“We’ll fly,” he said. “I’ll glide in. We’ll descend slowly till we see the floor, and then decide if we continue flying, or choose to walk.”
“Alright. Give me your pack.”
Scorio ignited his Heart and grew into his scaled form, ineffable strength and power flooding him. This time, he willed his wings to extrude, and with a shudder they burst forth, bat-like and broad. Since he’d be gliding, he made them as wide as they’d go, great muscles forming around his shoulders and overlapping his chest.
“There,” he said. “Ready?”
Naomi clucked her tongue. “You have to ask?” She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to his hips with the inside of her knees. “Hurry up and start flying. Holding on to you like this is undignified.”
“As you command, my queen.” Scorio laughed as she thwapped him, and stepped up to the furrow’s edge.
Only now did he glance back the way they had come.
Druanna’s fire was but a tiny mote of white light in the darkness.
It seemed so small, and so terribly far away.
Scorio took a deep breath. His ribcage expanded to its fullest, and when he exhaled, he tipped forward and dove into the dark.
Chapter 3
Scorio’s outstretched wings filled with air as he sliced down into the darkness. The chill was cruel, but his Heart was akin to a furnace, causing his body to smolder. Down they flew, Naomi clinging tightly, down into the huge tunnel.
Scorio’s heart was pounding with excitement and fear. Just like when he sparred with the Nightmare Lady, he had to restrain himself from trying to glance in every direction at once.
Instead, he forced himself to relax and slowly sweep his gaze from side to side as they speared forward into the absolute blackness. Within moments the rock ceiling had passed by overhead, the last faint glimmers of light drowned in the swarming black, and only his darkvision allowed him to track the rough curvature of the tunnel’s side.
Its depth was prodigious, its extent impossible to discern. They must have flown under the cliff already, but there was no sign of the boundary. On they glided, Scorio allowing them to gently drift down. The air was utterly still, the silence complete but for the rushing of wind and Naomi’s breath in his ear.
The tunnel wall bellied away gradually as they continued to sink, then slowly returned, curving back in. Scorio saw the tunnel floor at last. It was rough with fallen rocks and debris, but here and there glassy smooth stretches showed where the World Worm’s form had abraded it to mirror-like perfection.
“Down?” he called over his shoulder.
“Hold the glide,” Naomi called back. “Let’s see what’s ahead.”
They flew on, but his glide was rapidly losing power; there was no movement to the air, nothing akin to an updraft, so he began beating his wings, great, languorous sweeps that propelled them farther.
The tunnel was still slowly descending ever deeper into the rock. Would it only ever descend? What if the World Worm dug its way under the signal, and they emerged too many valleys over?
Scorio clenched his jaw and flew on.
The floor sped by. Here and there he noticed crystal outgrowths, spiky and unbroken, jutting out of the wall and ground like dull spears in the darkness. They had to have burst forth since the World Worm’s passing.
The Iron Weald healing this tunnel-wound?
“Sense the Iron,” Naomi called.
Scorio opened his senses, and to his surprise found that there was precious little Iron mana in the air. What thin streams and wisps were to be found would coil up in a manner akin to how Copper would behave, and sink to the ground, where he sensed a turgid river flowing just like real water did below, going ever down.
“Weird,” he called back. “The World Worm?”
“Maybe.”
Down they flew. With so little mana to draw on, Scorio found himself in the rare situation of watching his reservoir deplete, so after a spell he glided down to the tunnel floor, where he dropped the last few yards into a staggered run, releasing his wings and easing Naomi down to the ground.
The Iron mana was only knee high and strangely diluted. He set to sweeping it into his reservoir, felt Naomi do the same, and they quickly cleared the immediate area around them without topping off their reservoir.
“Strange,” Scorio said, turning in a circle. “Never seen Iron act like this.”
“We’re going to have to be conservative. If we burn everything we’ve got, it’ll take us ages to refill.”
“Has to be the World Worm,” said Scorio with a confidence he didn’t possess. “Its passage, or maybe a lingering effect on the mana.”
“Speculate all you like, we can’t know for sure.” Naomi drew her hair back and tied it off with a leather thong. “But let’s keep going. If it goes down for too much longer, we might need to consider turning back. How close are we to the signal?”
Scorio focused on the sensation. “Still far. We haven’t made any noticeable progress.”
“We’ve only come a mile or two. How wide did Druanna say the mountain dividers were this far down the canyon?”
“I’m not sure. Half a mile, perhaps? Maybe more? I remember her saying they were twenty miles thick by the time the Iron Weald hits the Telurian Band.”
“Then if we’re halfway, that means they might be closer to ten miles. We’ve a ways to go before we reach the next canyon. Maybe that’s why the World Worm kept diving. Perhaps it only surfaces in canyons.”
“Speculate all you like,” Scorio said with a grin, but danced away as Naomi glared at him. “Come on. Let’s make some time.”
They strode on.
The tunnel proved to be supremely unnerving. Druanna’s warnings made them paranoid, and they frequently stumbled and tripped as they gazed up into the darkness, their feet catching on chunks of shattered rock.
Time passed, but Scorio lost all sense of it. An hour? Two? Five? It began to feel as if they’d been below for days, but the lack of real hunger showed that to be a lie. At first they were conservative with their waterskins, but grew more lax after reaching the first waterfall.
It was little more than a dispersed curtain of droplets that fell from the void above, but its continuous patter served to fill cracks and crevices in the rock. They debated the possibility of the World Worm’s passage poisoning the water, but Naomi grew irritated and tasted a palmful, only to declare it chalky but fine. They refilled their waterskins and moved on.
The Iron mana remained at a low ebb. What little oozed out of the walls quickly grew mist-like and fell to the ground. They drank in everything as they outpaced the flow, but it was an unsatisfying broth, thin and insubstantial.
“Has the tunnel leveled off?” Naomi was ahead of him, and turned in a circle as she slowed. “Seems like we’ve been walking on a flat stretch for a while.”
“I think you’re right.” It was eerie how their voices didn’t even echo. The sheer scale of the tunnel drank every sound completely. “Maybe we’ve gone as deep as it’ll go.”
They continued, and soon the ground began to rise. It was subtle at first, then ever more overt. They reached a stretch that was almost completely choked with rubble, and for a while Scorio suspected a cave-in, but when he saw how steeply the tunnel climbed on the far side he realized what had happened: all the loose rock had rolled down to this elbow and nearly filled in the massive tunnel.
They scrambled up the scoria and slag and finally reached the tunnel floor again. He’d expected the World Worm’s rise to be as gradual as its descent, but the slope had become abruptly steep, and the Iron slid past them rapidly like rivulets of mercury. His thighs began to burn as the climb grew sharper, and the cold that had begun to seep into him was banished by his effort.