It should have been a relief to find that I was still capable of awe.
For a moment, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. I initially thought that the armourglass was suffering some kind of distortion. I saw stars go out, and had a moment of sudden panic, as if I had been tricked up here just in time to witness the final unravelling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw figures and schemas running down augur lenses, and discounted them instantly, as nothing, nothing at all, could possibly generate numbers of such magnitude.
And then, from the darkness, I saw the sunlight catch the first spire, and realised that it was coming at us from beyond the world’s night-shadow, surging out of oblivion like a new Terra from the old. The spires kept coming, one after the other, joining up and deepening and stretching into webs of gold and glass and steel. I saw the faces of what looked like cathedrals, piled atop one another, over and over, until the detail became lost in the sheer size of it all. I saw a great ridge, geological in its extension, studded and crusted with ironwork, culminating in twin spires from which fires burned like beacons. I saw the thunder of red suns, flaring under canopies of adamantine stalactites, buoying the docking bays and manufactoria and armouries and forges, piled and locked together just as the non-artificial worlds of our Imperium were ordained, only this had been built from nothing by the hand of humanity, cast in an epoch of giants when no feat was deemed above our limitless capability.
And even then, while I struggled to keep my jaw from falling slack, I could see the signs of catastrophic damage along its mountainous exterior. An entire flank, spanning a volume of space I could not even begin to guess at, had been driven in and was leaking gases into the void. The upper reaches of the structure were still lit and occupied, but much else was dark, marred with the filigree of bent steel rods about the maw-like entrance to ordnance chasms.

Regent's Shadow