The Spire of Ascension was not still.
From a distance — from the outer rings of Ashenveil, from the plains beyond the capital, from the decks of the fishing vessels in the coastal straits — it appeared immovable, a black needle of shadow-steel embedded in the centre of the golden lattice that now replaced the natural sky. Permanent. Complete.
From inside the Eternal Forge, Zephyr watched it vibrate.
The vibration was not physical. No mortal sensor could detect it. The Spire's shadow-steel alloy was structurally flawless — the finest engineering the Imperium had ever produced. The vibration was temporal. The vast column of compressed fanatic Faith Points that the Spire was drawing from across the continent was carrying with it the ambient weight of the Kardashev Transition, the probability mass of four million erased futures that the fifth head had absorbed during the cull.
