Semua Bab HIS REJECTED GODDESS: Bab 161 - Bab 170

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)It had been six months since I drove a spike of celestial silver into the beating heart of the abyss. Six months since the Mariana Trench was sealed beneath a mile of volcanic glass, and the wolves reclaimed their lunar frequency.For half a year, the world had been violently, aggressively peaceful.I stood in the center of a massive construction site in the heart of Aethelgard. The air smelled of wet mortar, freshly cut pine from the Jagged Coast, and the clean, rhythmic hiss of localized steam engines. We weren't building walls or foundries. We were building the Aethelgard Academy of Elemental Physics."The structural load on the western arch is leaning," I said, pointing a pale, silver-veined finger at the massive stone colonnade being erected fifty yards away.Corren, standing beside me with a rolled-up blueprint tucked under his arm, squinted at the archway. The old miner rubbed his jaw. "It’s within standard engineering tolerances, J

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)Fanaticism is a poor substitute for structural integrity. A man who believes he is destined to win will happily ignore the fact that the bridge beneath his feet is crumbling.The Imperial squad leader knelt in the toxic, frozen mud of the ash-wastes, his mind pinned to the earth by the sheer, crushing psychic weight of Elias’s Alpha command. But even as the blood dripped from his nose, the soldier looked up at me with a twisted, manic grin."You can take the water," the soldier hissed, his voice rattling in his chest. "You can kill us all. It doesn't matter, Architect. Commander Vane already has the engine. The Iron Crown will shatter your glass tower by midnight.""Commander Vane," Cord rumbled, stepping forward, his massive hand resting on the haft of his Starved Iron sledgehammer. The old Master Forge spat into the ash. "He was the Emperor’s Chief Siege Master. I thought Torin ripped his throat out during the palace breach.""He missed

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)An empire doesn't die when its king is killed. It dies when its supply lines run dry. You cannot build a fifty-foot gravity cannon out of thin air and fanaticism; you need logistics.I stood at the edge of the perfectly smooth, smoking crater where the Crimson Engine used to be. The ash was still settling. The surviving Imperial soldiers were kneeling in the dirt, disarmed and surrounded by the towering, white-glowing forms of the Lunar Vanguard.Cord walked up beside me, his golden eyes fixed on the microscopic, ultra-dense sphere of iron sitting at the bottom of the crater."I've hit steel on an anvil for sixty years, boy," the Master Forge grunted, crossing his massive arms. "I've never seen metal folded that tight. It doesn't even look like iron anymore.""It's not just folded, Master. It's collapsed," I said, my voice quiet in the eerie silence of the canyon. "The atomic structure of the barrel couldn't handle the gravitational invers

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)Retrofitting a machine designed to talk to the moon into a machine designed to catch an ocean is not a matter of simply pulling a lever. It requires tearing the physics of the world down to the studs and rebuilding them backward.The roof of the Grandmaster’s Spire was a storm of sparks, freezing wind, and raw, localized gravity. It was two hours past midnight. The massive, forty-foot Starved Iron prongs of the Lunar Bridge loomed above us, usually humming with a soft, downward-pulling celestial resonance.Tonight, we were ripping the core out."The inversion matrix is locked on the western prong!" Cord roared over the howling wind, his massive, silver-furred arms straining as he swung his sledgehammer into the heavy iron locking-pins at the base of the bridge. The sheer kinetic force of his strike echoed over the sleeping city of Aethelgard far below."Reroute the thermal exhaust!" I yelled back, my voice tight with exhaustion.I was stan

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)If you want to infiltrate an impenetrable fortress, you don't build a better battering ram. You just wait for the enemy to open the gates for their own returning soldiers, and you walk in behind them.The warm rain continued to fall over Aethelgard, washing the tension of the near-apocalypse into the cobblestone gutters. High above, the fifty merchant airships had completed their banking maneuver. Assuming they had just flattened the wolf capital into a two-inch layer of dust, they were adjusting their steam-propellers and setting a slow, victorious course back to the eastern territories.I stood on the wet roof of the Grandmaster’s Spire, my heavy leather coat soaked through."The eastern territories are protected by the Aegis Wall," Elias said, his golden eyes tracking the massive silhouettes retreating into the dark clouds. "It is a hundred-mile-long barricade of Starved Iron and steam-powered repeating ballistae. If the Vanguard approa