The door closed behind me, I felt it, the way you feel a held breath let go, and then I was standing in the heart of the Caelith, and the heart was a woman.
I do not have a better word for it, though every word is wrong. She was a machine. She was also unmistakably a she, as her figure was in the shape of a woman, jade and dark metal, kneeling at the centre of the vast green-dark room with her hands open in her lap, and she was the size of a cathedral.
If she had stood, her head would have brushed the top of the dome I could not see… If she had a head.
This is also how I knew that she was a machine, from the cut on her neck, where I could see metallic components.
The same clean, impossible, surgical cut I had seen twice already on the bodies of her wardens ran across the base of her neck, and above it was nothing, no head on her shoulders, no head fallen at her feet, just the flat green cross-section of a wound a blade finer than thought had made eras ago.
