There is no wind, no rustling, no true natural sound once the echoes of the monster’s shattering bones fade. There is only the soft crackling of bone-grass, Verity’s gentle humming, and the rustle of our armors— chain for her, metal and leather for the both of us.

  All the worse to quell my thoughts. My worries, released through the flexing and swinging of my tail, only to rise again from within. They’re hardly the darkest; Verity is walking away from that battle unharmed, and the bruise on my side is already healing.

  I look to my Depth meter. Ninety-eight marches. Ninety-nine. One hundred, one hundred and one...

  “That didn’t make much sense,” Verity says aloud, a handful of minutes after the fight concludes. Her voice has lost some of that second tone I was hearing before, reduced to a trill punctuating her words. “I’m no Delver, so correct me if I’m wrong?”

  She looks at me, pausing, and I look back. Don’t I already correct people? “Sure.”

  “Thanks,” she smiles, lips quirking. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “That was not a little material-and-animal mix that I can crack open in a few hits.”

  “Not in the slightest,” I agree. I curl my tail up to check it for damage, and I drip down a bit of Lightning to sear off any tar. “Either it came up from below, or we’re in a pretty rare Delve.”

  "I pride myself in my observational skills. I've got good eyes," Verity leans forward, showing more of her face to me and winking. “Rare in a good way?”

  “Bad, but you knew that,” I snort, kicking at the grass in front of us. “Gods, we’re already beyond the usual depth for a yer transition, Verity. Delves usually follow a clear structural pattern, we’re in one that doesn’t.”

  “The Goddess always gives me the interesting challenges,” she muses, still leaning forward. “I’m sure we’ll be fine, but you’re probably already thinking of a pn. Should we go back even earlier?”

  Should we?

  I weigh the risks again. I'd be a fool not to, and while I certainly can be a fool, I'd prefer to avoid the habit. Something twinges as memories make themselves known— failure, foolishness, Helena's blind ambition, Dongbaek's trickery.

  My tail thumps against the ground, swinging hard enough to shatter the bone-grass. The pattering sensations pull my focus back, and I meet Verity's eyes.

  “We push forward for now,” I decide, taking care to turn the thought over in my head. “We can't afford too many deys, and for all that this was abnormal, we weren't in danger.”

  Verity finally straightens, and her path moves closer to mine. She nods, humming to herself. “This is bothering you, though, that much is obvious. Too many unsettling problems, right?”

  She's right. I grunt in response, feeling out the curve of the Delve. I turn slightly to correct our course, taking care not to brush Verity as I do. We're closer to the next yer now— much closer. No real hint of what the transition will look like, but if that is strange too, I'll not be surprised.

  “You're quite ferocious in a fight,” Verity says brightly, and I don't have to look to know she's smiling again. “It’s one thing to see all that muscle, and another to see it all in motion.”

  “Of course,” I say before I can stop myself. “It’s my job, and I'm good at it. You're not bad yourself— that fireball at the end was impressive.”

  She ughs, throwing her head back. The sound is strangely fnged, underscored by the return of that second tone. “Goddess, there's nothing more satisfying than a big, fshy spell! And I never get to use it. Do you know how dangerous that thing is outside a Delve?”

  “Wildfires, damage to buildings, and the shockwave might break a regur human?” I ask drily. It's hardly a guess— I've heard the same things about many of my bigger Lighting-based structures.

  “Right on all counts, but the phrasing is a bit reductive, isn't it?” Verity replies, extending a hand palm-down and wiggling it. “Saying it breaks them is treating humans— regur, unchanged ones— like objects, not people.”

  Hm.

  “I suppose it is,” I muse, scratching my chin. The scales have made it up to the base of my jaw, so I get a satisfying clink with each movement. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Nobles rarely do,” Verity mutters sourly, then sighs. When she speaks again, it's in a softer, gentler tone. “I'm gd you actually listen. Now, how's our progress? The pressure’s changing faster than before.”

  Frustration stirs, a different kind than before.

  “Not the time, Verity,” I huff, electing to ignore the bite in her first comment. Even at that ill-fated gathering when I arrived in this city, I'd seen nobles who might foolishly ignore a Padin of Adamantine. She’s found plenty of reasons to distrust us, I’m sure. “As for progress...”

