The earth-shaking groan that echoed from the floor of the Stygian Basin was not the rattle of crumbling stone. It was the sound of bedrock snapping under five hundred years of relieved pressure.
Ren Vale gripped the gold-silver metal handrail of the lead balance bowl. His knees bent to absorb the violent, upright shudder that surged up through the ninety-pace dark rock balance beam. Beside him, Mira caught his arm, her smoky quartz fingers biting into the fabric of his sleeve with unbending strength. Across the three-mile expanse of the cave, the four massive aqueducts that fed the Stygian clouded eye began to shudder wildly, spraying plumes of black spray into the violet mist.
“Off the scale! Now!” Lord Ren’s command rang out from the limestone bridge pillar with the clear power of a general ordering an emergency retreat. “The anchoring pylons are shearing! The pivot point won’t hold a dynamic ground-shaking load!”
Artificer Ren was already racing along the narrow top edge of the dark rock beam, his leather tool-roll flapping against his thigh, his brass measuring tongs clutched tightly in his fist. “The star-iron pivot point needle is intact. But the dark rock bed beneath the northern pier is flaking off! Hairline fractures are propagating along the First Epoch bedding planes at twelve paces per second! If the beam drops into the clouded eye, the mid-air chains will whip across the terrace like steel threshing flails!”
