The change didn’t remain confined to the underground depths of the Obsidian Vault.
Like a tidal wave traveling through solid stone, the spirit blast wave of the ratified amendment ripped upward through eighty feet of bedrock, bursting into the marble rows of stone pillars, the office archives, and the crowded tenement quarters of Val-Khorat.
In the Great Registry of Deeds on the third terrace, three hundred clerks dropped their goose quills in terror as every volume of property ledgers on the twenty-foot cedar shelves began to flip pages at the same time. The sound was like the wings of a million startled pigeons. Names written in ancient black gall vanished beneath a sudden wave of pale, drying parchment. New lines of violet-black text emerged in their place, reallocating water rights, stone claims, and residential tenures across four hundred years of town records.
Two miles away, in the underground sanatoriums of the Southern Vitric Trust, the heavy lead-lined solitude doors didn’t unlock. They ceased to exist as barriers.
The iron sliding-bolts dissolved into soft, crumbling graphite. The heavy brass collars around the necks of two hundred sleeping crystal patients popped open with timed together, ringing clicks, falling harmlessly onto the wool blankets. Across their beds, patients in Stage 2 and Stage 3 turning to stone woke from years of induced coma. It took deep, clean breaths of air as the unending extraction drain tubes drained back into the storage vats and died.
