“Oh, I can’t create it,” the dwarf told her, waving them through. “None of my kind can. D’hea created us without the ability, and instead, made us fairly resistant to magic of all kinds.” He beat his hand against his chest. “Makes dealing with the Dracsi much easier, after all. But we still needed to control magic, for the lightning if nothing else.” He nodded back down the way they came. “It’s required to feed the Dracsi, so D’hea made sure we could still manipulate magic, even if we couldn’t cast it ourselves.”

Fort would have loved to have asked Sikurgurd a thousand follow-up questions, but now wasn’t the time. “Shouldn’t we be quiet?” he asked instead. “I thought we’d reached the city.”

“Oh, we should be safe while we’re in the tunnels,” Sikurgurd told him. “There’s not another group of feeders scheduled for a while.”

As they passed the gate, the dwarf released his hold on the lightning, letting it cascade back across the tunnel, closing off their exit. With no real choice, Fort led the others around a corner, then stopped abruptly, throwing out his arms to keep the others from falling as he almost had.

He and his father had once walked on a glass path that overhung the Grand Canyon, standing over a mile above the canyon floor. Nothing felt like it could possibly go deeper than that, at the time.

But now, Fort stood on the edge of a dimly lit cavern that had to extend for dozens, maybe hundreds of miles below him, with masses of Dracsi-kin milling about each and every level down as far as he could see.

Lightning tubes began at their height, and ran up, down, diagonally, and in every other direction, connecting both to the gate behind them, and continuing on from there. Elaborate crystal gondolas ran throughout the cavern along some of the tubes, zooming up or down along with the lightning, only to coast as the electricity passed, waiting for the next bolt to strike.

And everything was covered in gold, silver, and gems of all kinds. The city of Dra had to be one of the richest in existence, if you went by rare minerals. But the dwarves weren’t collecting or hoarding the gold and jewels; instead, they’d built with them, using gold for roofs and creating elaborate decorations with gemstones.

The biggest display of wealth lay in the middle of the cavern, rising all the way up to their level from potentially the bottom floor. From what Fort could tell from the random lightning blazing by, it looked like a sculpture. From here, he could make out the very top of a human or dwarf head, so enormous that Fort could barely see down to its forehead. That meant the sculpture could be an entire body or more, depending on how far down it extended.