The shadow fell across Crucible Four before the bone-shaking sound arrived.
It wasn’t the soft shadow of a cloud. It was a sharp, unnatural square of pitch-black shape, half a mile wide, slicing across the canyon and plunging the Seventh Ward foundries into freezing twilight.
A grinding sub-heard hum tore through the gorge, shaking at sixteen cycles per second. The air pressure plummeted so rapidly that water in the outdoor cool troughs began to boil at sixty degrees. It sent plumes of lukewarm mist curling over the cobblestones.
Lin Ke stood on the corrugated iron roof of the tapping house, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the shaking guardrail.
Above his head, the glassy glass spirit veins in his forearms shivered with brittle tension. The intense magnetic polarization in the air felt like thousands of tiny needles scraping against the quartz linings of his channels, threatening micro-fractures with every breath. He gritted his teeth, feeling his Ashen Iron bone lattice groan under the downward torque.
Floating three hundred feet above the foundries was the Imperial Iron Seal of Divine Sequestration.
It was a monstrous cubic war-engine forged from cast bronze and magnetic meteor-iron, the size of a four-story castle. Four massive dragon-headed keels projected from its lower corners, discharging blinding sheets of blue gravity-lightning that cracked against the canyon walls, shattering ancient pine trees to splinters.
