The three-hundredth riser ended not in a doorway, but in a fractured vault of cold-rolled iron.
The double doors had been forced inward, warped off their bronze pintles by some violent high-pressure eruption that had occurred days before. The heavy iron panels, each six inches thick and heavy with outward clockwork bands, leaned uselessly against the doorframes, their gear teeth snapped into jagged metal splinters.
Ren Vale stepped across the threshold, his mammoth ivory awl gripped tightly in his ink-stained right hand.
The air inside didn’t taste of mountain winter or burning hearths. It tasted of frozen ozone, rusted copper, and the strange, nauseating static that lingers over an open lightning strike. The heat plunged thirty degrees within a single pace, coating Ren’s leather apron and coarse woolen breeches with an instant crust of silver rime.
He stopped, his heavy cobbler’s boots biting into the floor, and looked up.
The apex sanctum was a circular cathedral eighty paces in width, carved directly into the dark rock pinnacle of the Iron Bastion. But it possessed no ceiling.
The ancient corbeled dome that once crowned the tower had been erased. It hadn’t collapsed into rubble. There were no fallen keystones or shattered arches littering the floor. The stone had simply ceased to occupy physical space. In its place, thirty yards above their heads, the sky had been torn open like rotten parchment.
