The pillar of clear starlight didn’t shatter against the deck. It folded inward upon itself, assembling with terrifying exact care into a huge physical titan.
It stood thirty paces tall, towering over the Central Console Dais like a monolith carved from black glass and man-made diamond. Its form was fully empty of anthropomorphic vanity. It had no face, no eyes, and no mouth. Its torso was a fine, detailed cluster of linked dodecahedrons that rotated in counter-balanced orbits around a central glowing core of tightly packed blue starlight. Four multi-jointed arms, forged from solid star-white-gold and segmented with silver-steel ball joints, ended in massive three-pronged high-pressure claws.
Every surface of the titan’s armor was etched with micro-circuitry that pulsed with pale azure light, cold and sterile as a winter glacier.
The non-Euclidean shape of its assembly folded across four spatial dimensions. To the naked human eye, the titan seemed to expand and contract at the same time. Its crystal-clear plates slid past one another with a ghostly singing tone that sounded like thousands of glass flutes shaking in a winter blizzard.
The surrounding heat on the dais plummeted in an instant.
The air pressure dropped to zero point six sea-weights as the entity’s presence absorbed the surrounding heat breakdown. A rim of brittle white frost swept across the star-white-gold flooring, coating the boots of the quarry masters in semi-clear crystals of frozen cold air. The moisture in the men’s breath turned instantly to falling ice dust, pattering like fine sand…
