The silence that followed the blinding of the surveillance grid was not merely an absence of noise. It was a physical weight that pressed against the walls of the Board like the bottom of a deep mountain lake.
For thirty thousand years, the Archon Board had never known silence.
Day and night, season after season, through the rise and fall of ninety mortal dynasties, the inner sanctum had hummed with the constant, invasive sixty-cycle shaking of the Precursor power bus. It had been the steady, inescapable background noise of creation. An spark drone so deeply woven into the environment that the Archons had come to mistake it for the breathing of the cosmos itself.
Now, that hum was gone.
In its place was a quiet so total, so profoundly still, that Lin Tao could hear the tiny, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of cooling insulating oil falling from the cracked transformers onto the marble flat stone slabs eighty paces below. He could hear the faint, dry rustle of Tie Shan’s linen cloak shifting against his rough wool tunic. He could hear the shallow, wheezing breath of nine de-powered sky lords sitting in the dark at the base of the tiers.
It was the first time since the Precursor epoch that the chamber had known true sound silence.
