The underground water chute that plunged beneath the First Well was not an aqueduct of stone. It was an upright deep gap carved through a solid vein of smoky quartz five hundred paces wide.
Ren Vale, Mira, and Nomad Ren dropped the narrow spiral stair that wound around the outer edge of the shaft. Every twenty paces, massive crystal-clear struts as thick as cathedral pillars bridged the deep gap. It glowed with deep, shifting bands of amethyst, amber, and sky sapphire.
The heat rose with every yard of descent, but it wasn’t the choking, rotten-egg heat of the surface fumaroles.
It was a dry, ringing, pressure-sparking warmth that made the tiny hairs on Ren’s arms stand erect. A constant, low-hum—shaking at forty cycles a second—echoed through the marrow of his bones, so powerful that Ren could feel his heart adjusting its rhythm to match the underground pulse.
At the eight-hundred-foot level, the spiral stair ended upon an open, circular watching platform suspended over a huge underground lake of boiling stone salt water.
In the center of that vast, glowing cave hung the Heart of the Weeper.
It was a titanic, geodesic sphere of raw, many-sided smoky quartz forty paces in width, suspended in mid-air above the boiling lake by nothing more than the linked magnetic fields of three massive selenite pylons anchored into the cave walls.
