The ascent along the heavy dark metal cable was a journey through the stonework of a nightmare.
Seventy-four yards of braided metal hung suspended between the solid granite flat stone slabs of Cloud-Rest and the trembling iron belly of the Vitreous Giant beast. With every foot Ren Vale climbed, his Exclusion Axiom hammered his mind with brutal, disorienting fury. The open sky above and beneath him was not merely empty air. To his senses, it was a crushing high-pressure void. A bottomless deep pit waited to swallow his existence whole.
His boots kicked against the cable with clockwork regularity. Slide the bronze ascender. Kick the heel loop. Hear the cam lock with a sharp, reassuring click. Pull.
His hands, clad in thick sheepskin mittens smeared with animal fat, trembled against the cold metal. Looking down was suicide, but his eyes betrayed him once, darting toward his boots. Below him, the castle courtyard was shrinking into a tiny diorama of wet stone and scurrying figures. He could see Master Kroll by the storage tank. He looked like an overturned beetle, and Mira standing beside the bronze collar, her violet dark shape streaming steady, crystal-clear warmth. Beyond the low roof wall lay the four-thousand-foot upright plunge of the Cloud-Cleft canyon, churning with white sulfur fog. The sheer emptiness under his feet made his stomach heave with violent nausea.
