The Black Stone of Ambrosia is a thousand-pound sphere of all the world’s ambrosia fused together, launched moonward in the late 19th century to feed the worm Blanqui.
| Spanish entry | La piedra negra de ambrosía (Never 9-11) |
The ambrosia, which drips from thresholds and first reached the seekers through the Ambrosia Delivery, was spread among many flasks until fused. The sphere was stored in the Lethal Chamber so no one could use it, or so the governors were told.
When the inauguration ribbon was cut, the stone dropped down a chute to Battery Park; neither a body in the tube nor a blow to its roof stopped it. There the Vernian Moon rocket of 1865 waited with its door open. It loaded itself and flew to a crater on the far side of the Moon, where Blanqui bores into the satellite 150 years later.
El dragón va a estar ya alimentado desde 1890 (“The dragon will already be fed from 1890”). The seekers went to New York of 1870 to stop the drug reaching the Moon, and that journey is how it reached it. The immortals sent the fuel the seekers had hidden, to be ready to explode on their return; the worm, they added, might take three hundred years. The weavers of the gate had said only one route runs from the Moon to here.
Hecate bred the worm; she is aunt and teacher of Medea, who guarded the stone and explained the immortals’ plan, which they justified by the threat of Terminus.