The silence that dropped upon the underground tiered arena was so sudden, so vast, that the dripping of cold water into the drainage water gates sounded like pistol shots.
The five-story bronze engine of the Great Un-Burning Loom had ceased to move.
Its huge central drive shaft, which had spun for weeks with the fury of a dying hurricane, groaned one final time as the leftover moving driving force bled into the babbitt-metal bearings. A long, shuddering sigh of cooling steam hissed from the external relief valves: Hssssssssss...
The Primary Causal Core had changed forever.
The five-yard sphere of blazing bright crimson liquid was no longer boiling. The radiant, violet heat that had scorched their cheeks had collapsed. The violent gravity draft had faded away into calm, underground air. Before their eyes, the liquid gold-silver metal cooled at terrifying speed, shifting from glowing amber to dull, tarnished pewter, then hardening into a solid, pitted mass of inert, scarred metal. Deep hairline fractures ran across its curved surface, venting thin wisps of harmless grey steam that smelled of melted beeswax, scorched animal fat, and cold iron.
The forty spindle-columns stood motionless.
The thousands of glowing silver threads that had whipped through the air like cut spark cables hung limp, their time charge exhausted. With a soft, rustling whisper like falling autumn leaves, the threads broke from the gold-silver metal eyelets. He drifted down into the empty pool basin to cover the floorboards in a delicate, shining carpet of harmless silver tinsel.
