I can't help but shiver as I stare into the abyss.

Some have compared it to an eye, but to me, it’s more like an open maw, pretending it wants to devour us. What was the saying again? Throwing oneself into the lion’s den? Watching the Axiom’s freight elevators rise and fall along the cliff face, carrying — like caged canaries — heavily harnessed engineers and prospectors, I couldn’t help but see them as sacrificial offerings to some ravenous god.

And soon, it would be my turn to take a seat in one of those lifts…

I shiver again and, trying to think of something else, scratch Nauraa behind the ear. He grumbles in annoyance at being disturbed. After bearing a white coat through the entire crossing of the Storhvit, his fur is now shifting to a deep brown, nearly black in places. From winter pelt to summer coat… Or perhaps he’s simply adapting to what we’re about to face — moving through darkness, dozens, maybe hundreds of feet below the earth…

His temperament had also changed drastically, perhaps justifiably so, ever since we left the split mountain. He’d always been prone to mood swings, but never this intense or prolonged. I press my face into the fur of his neck and cling to him, feeling a prickle of energy tingle through his coat.

‘Why did you react like that, near the Nilam?’

He opens one yellow eye, the pupil narrowing against the light.

There was something there that reminded me of the Katkera. Something that made me think of the old days, before our bonding. I felt what you call melancholy, I suppose. I still feel it.

I’m surprised, and he picks up on it — of course. He rarely spoke of emotions — all those subtle feelings he had learned to experience through me, through our bond — and even less so of the time before I found him in the forest.

I’m the one who found you, little one. Not the other way around.

I smile at him.

‘Whatever you say, old brother.’

He had stared long and hard at the dead tree, listened to the crackle of its crystal branches. He’d let out a yelp, almost a lament.

‘You never told me what you heard back then…’

Nauraa lifts his head, and I cling tightly to avoid slipping.

The wingbeats of the moths cried out their sorrow. They kept circling the tree, as they had since before winter ever arrived, but there was something missing. A hollow space that hadn’t been filled. Like a void, where there should have been the absence of void.

‘As if they were mourning?’

As if there were a hole in the world.

I look once more at the yawning, greedy chasm and briefly feel the pull of the void. A wave of sorrow grips me. A sense of loss for something — someone — I’ve never known. ‘The tree…’

Nauraa doesn’t answer. Perhaps he doesn’t want to twist the knife. Because the grief we share remains, an open wound. I sigh. The idea that the Spindle is dying, that it too could wither like the Nilam, fills me with anguish. I can sense Nauraa feels the same — but strangely, it’s as though he’s holding something back, keeping a thought from reaching me.

‘Time’s up, Tei. You’re up next.’

I straighten and turn toward Sigismar, who steps over a collapsed pillar to approach us. He hasn’t bothered with his armor this morning.

‘Already?’

He nods as I drop down the slope. My boots hit the grassy plain, dotted with soft white flowers.

‘Remember, the lower levels are still sealed off.’

‘I was at the briefing. I know there might be a Tumult Singularity at the bottom.’

He sighs, looking a bit sheepish.

‘I just mean to say…’

I smile to ease his awkwardness.

‘I know, Sig. I’ll be careful. Just the first tier.’

He responds by patting Nauraa’s neck, as he would his griffon. Nauraa doesn’t appreciate it and shakes him off with a growl.

‘No funny business down there’, he mutters to him.

Who does he think he is?

I click my tongue in mild rebuke at my Alter Ego and nod toward the paladin, just to reassure him. I knew he meant well, but his paternalistic tone could be grating — especially when he was worried. I wave and turn to gather my gear.

I had packed a bag and everything needed for an underground mission: a Kelon lantern with a few reflective crystals scavenged from the Sarkans desert, helmet, rope, retractable grappling hook, harness, pitons, carabiners… all generously provided by the Bravos and Axiom.

Don’t forget my snack.

I shoot Nauraa a teasing look.

‘I’ve got your snack, don’t worry. Who do you take me for?’

We walk along the Screed, following the rim of the abyss toward the lifts. They’ve been arranged intermittently around the pit, mounted on massive steel scaffolds plunging into the dark. Some — simple baskets hanging in the void — are meant for personnel; others — larger — are for heavy vehicles. One, resembling a mobile laboratory, is being lowered into the depths on the far side of the Crow’s Eye. Thankfully, we’ve been assigned one of those, due to Nauraa’s size. I shiver involuntarily.

