Trey’s disembodied mind watched his mother tip sideways into a black maw, a hole with sharp edges that seemed to go down, down . . . She fell, and although he obeyed her last wish and did not send his mind to follow her, he sensed in her last moments an immense peace and conviction that she had done the right thing.

Seconds later, suddenly, she was gone.

Trey screamed himself awake. The sound terrified him—they had been almost silent for the entirety of their journey—and so he screamed some more. He thought he heard something answering from far away with a scream of its own making, but perhaps it was an echo already lost.

TREY WENT ON. He remembered only brief flashes of the remainder of his journey. He continued to lick moisture from walls or drink from underground streams. He ate moss and it started making him sick. He had to defecate every few hundred steps, feverish, dislocated, driven now by instinct alone. Images flashed in and out, places and smells and distant sounds, but he did not know whether they were true memories or imagined by his fledge-fueled mind. He saw an underground waterfall venting itself into a bottomless pothole, but its sound could have been the roar of a victorious Nax. He swiped with his disc-sword at something in the dark as it flapped in and bit him, slapped at his ears with leathery wings. He cried himself to sleep as the minds of the dead touched his own. He dreamed of Sonda.

Trey remembered reaching the rising. It was a great cavern carved out of the bowels of the world centuries ago by machines as large as the entombed Beast. Traces of them remained, littering the cavern’s perimeter, metallic ribs exposed and rotted with rust, old byways and hollows where something once existed now sad and vacant. In a pit in the center of the cave flickered the Eternal Flame of the underground, ever-lit to guide in miners with their cargos of fledge. It illuminated the whole cavern and blinded Trey, showing just how deserted that place was.