Chapter 583: The Floor Isn’t The Floor Again!

I stood on the edge of the shelf and watched Devant’s back. He reached up to adjust a scarf that wasn’t there anymore. His fingers found bare neck, rested there a moment, and dropped back to his tin cup.

Behind me, Maggie leaned close, the edge of her veil brushing my shoulder. Her crimson eyes stayed fixed on the pale boy. Her face gave away nothing, the same as always.

’Like me huh...’

The thought sat in my head like a cold stone. I looked Devant over. The slight frame. The dented tin cup. The pleasant, hollow smile he wore like a mask. I didn’t see the resemblance, but Maggie didn’t make jokes, and she certainly didn’t use metaphors.

Before I could ask her what she meant, Devant stepped off the shelf.

"We should stay on the upper paths. The lower ledges are far too steep."

’Right. Lower paths it is.’

I didn’t argue. I just waved the group in behind him and ran every direction he gave through my tally, flipping it before my feet ever moved. If he said upper, we went down. If he said left, we took the narrow chimney on the right. It was stupid and it made no sense at all, but it worked.

We descended deeper into the dark throat of the chasm. The footing was loose scree most of the way, and every so often a stone skittered off the edge and fell for a long time before I heard it land.

The ecosystem down here was ruined. The fire-dragon families that had nested in the cliff faces were gone. We passed empty roosts, nests cold under a crust of old ash, and shattered ledges littered with ancient bones, picked clean, brittle and grey.

Along the sheer basalt walls, gouges ran deep into the stone. Claw marks. Each groove was wide enough to park a truck in, and the marks sliced straight through the bedrock as if it were soft clay. Whatever had made them had passed through recently. The edges were still sharp, the rubble beneath them still loose, and nothing on the lower shelves was left alive to complain about it.

’Let’s not think about the size of the hand...’

As we picked our way past another shattered roost, a voice spoke directly into my mind.

White Feather is resting in the Nave. I want to see my mother. The Hex got louder when you broke the door.

I didn’t answer Wren. Her voice was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving a faint ache behind my temples. I glanced back at the rest of the party.

Ilse was holding up better than I’d expected, but her fire was running low again. The red glow beneath her skin had dimmed to a dull ember. Every so often she pressed a hand flat against her ribs, as if checking the heat was still in there. Her face was sour and drawn, and her lips kept moving as she counted her paces under her breath.

Beside her, Light walked without a sound. His white hair was matted with soot, and his left arm, burned coal-black from the elbow down, hung dead at his side.

I dropped back a pace to walk next to him.

"How’s the arm, Light?"

He didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on the rock ahead, and the dead hand knocked against his thigh with every step.

"It stopped hurting."

’Ah, damn. That’s worse.’

When dead flesh stopped hurting, it meant the nerves were gone for good.

"I can heal you..."

"I assume you’ll need those essence more for whatever may be in front of us."

"Ah, don’t worry, it’s just—"

I kept my mouth shut as he turned and glared at me. Then I quickly pushed forward, following the white veil of Maggie’s habit as she tracked Devant’s footsteps.

An hour later, the winding stone chimney opened up.

We stepped out onto what looked like a vast, endless plain. Flat, dark stone stretched out in every direction under the black ceiling of the mountain, marked by long parallel ridges that ran as far as the eye could see. The air down here was heavy and strangely warm. A deep heat rose out of the ground and seeped right through the soles of my boots.

Devant stopped.

He stood five paces ahead of us, staring out over the dark plain. For the first time since we had met him, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t offer a pleasant contradiction. He didn’t make an unhurried joke. He just stood there, perfectly still, the tin cup balanced in his fingers. Even his thumb had stopped moving along the dented rim.

That silence scared me more than his words ever had.

I reached out with my Death Sense and pushed the perimeter wide to map the ground ahead.

My Death Sense went completely silent.

It didn’t ping an obstacle. It didn’t read a threat. The sense simply died on me, dead and black, the exact same way it had when the first sleeping dragon woke beneath our feet. My core couldn’t put a number on something this big.

I looked down at my boots.

The dark, warm stone beneath us wasn’t bedrock. The long, sweeping ridges weren’t formations carved by underground water.

They were scales. Massive, overlapping plates of dark, grooved armor, stretching for miles in every direction. And the warmth seeping through my leather soles wasn’t geothermal heat.

It was body heat.

A low vibration rolled up through the stone, so deep I felt it in my teeth before I heard anything at all. It wasn’t an earthquake.

Then the entire plain exhaled.

A gust of hot, heavy air rushed up from the edge of the shelf, smelling of ancient copper and cold iron. The ground beneath our boots rose three feet, held there for one long second, and then sank slowly back down as the thing beneath us drew another breath.

I bent my knees on instinct, the way you do on the deck of a boat, and my stomach went up and came down a half-second behind the rest of me.

The whole world was rising and falling under us.

I stood on the breathing scale, watched the horizon tilt, and let out a long, slow breath.

’Ah, damn... not again.’