The sound of silence on a high-sky mountain was usually peaceful. It was the clean, crisp quietude of thin air, drifting snow, and distant pine needles brushing against granite cliffs. This silence, however, was not peaceful. It was the choking silence of an empty pocket chamber. Just then, the intake valve is slammed shut and the rotary vane pump begins to pull hard empty pocket.
Outside the fractured high window row windows of the Hall of Ten Thousand Sages, the midday sun didn’t set. It curdled. The bright golden radiance of the Jiuzhou sky dissolved into an unnatural, bruised twilight violet. The exact color of a spark arc viewed through dirty oil. The movement of air molecules simply ceased to register, and around the mountain peaks, where heat updrafts had carried soaring raptors for millions of years, the air lost its floating thickness.
Then came the birds.
It began with a single high-sky golden falcon. It was followed by dozens of white-tailed mountain eagles, black crag swallows, and sky spirit-cranes. They didn’t glide down to roost. They dropped like solid cannonballs of frozen meat, tumbling end over end through the violet gloom, crashing through cedar canopies, smashing against stone terraces, and shattering across courtyard flat stone slabs with wet thuds.
