Noah felt a grand change before he understood it!
Something changed, far from the chamber and the Ember-Keeper and the six hundred dying dead on their beds of bone. Somewhere far above them, in existence itself, something turned over, and the turning went through him like a cold hand passing through his chest.
He had felt many things since he came into this winter: Judgments, Immensities, the pull of the rift. This was something else.
He looked up!
The ceiling of the chamber was peeling!
The great skull-lined bones overhead were coming apart, lifting away rather than breaking, curling back in long white strips. Above them, the ice of the city peeled back too. Then the streets. Then the frozen towers. The whole underground, the First Lifeform's vast skeleton and everything carved inside it, was being opened up, layer by layer, from the top down, until the Lanterns' hidden home lay bare under the sky like the inside of a cut fruit.
The Lanterns screamed!
