On the northern crags of the plateau, completely isolated from the deep, echoing thunder of the lower granite quarries, the massive, hollowed-out chambers of the old imperial outpost were being systematically transformed into something entirely unprecedented in the history of the realm: The Northern Lyceum.
Lucien stood at the front of a vast, vaulted amphitheater carved directly from the living, seamless basalt of the mountain roots. The dark walls were no longer covered in the mechanical tracking needles, surveillance nodes, and copper needle-arrays of the old regime. Instead, they were lined with rows upon rows of dark cedar shelves that were rapidly being filled with tattered leather journals, ink-stained historical scrolls, and raw quartz matrices rescued from the flooded underbelly of the Sinks.
