Malachite sends a withering look at him. “Maybe move your arse.”

“I’m just being factual,” the celeon hisses back, beginning to mince down the thin pathway with an effortless ease. His tail swishes, no doubt giving him a balance advantage. Fione stares warily at the thin pathway and then her cane.

Malachite sees it and offers his pale hand to her. “C’mon, Your Grace. I’ll carry you on my back.”

“I can walk just fine,” she sniffs.

“I know you can,” the beneather sighs. “It’s just to be safe. C’mon.”

She studies the impossibly long drop for a second more and then slings her cane beneath her pack, climbing on Malachite’s kneeling back. He straightens, holding her like it’s nothing, and looks back at Lucien and me.

“I’ll leave you two slobbering lovebirds to figure out who goes first.”

“Eternally thankful,” Lucien drawls and tips an imaginary hat. He turns back to me with a smirk. “Jealous, you think?”

“Irascibly so,” I agree and motion for him to go first.

“Don’t fall,” he advises.

“If I do, I’ll shout up and let you know how deep it is.” I smile. I’m making jokes, but the second I take two steps onto the precarious line of stone, I feel my stomach drop out. A cold wind whispers up from the abyss on either side of my feet, and I finally get it. It wasn’t the traps or the suffocating darkness and closeness of the tunnel. It’s this yawning nothingness that crystallizes my understanding of the Dark Below—it goes on forever.

It’s not a place but a feeling, the deep and unsettling feeling of eternity. I’ve felt it before in my darkest moments of hunger—the hopelessness of my situation. The hopelessness of immortality. No change. No end. Only pain like dark, without rest.

I look up from the fall and to Lucien’s back. Because of him, I found rest. Because of them all, I found change. But other Heartless aren’t so lucky. And the valkerax aren’t lucky at all—dying in scores for a Tree they can’t disobey.

We make it to the other side of the fall, the cavern narrowing again, and I look back once at the runes all over the walls. Runes that tell me to forget, to think, to run chaos in my own mind. Runes that presume I’m like the other valkerax, like every other Heartless, like everyone else who can’t disobey.

Like everyone else who wants to continue the cycle.

A single blood tear falls off my cheek, and my soft laugh is swallowed up by the abyss.

…

Finally, through the bones and the traps and the shadow, we come to a door.