The entrance revealed itself only when the silver resonance brushed a particular pattern of fallen pillars. The glass plain folded downward into a wide descending ramp of the same dark crystal they had seen in the holding. Soft light—neither the blue of Seris's flame nor Lior's silver—glowed along the walls in steady, architectural lines.
At the bottom the ramp opened into a cavernous space that was unmistakably a city.
Towers of translucent black stone rose in elegant, organic curves. Bridges of frozen light connected them. Figures moved along the streets—tall, slender, their bodies formed of the same shifting lattice-work Lior had glimpsed in the First Dark's intermediaries, yet far more stable, clothed in layered robes that seemed woven from dusk and starlight. Their faces were smooth and featureless, yet each carried a distinct presence, an individual quiet.
None of them fled. None attacked. They simply turned and regarded the four intruders with the calm of people who had been expecting an arrival for a very long time.
One figure stepped forward, taller than the rest, its lattice denser, its robes marked with a single vertical line of pale silver.
The Continuant has come, the impression arrived, clear and formal. The city of Residualis acknowledges the new arithmetic.