The altar didn’t give off warmth, but as Ren Vale approached the gold-silver metal dais, the marrow of his collarbones began to thrum with a dry, electric chill.
It wasn’t the cold of deep water. The hadal cold was heavy and ancient. An indifferent weight that pressed against the ribs like slate. This was something different. The sterile, preserved freeze of an archival vault sealed before the dawn of modern ink, where words had been carved into metal so that no flame, no flood. No rot could ever alter their clauses.
Ren stepped onto the second tier of the star-shaped stone stand.
His boots crunched through the pale grey ash that blanketed the gold-silver metal steps. The dust rose in thin, lazy plumes that drifted through the stale air before settling back into the micro-inscribed grooves of the floor. There was no wind in the sanctum. There was no current, no tide, no shifting thermocline. For four hundred years, the chamber had existed in suspended animation beneath the floor of the Mariana Deep pit, held in a brittle bubble of air while great realms rose and sank above it.
Mira walked beside him, her light footsteps making scarcely a sound in the dust.
