The giant stone ceiling of the Great Scroll hall didn’t simply crack. It blew up under the dropping weight of six thousand deep-water lengths of ocean and thirty thousand tons of Spire steel.
At six thousand deep-water lengths below the Southern Pelagic Sea, the surrounding deep water pressure was one thousand and fifty sea-weights—more than fifteen thousand pounds pressing against every square inch of stone, flesh, and metal. Water at that depth was not a fluid. It was a dense, cold vise that turned any load-bearing void into an inward collapse chamber. For four hundred years, the vaulted dark rock arches of the First High court had held that crushing sky at bay through linked keystones and high-pressure gold-silver metal ballast runes.
Now, a tooth of star-iron as thick as a royal watchtower punched through the central dome.
The impact tore through fifty feet of solid hadal dark rock. A blast wave of crushed stone and super-tightly packed silt erupted outward in a blinding grey cloud. Seawater rushed into the fissure with the scream of a cut steam pipe, churning the black depths into a violent, disorienting vortex.
Through the copper drain tube clamped between his teeth, Ren Vale drew a sharp, freezing breath of stone salt water.
