Aerolith Quarry

393 AC - I drink from my canteen, savoring the last few drops as the barge brings me back to the open-pit quarry. The clouds part, and I whistle at the spectacle. It only took a week for the site to become a bustling mine in the sky. Once Angus had detached the block from the main island and blown up the parasitic fragments, the Axiom flotilla was able to deploy their installations there. And boy, did they ever. Cranes, excavators, a drone factory, refineries, storage and processing zones, even a mooring dock… Dang. I was only away for a few days, and they've accomplished all this. What's the old saying? Progress doesn't wait. "Maybe I should be with them," I think to myself with a twinge of guilt.

Covered in sweat, the miners move about like scavengers on a carcass they're picking apart. Meanwhile, the drones are already scoping out other locations to hollow out in the same way. I would have thought we'd have taken what we learned in the City of Scholars and our contact with the Hunger as a lesson, or at least a warning, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything. I guess the appetite of science can be pretty hard to satisfy… Just like the drones, we'll also be deployed with Pebble. Since he's made of Aerolith too, he knows where to find the most profitable veins. He can sense them even when they're deeply buried in the rock. We too are part of the machine – just one little tastebud in a voracious, insatiable excavator.

ISAREE