The belfry of the church smelled of ozone, hot whale-oil, and cold mountain thunder.
Eighty arm-lengths above the sunlit market square, the open stone arches looked out across the valley. Below, the toy-like houses of Oakhaven lay bathed in warm June light. Their chimneys puffing was silent white smoke into a sky that refused to move.
In the center of the wooden loft, suspended from massive oak belfry beams, hung the engine of their imprisonment.
A six-hundred-pound lead swinging weight, four paces long and bound in heavy copper wire, swung back and forth across a thirty-degree arc with terrifying, bone-shaking driving force.
SWOOSH... CLANG.
SWOOSH... CLANG.
Every swing displaced forty cubic feet of air. It shook the heavy pine floorboards beneath Ren Vale’s boots.
Behind the swinging weight, mounted within a cage of cold-forged black iron, spun the Paradox Spindle. It was nine feet tall, forged from the same dark Seventh Void melted rock waste as the needle they had pulled from the wyrm. It spun on gold-silver metal gimbals at seven thousand revolutions a minute. Its surface was a blur of black fire and fluting glyphs, emitting a nonstop, high-pitched whine that set Ren’s thirty-one-year-old teeth on edge.
