There was a sound beneath the Sovereign Imperium that only a god could hear.
It was a persistent, low-frequency hum, vibrating at the exact resonant pitch of breaking granite. Zephyr felt it not in his ears, but in the deepest, load-bearing architecture of his own divinity. It was the physical manifestation of the starvation shell.
For twelve straight months, Zephyr had sat in the center of the Eternal Forge, maintaining the planetary-scale spherical boundary around the Morreth Entity. The Korthane embargo had driven the Imperium's economy into a brutal, grinding isolation. Zephyr had mandated ruthless industrial quotas, turning Ashenveil into a sleepless machine designed solely to generate Faith Points. The silver flowed inward, the faith flowed upward, and every single drop was immediately redirected downward into the earth to hold the shell.
