The heat streaming from the bronze cathedral doors was so intense that the silver oak leaves on Diplomat Ren’s mantle began to curl and smoke.
The doors themselves were twenty feet wide, forged from eight-inch-thick bell-bronze inlaid with scenes of the Creation. But the metal was barely visible beneath the blinding, swirling vortex of glowing contractual script that covered the portal:
Four nested rings of glowing runes were rotating across the bronze surface in counter-rotating directions, each ring burning in a different, incompatible color:
Ren Prime stepped within two feet of the roaring bronze portal, the heat blistering the skin on his cheeks despite the mist from his breathing collar.
His careful eye dissected the four nested rings of script with painful, tiny care. Each ring was an authentic historical treaty, signed by sovereign authorities who had sought to seal the cathedral vaults during times of existential terror:
The outermost black ring—The Ducal Lockdown Seal of Year 520—had been inscribed in the wake of the Great Tannery Revolt. It was a town curfew contract, binding the doors shut until the signed name of four guild wardens and the Grand Duke himself were applied at the same time.
The second brass ring—The Sun-Crown Imperial Taboo of Year 410—was an ecclesiastical edict issued by Emperor Sol-Amon during the First Schismatic Heresy, declaring the cathedral foundations an ‘Ontological Exclusion Zone’ under pain of summary soul-severance.
