登入BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Biology cannot create mass out of nothing. But when you funnel the raw, concentrated gravity of a celestial body directly into a predator’s nervous system, biology doesn't have to create anything. It just takes what you give it.The invisible wave of lunar gravity hit Torin’s shattered, dying body.The reaction was catastrophic and beautiful.Torin didn't just heal; he detonated. A blinding flash of silver light erupted from his chest, shattering the reinforced medical cot beneath him into splinters. The massive Vanguard general was thrown into the air, but he didn't fall back down immediately.The localized celestial gravity caught him.Suspended three feet above the roof, Torin began to shift.It didn't sound like the usual, gruesome cracking of bones and tearing of muscle. It sounded like grinding ice and chiming glass. His withered, human body violently expanded, but the mass he was pulling wasn't the heavy, dense, magma-fueled bul
BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Moving a forty-foot spear of upward-falling celestial silver through a densely populated city is an architectural nightmare.We couldn't put it on a cart; it would just pull the cart into the sky. We had to use Corren’s heaviest industrial steam-cranes, chaining the four Starved Iron containment crates to the massive steel treads of the machines to keep the payload grounded.It took us an hour to drag the hovering, blindingly bright Lunar Bridge from the central foundry to the base of the Grandmaster’s Spire.The citizens of Aethelgard lined the cobblestone streets in absolute, terrified silence. They were used to seeing white-hot magma iron and black steam engines. They had never seen a piece of the moon. The pale, freezing light of the silver cast eerie, inverted shadows across the buildings, making the dust and loose leaves in the streets float slowly upward as we passed."Get it on the heavy winch!" I roared, standing at the base o
BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Time does not care about your math. It does not care if you have solved the equation, built the cage, or stolen the sky. If you run out of seconds before you write the final answer, you still lose.The heavy, armored locomotive didn't stop at Aethelgard’s Grand Central Station. We bypassed the passenger lines completely, tearing down the reinforced industrial flex-rails and slamming into the central foundry courtyard at maximum speed.The brakes shrieked, dumping a massive cloud of white steam over the cobblestones.Before the train had even fully stopped, Corren was running alongside the flatbed. The old miner looked terrified."Valerius sent word from the Spire!" Corren yelled over the hiss of the steam, his eyes wide as he stared at the hovering, glowing block of caged silver strapped to the train car. "Torin is seizing, Jace! The marrow in his spine is turning to dust. He has hours, maybe less."Elias vaulted over the side of the t
BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Hauling Starved Iron up a mountain is a punishment fit for a god. The metal is designed to be impossibly dense, craving the thermal core of the earth. Dragging four heavy containment crates through knee-deep snow at thirty-two thousand feet nearly killed us before we even reached the crater.We stood at the edge of the Goddess’s Tear, our breath freezing instantly in the howling wind."The crates are in position," Corren wheezed over the radio, coordinating from the fortified base camp three miles below us. "The heavy steam-winches are locked to the mountain bedrock. You have the towing cables."I looked down at the massive, glowing silver shard of the meteor. The anti-gravity field was terrifyingly beautiful, a localized pocket of the universe where the sky was pulling harder than the ground."We go down," I said, my physical voice barely carrying over the wind.We didn't rappel into the crater. We jumped.The moment we crossed the in
BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)There is a point at the edge of the atmosphere where the earth stops fighting to keep you, and the sky starts trying to pull you away.We rode the northern flex-rail line until the tracks simply ran out, ending at a fortified mining outpost buried in the permafrost. From there, we climbed.The peak known as the Goddess’s Tear was thirty-two thousand feet above sea level. It was a jagged, brutal spire of black ice and ancient granite that pierced straight through the cloud cover. The air was so thin it tasted like copper, and the temperature hovered at a terrifying forty below zero.I marched near the back of our small group, wrapped in heavy, Starved Iron-lined furs to keep my core temperature stable. My breath crystallized the second it left my lips. My ruined hands, wrapped in thick leather gloves, throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache. The higher we climbed, the fainter the thump-thump of the earth’s Deep Nodes became."Keep moving, M
BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)We rushed Torin into the highest medical ward of the Grandmaster’s Spire. It took six fully armored Vanguard soldiers just to hold the convulsing general down on the reinforced steel table."Hold his spine!" Elias roared, his hands pressing down on Torin’s shoulders. The Sovereign's face was pale, his own hands shaking as the ambient lunar withdrawal began to set into his own bones.Torin screamed. It wasn't a human sound, and it wasn't a wolf's howl. It was the horrific, tearing sound of biology trying to expand into a form that was strictly prohibited by physics. His ribs violently flared outward, cracking audibly under his skin, only to snap back into a human shape a microsecond later."His cellular structure is stuck in a loop," Elara said, her hands glowing with a soft, green ambient healing voltage as she pressed them against Torin’s chest. "I can heal the fractures, but I can't stop the trigger. Something is telling his body to
BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)If you want to survive the absolute bottom of the ocean, you cannot build a ship designed to fight the water. The Mariana Trench is thirty-six thousand feet deep. The hydrostatic pressure at that depth is roughly sixteen thousand pounds per square in
BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)Water always takes the path of least resistance. When you build a dam of pure gravity and weaponize the plumbing, the ocean does not stubbornly continue to beat its head against the iron. It simply flows somewhere else.I sat on the edge of a mahogan
BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)A siege is not always broken by battering rams. Sometimes, it is broken by rot. The ocean couldn't shatter the front door, so it decided to seep through the floorboards.Cord’s locomotive screamed north, tearing across the empire's central plains. I
BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)Building a wall is exhausting. Defending it is an eternity.It took us three weeks to line the southern coast. Three weeks of grueling, terrifying logistics, moving the thirty-nine remaining splinters of the world’s heart along the jagged cliffs and







