The black glass flying chariots didn’t glide on clouds of gentle sky mist. They cut through the sky like iron battering rams, propelled by burning arrays of black potion-made sulfur that left thick, greasy trails of soot across the newly cleared azure heavens. Twelve chariots entered the airspace above the Grand Central Tiered hall. He formed a tight aerial blockade around the three-hundred-foot Central Stele. Fluttering from their bronze prow-spikes were the severe, blood-red banners of the High Scribes of the Ancestral Sanctum—the dogmatic court trial responsible for preserving the purity of First Epoch texts.
Standing at the prow of the flagship was High Scribe Checker Mo Sha. Clad in rigid, high-collared robes of midnight-black sharkskin stitched with silver skulls, Mo Sha held a heavy iron scroll-tube bound in chains of soul-locking cold-iron. An 8-Star Scribe Grandmaster and blood-brother to the humiliated Elder Mo Cheng. Then, Mo Sha had spent four hundred years memorizing the exact stroke count, ink thickness, and calligraphy angles of every ancient monument on the Jiuzhou Plane. To Mo Sha, calligraphy was not writing. It was the divine shape of old family supremacy.
He looked down from his chariot, his hawk-like eyes landing first on the newly bloomed golden jade-trees, then on the four thousand geniuses sitting in breakthrough quiet focus, and finally on the Central Primordial Stele. There, on Line Forty-Two, blazing in brilliant carpenter’s blue against the sacred black glass, sat Frank’s semicolon.
