The central pool vault beneath the Grand Cathedral was huge, an underground tiered arena two hundred paces wide and seventy feet high, originally built to hold the emergency water reserves for two hundred thousand citizens.
Tonight, there was no water in the pool.
The basin had been transformed into a heavy-duty temple of ontological heresy.
In the center of the vast chamber stood The Great Un-Burning Loom.
The machine was five stories high, a towering, monstrous rig forged from melted bronze cathedral bells, blackened High court binding scrolls, and thousands of linked brass gear-trains that spun with terrifying, ear-splitting speed. Driven by four huge high-pressure pistons powered by the diverted underground current of the River Skell, the engine shook the solid bedrock beneath Ren’s boots with every stroke.
Around the outer edge of the machine, forty upright gold-silver metal spindle-columns rotated in counter-clockwise exact timing. Each column held fifty spinning bobbins strung with glowing, silver-grey thread. The crystal-hardened causal ash of unchosen timelines pulled out from the border of the Seventh Void.
And in the heart of the engine, suspended inside a cage of counter-rotating bronze gimbals twenty feet above the basin floor, hung The Primary Causal Core.
It was a sphere of raw, liquid time gold-silver metal three yards in width. It boiled like molten liquid silver, streaming waves of blinding, violet-tinted heat that distorted the air around it into shimmering, non-Euclidean lenses.
