On the final day of the fifteenth season, Crown-Reach was bathed in the crisp, pale gold of late autumn sunshine. In Sovereign Square, the huge timber sheer-legs, the steam capstans, and the temporary staging platforms had been fully dismantled and hauled away to the naval drydocks. The cobblestones had been washed down with river water and swept clean by squads of town apprentices.
Where the monstrous, eighty-two-ton bronze coronet had once hung five hundred and fifty feet in the air like a sword of Damocles, the summit of the Great Sky-Spire now ended in a clean, low-profile pyramidal roof of standing-seam copper sheet. A solid brass lightning rod rose ten feet from the apex. It was flanked by a simple gold-trimmed weathercock that turned smoothly and silently in the fresh northern breeze. The dark shape of the cathedral against the sky was graceful, grounded, and dignified. Restored to the honest proportions of its original fourteenth-century master builders.
The stone-built transformation of the inside was equally deep. With the massive bronze overhang removed, the high window row windows of the cathedral nave were unshaded for the first time in six decades. Sunlight poured through the restored rose window, lighting up the fourteenth-century limestone pillars with rich bands of cobalt and crimson light. Clerks, choristers, and common worshippers stood in the aisles. He stared up in awe at the glowing stone vaulting that had spent sixty years shrouded in shadow.