  The Delve is curving more now; I can feel the Delve pressure swell around us, grasping with rotten tendrils but finding no purchase on my scales. One hundred sixty, one hundred seventy two, one hundred eighty five... mm. I flex my tail thoughtfully. I’d estimated something closer to a hundred eighty, but that’s not half bad.

  “The transition is coming up. Closer to two hundred marches than one hundred, looks like.”

  “You mean an absolute... hm, down-ness? Of two hundred, right? That's bizarre. I'd expect those crystal things, maybe a Delve Heart at this depth.” Verity's smile returns, and Gods, I've found something worse than people calling it a magical gradient every time.

  “You can call it Delve depth or Delve down,” I manage, tail twitching and spasming briefly. “Depth is detectable by a triple-axis abstraction pressure gradient. It is not down-ness.”

  “Delve down. I like that!” Verity says brightly, nodding sagely. Her eyes flick behind me, then ahead of us. “Down-ness is a bit childish by comparison, isn't it.”

  “Yes,” I mutter, taking a breath. Right. Delving. I reach out with that st, impossible sense, feeling the Delve's pulsation. Harder, with my soul armored as it is, but enough to know that there's no Hearts nearby. Their echo is unmistakable, but the distance is hard to guess at.

  We walk through the field until the field isn't; a new shape and yer has taken its pce.The pressure, rotten and wriggling, plucks at my scales but finds no weaknesses.

  Brittle grass one step, crumbling stone the next. The golden sky is caged by towering orange-red cliffs, their jagged edges grasping for what remains. Bitter wind howls past, yanking my hair as it goes. My senses spread, my blood roars, and despite the ck of obvious threats, I stay alert. Be it monsters or the Delve itself, the solidified abstract will always hold dangers.

  We've been dropped into a carved, open-sided tunnel, one of many that spot the cliffs. Stactites hang overhead, some nearly dipping to the floor. The paths weave and link and twist, some going up, many going down into the dark.

  Peering out and up, I see a ck of sky: above us, barely visible through the gap between the cliffs, is a sea of yellowed grass. Hm.

  “More bck smoke,” Verity murmurs, her hand brushing mine. She taps her cwed nails against my scales, then points at a tunnel that curves and burrows into the cliff itself. Darkness writhes within the tunnel, strange tendrils visible only by how their edges catch the light.

  “There’s a name for this,” I mutter to myself, turning over a half-formed memory. I try casting my memory back through every training, every lesson, every css I’d ever taken dealing with the stranger side of magic. Warding, abstraction, Delve theory... Bah. But I can’t quite catch the word or the meaning, not with my senses and instincts buzzing. Only one thing for it: shrug, worry, and kill monsters.

  I frown. That’s three things, actually, but the point stands.

  “Not the best time for me to think it over, though. If we have to get near it or things get stranger, we’ll reassess.”

  “As long as you’re not too worried, I’m not either.” Verity winks at me. Plucking a bent feather from her hair, she waves it at me pointedly. “As long as our subject matter expert thinks we’ll be back and unbloodied by dinner, mind you. Onward!”

  She drops the feather and hefts her mace, pointing it out in front of us. Which is, of course, the wrong direction. Mostly over the cliff face, in fact.

  After a moment to gather myself— and recover from Verity’s blinding enthusiasm— I point with my tail in the other direction, then follow up with my arm. “Onward and downward.”

  Without missing a beat, Verity lowers her mace and gestures for me to lead. The path ahead is narrow, a tunnel in the cliff-face caged by stactites. But it curves down, down to where the deepest point of this yer seems to rest.

  I can only pray to our shared goddess Adamantine that the strange, wriggling feeling in the back of my head is wrong, and the darkness means nothing. That the rot is merely an obstacle, not a threat.

  More stony monsters found us at the narrowest point in the passage, screeching in from their distant perches— rock against rock, shrill enough to hurt my ears. Irritation escaped through a shing tail and putting my fist through the bat-monsters' chests.

