The Celestial Sphere's Secret Rite

Above the firmament, the stars are cold, and the turning celestial spheres mercilessly strip away humanity.

Beneath the earth, coal smoke chokes the throat, while a fourteen-penny IOU weighs as heavily as an iron anchor.

Those who over-tune the courses of the stars will eventually be frozen into nothingness by the deep cold of the void, reduced to stardust.

Only the mundane gravity of daily necessities and rough-and-ready calculations can keep the soul from falling into the void.

A body returned from the dead, a document filled with unpaid debts, and a bronze star chart that turns backward on its own.

As a mortal's counting rods begin to weigh the empire's conspiracies,

the bronze gears of an ancient temple are already grinding and thundering in the depths among the stars.

Those who walk the celestial paths will, in the end, return to the firmament.