Book One – Chapter 1

Part Four:

MONOLITHS
   

Neither of them had ever seen what lay behind the shimmering curtain. What they had heard of it had sounded like embellishments or desert madness, or the theatrical malice of a secluded witch — until now, when suddenly these exaggerations felt disturbingly insufficient and even more incomplete. If anything, they had failed for lack of language. Words had named the Veil, the monoliths, the White Fire, the maze of glass, and still missed the sheer vastness of it, and how it overwhelmed not only sight, but sensation.

The desert was vast, but that was a vastness of sand and heat and suffering; unbearable yet understandable. This, now was a grotesque phenomenon that spanned the whole horizon. Hundreds — no, thousands of monoliths rose from the earth. They cut into the colourless sky like an assembly of crystalline titans. Some leaned at deliberate angles, others were held in perfect vertical alignment. It was an unreal sight, unnatural in the deepest sense, and yet, these giants bore no mark of chisel or enchantment. No, they had not been shaped by craft. They had been forged and forced out of the world through catastrophe, ruptured from deep within the earth by lightning storms that had split the sands, and by firestorms that had boiled the desert into glass. Forces older than any surviving record had collided here, compressing heat and pressure with such violence that the land itself had fractured upward and birthed these monoliths from beneath its own blackened skin.

And yet, for all their violent origin, the monoliths were unsettlingly precise. They stood as sharp-edged, geometric columns; crystalline mirrors arranged in silent convergence on the grandest of scales. If you could look down upon them from the realm of dragons, you might see the pattern that the ground concealed: an elaborate inward spiral of impossible breadth, each monolith answering the angle of another, each angle corrected by the next, until the whole desert appeared to turn, without motion, towards the single centre it held:

At the far heart of the convergence stood .