You feel it too, don’t you?

‘You mean vertigo?’

He chuckles.

I mean what’s lurking down there.

Of course I felt it — like all the Muna present, in the end. It was my explicit recommendation that led Admiral Singh to postpone exploration of the City. Because the Skein reacted strangely here — as if its network avoided going too deep.

‘That’s partly what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?’

We pass an improvised pen within what must have once been a temple. Sheep graze lazily among fallen columns reinforced with rough wooden planks. A young shepherd with walnut-dark skin waves at me, though he seems a little intimidated by Nauraa and the threat he might pose to the flock. I wave back with a reassuring smile. I’ll behave. Promise.

‘You’d better.’

As we slowly approach the rest of the group, I see that it’s made up of very specific profiles: mostly hellequin hunters, some of whom even bear the dreaded mark of the Reapers. It’s not surprising. Many Muna had been requisitioned to work on the Farm or in the surrounding pastures. And the City below required the expertise of those who knew how to handle danger… The Hellequins knew how to deal death when necessary.

I take my place among them, a mediator among the trackers, and notice out of the corner of my eye two Noosh Burrowers stretched out at full length, occasionally flicking their cauliflower-shaped tails. A few daisies have sprouted from their plant-like coats, as well as a small gourd on one of them—probably from napping too often among the vegetable plots of the Muna farmhouse.

They’ll be undeniably useful when it comes to digging tunnels through the rock. Just as these trackers will be, protecting me from any external threat. I greet them each in turn and head toward the freight elevator operator. The gate opens to let me through, scraping ominously.

You know how much I loathe cages.

But despite his grumble, Nauraa moves forward—without any prompting from me—and lies down in the center of the platform. The other Muna and I settle around him, and the gate closes again with a harsh screech and a sharp clang.

‘Safe descent’, the operator says, probably for the hundredth time since operations began.

I thank him with a nod, though a nervous knot tightens in my stomach. We now hover above the chasm, with nothing but a thin—relatively speaking—metal plate separating us from the drop. I recall what Akesha said just three nights ago: ‘You never know what you’ll find when you fall down the rabbit hole’. She couldn’t have been more right…

If there’s a rabbit down there, given its size, it’s mine.

A jolt—and the elevator begins to plunge into the earth’s bowels. I grip a metal railing and peer down, while the hunters double-check their gear. Few of them bothered with flashlights like I did, preferring instead to invoke, through Alteration, the senses of nocturnal predators: barn owls, bats, or caracals... I could do the same, using Nauraa’s senses.

After a few more lurches and bumps that do nothing for my comfort, I finally see the vast expanse of the first tier.

Ahhh, so this is our new hunting ground.

Through my eyes, Nauraa observes the first levels of the shaft—what the first scouts jokingly dubbed the Undergrowth. But that name doesn’t do justice to the ecosystem unfolding before us: a partially buried jungle, all tangled roots and gigantic stems. These massive structures form a fantastical tangle of verdant arches, soaking in the little light that filters from above—a complex web of levels and terraces where it would be easy to get lost. Pink mosses, multicolored canopies, shadowy groves… As we continue to descend into the Eye, the sheer scale of the task ahead becomes overwhelmingly clear.

Soon, when we reach the first exploration base—just a matter of minutes at this rate—we’ll be on our own in this green labyrinth.

I notice, trapped in dense vegetation, deep blue blocks with geometric patterns veined with what looks like gold. Cubes and slabs of all sizes, smooth and so dark they seem to swallow the light…

I blink suddenly as I feel ripples disturbing my perception of the Skein. What the Axiom might call interference. Something here—latent, underlying—seems to disrupt the network that connects all things.

‘I feel it too. All too well.’

Nauraa says nothing, ears turned back.

I cast one last glance upward. Far above, past countless concentric tiers lined with shadowed alcoves, the sky is nothing but a pinhole of light floating in a sea of darkness. With a final shudder, the lift halts on a mezzanine floor covered in thick grass, now entirely trampled. I notice my hand has instinctively moved closer to my dagger, and I exhale slowly as the elevator’s hydraulics hiss and sputter. With a surge of focus, I center myself in the present—on high alert—and momentarily cut my link to the Skein, not wanting to be distracted by its troubling unrest.

A sharp beep rings out—and the gate bursts open with a crash...