  Verity's shields let us push them back to a broader point, a spot more practical for shattering our weak prey. Their corpses now litter the five march wide space as proof of our success. It’s a shame this is an urgent mission, one where I can’t really stop to collect crystals; I’ve spotted more than a handful of Wind crystals clinging to the cliffsides. Bit too hard to reach quickly.

  With one st heave, one st roar to expel the strain of countless taut muscles, I toss a crumbling stone monster into our st remaining opponent. Pebbles ctter against scale and armor, and with a crack, the stone bat is sent tumbling into the chasm below.

  This time, none rise up to repce it. I am left with a pounding heart and warmed muscles; each breath comes with a low growl, barely audible over the howling wind.

  My lips are pulled tight in a grin I know would make most humans shudder. I stand unharmed by my prey this time, but Gods, there are few things as satisfying as a fight. And my comrade here is an impressive fighter, which is all the better— while her fireballs won’t work in close quarters, her shield crushes wings and her mace shatters stone limbs with ease.

  And, just as pleasing, we hadn’t crossed paths with even a hint of the bck smoke on this yer. Verity doesn’t seem terribly happy, though, if the furrow of her brow is anything to go by.

  "Stagmite bats," Verity says darkly, inspecting her mace for dents. She grimaces at a particur spot, and with a flick of her fingers, the head turns cherry red. A bit of petty envy seeps its way in at the sight of her mastery, but I easily quash it with a surge of admiration for her practical Magecraft. "Goddess. Who thought of that?"

  "It's the abstract. Who knows?" I grunt, letting my grin fade and rolling my shoulders to loosen them. They twinge at the apex of their motion, and I allow myself a soft hiss. "I'll be feeling the joltsss in the morning... but it was a good fight. I like them. Alsso, it’s stactitess."

  "I'd have words with them, ideally the correct ones next time," she enunciates, and with two fingers she massages a dent in the metal away. Her smile, though, returns in full force. "It was fun though, you're right! Mostly watching you toss them at each other. Hitting them was awful."

  “Gd to entertain, I suppose,” I say drily, looking away. Shifting my focus back to actual progress in the Delve, I pull my Delve depth meter out. The little wheel on it takes a moment to settle, but the depth still flickers up and down rhythmically. “We’re already at... three hundred forty-odd marches. The yer transition won't be too much further, hopefully.”

  Verity approaches me, still smoothing out her mace. Her dark skin melds into bird scale as she strokes it in strange, gentle motions, guiding the cherry-red grains of metal to follow a particur path. She turns her head, watching me with one sun-yellow eye. “That’d put us close to our limit for the day. What’s our pn?”

  I look at her, then at the tunnel, then back at her. I raise an eyebrow, gesturing generally toward the tunnel, allowing a smile to curl my lips. “Unless you pn on climbing, Verity, we don't exactly have many options.”

  She snorts, rolling her eyes. “I— yes, Ivy, I know. But what about when we get the Heart? What if we can't find it before five hundred marches?”

  We keep going, is what I don't say. Something scaled and cwed in my mind reaches out and stops what comes next— so I don't say that there'll obviously be a Delve Heart, either. But none of this is entirely out of the norm. I've been in strange Delves before, I've summited a mountain that spanned from six hundred to a thousand marches.

  But I’ve never had the safety of a city weighing on my shoulders. Not like this. I take a shuddering breath— a long, rattling inhale, a hissing exhale. The bruise on my chest stings, just a bit, and the aches of my body make themselves known.

  Verity knows, too. I can feel her burning eyes trace the lines of my face.

  “We're taking a risk,” she says softly, and her words hang heavy in the air.

  I gesture again at the tunnel and start walking. Rather than give her a composed response, I simply... speak, allowing frustration and experience to flow in equal measure.

  “What else can we do, Verity?” I ugh bitterly, picking up a loose rock. Frustration, though, quickly builds to rage. A burning heat in my chest, a fury, a desire to hunt and kill and hurt. “We stick to procedure, we look for a Heart up to a depth of five hundred marches. If we don't, we leave empty-handed, and I use the Heart I took in the st Delve tomorrow. I was hoping to save that for my final ascent, but every day wasted is a day Craumont is dying.”

