop amendments to the stone-built deeds of the central deep gap.
The physical world groaned in protest.
Beneath Ren Prime’s boots, the ten-foot-wide black glass narrow high walkway shuddered wildly. Overhead, the massive bronze mid-air chains shrieked as their tension doubled, shedding flakes of green rust into the dark. The stone beneath them didn’t crack. It squeezed.
With a sickening screech of protesting stone matter, the edges of the walkway curled inward like dry paper touched by flame. Within three seconds, the ten-foot span shrank to six feet, then four feet, then narrowed to a precarious, knife-thin ledge barely eighteen inches wide, suspended fifty feet above the deep pit. Gravity itself began to warp. He pulled at an unnatural thirty-degree angle toward the northern wall, threatening to pitch them over the brink into the darkness below. Looking down, the sight perspective twisted wildly. The bottom of the deep gap seemed to rush upward. Meanwhile, the ceiling pulled back into an impossible, infinite pinnacle.
