“Stop the elevator at the twenty-mile ledge!” Abacus Su wailed, pressing both hands and his nose flat against the thick crystal window of the command bridge. “Lord Pei, please stop the drill for five minutes! My heart is palpitating! I need to step outside and verify the audit!”
Pei Xuan pulled back the brass throttle lever, bringing the hundred-foot-wide Dry-Well Abyssal Elevator & Super-Drill to a smooth halt on a wide shelf of gray stone twenty miles beneath Dry-Well City.
Outside the elevator’s floodlights stretched a subterranean cavern so vast that it could have held three mortal kingdoms inside its vault.
Rising from the floor of this twenty-mile cavern were millions upon millions of towering, hexagonal crystal pillars, each one between a hundred and three hundred feet tall and thicker than an ancient redwood tree. They grew in dense clusters that twisted toward the cavern ceiling like a subterranean forest of giant dragon-spines.
Yet there was not a single spark of light or warmth in the entire cavern.
Every single crystal pillar had been drained to a chalky, bone-white gray. Thin purple veins—like dried-up blood vessels—ran down the centers of the hollow trunks, and the ground between the pillars was knee-deep in gray crystal powder that had flaked off over thousands of years.