  The st word comes out as a snarl, punctuated by a heavy thump of my tail against stone. I turn, winding my arm back, and drive the full force of my body out through the rock. The very air cracks from its passage, thundering back at us while the projectile itself shatters a stactite across the chasm.

  “Gods. I want to hate this pce,” I hiss, gesturing onward. My tail comes up to my side, and I run my cws along it to soothe myself. “The Church just can't stop ruining my life, can it.”

  Verity’s thin smile stays, but her eyes take on a darker sheen. A flicker of orange-red light from her hands extinguishes her mace, and she drops it through a loop in her belt.

  “Then let's do our best, right?” she says, and then she's off down the tunnel. Her voice echoes back to me, “We can punch the priest and insult your parents' graves ter. Sound good?”

  I stare after her, a bit incredulous. And, impossibly, I feel less awful. “Isn't that a bit much for a padin?”

  “My mother punches autocrats, I threw a Duke of Caliburn in the ocean,” Verity practically sings. “This is trivial by comparison.”

  I bark out a ugh, and hurry on after her. “Not bad, Verity. I like that.”

  And then, “You threw a Duke in the ocean?”

  Her ughter echoes down the tunnel, but she never quite answers me.

  She doesn’t need to. I’ve vented, I’ve calmed down, and it’ll be far easier to do my job now.

  The path winds, the path twists, the path burrows into the stone; I break stone monsters with my cws and Verity shatters them with shield and mace. Crystals begin to sprout from the walls, little stactites of Wind and Earth made solid by the depth.

  We find the yer transition— two stagmites, the only ones we'd seen, with a field of crumbled stone between them. And, thank the Gods, we find a Heart buried deep in a crevice. Its yellow light flickers weakly, but it should be good enough for today's task.

  But we push on and see the full extent of the third yer: a sluggish river of gleaming water, weaving its way between two endless expanses of greyish-brown stone. A handful of rger rocks are all that break up the ndscape, lumpy mockeries of mountains and hills. Interestingly enough, there’s some Earth crystals amongst the rocks, barely distinguishable without the soft glow.

  “It's a risk,” Verity says, but she's the first one through.

  “We’ll take it,” I reply, and we do. We take that risk, we Delve deeper. Beyond five hundred marches, by some half-spoken agreement.

  We fight the half-formed monsters of rusty red cy that drag themselves up from the river, we stay far from plumes of bck smoke that seep through some of the rocks.

  Dread remains.

  Fortunately for us, there's a perfect spot to open a portal back to the cliffs. Making a shorter path is an involved, exhausting process; open the new portal, find the old one and seal it. Lots of walking, lots of reaching into those rotten mechanisms and hoping I don't vomit. Repeating it between yers two and one?

  It's a bit like swallowing bile, then washing it down with lye. The Heart very nearly breaks, too.

  But it works. I’ve quartered the distance between our entry portal and the entrance to yer two, and the portal from two to three is perhaps ten marches away from that first shortcut. Tomorrow, it’ll only take us twenty or so minutes to descend to over six hundred marches, rather than a handful of hours. Given the ascent will likely take a few hours due to decompression rest periods, any time saved is incredibly valuable.

  So, the metaphorical lye-drinking is worth it.

  Needless to say, with our route established, I swim up through the Delve portal in a much poorer mood than I entered it, even buoyed by the scale of our success. I need a bath, possibly two, some salves for a litany of bruises, tweezers for some cracked scales, and food.

  Stepping back into Craumont, though, I am greeted by a wall of people that assaults my still-sharpened senses. Chattering, talking. Shuffling boots, occasional raised voices— apart, in the singur, they are manageable. Together, they are incomprehensible without significant focus. Motion and cmour, painted over the heartbeat of Craumont; voices familiar and unfamiliar blending into noise.

  There's Winston and Helena on one end, and a smattering of common folk on the other— a headache starts to form when I realize several of them are wearing those purple robes. At least everything looks civil.

  My tail ctters against the cobbled pza, the Heart in my cws crumbles to dust.

  “Bah,” I say to the air, rolling my neck. “Why is it that, whenever something strange happens, it's right when I need a bath?”

  Origami_Narwhal