The World Below

The gods hatched out of the world and left it to rot. In the dead world beneath it, the witch means to call them back down onto a pyre, and bind them there, and stop the rot by force.

Heyou came round, and while they weighed a rest Draz worked over the two dead mantises. Where the creatures had fallen half into stone, the buried parts still passed through rock as if it were air — but only the parts that had died inside the matter; pull them free and the stone stayed whole. So they cut those pieces loose, and found that worn, they lent a limb the same passage, though there were too few of them to send a whole body through a wall. Sylvie looked out through the hole in the floor at the World Below — a barren, lifeless spread — and saw, far off by an abandoned settlement, a titan carrying a great rock, slow, alone.

She spoke to it across the gulf in the Voice of Dread, gently, only to say hello; it did not answer. So she threw a Fireball up into the air between them for a flare, and a winged lion came out of a far tower and up toward their ledge. Heyou drank a potion and went invisible. The lion landed and loosed a roar that went through them all, and Draz read its meaning as near as he could: it asked whether they were servants of its mistress — a mistress who had come down out of the sky and woken it, and woken the titans. They asked it to bring her up to them, and it went to fetch her, and they took what rest they could while Heyou kept the pendant and the Living Fortress in hand, hidden behind Draz.

Ygva came back riding the lion, and greeted Sylvie as sister — naming her a worker of the umbra now, since the heart came out of her. She asked her help, and laid the whole of it bare. She was gathering the remnants and totems of the gods to eight altars, to raise a pyre vast enough to draw the departed gods back down into the world below and bind them there, with the titans' aid, before the rot above finished the world entire. Sylvie read her for the truth of it and found things left unsaid, but no lie. They agreed to go with her, and the lion — Valghast — carried them down into the World Below, the fall taking the nerve of all of them but Sylvie.

They came down on the roof of a great tower, and below it the titans were at work: clearing the dead buildings, setting eight flat stones in a wide ring, heaping an offering-pile that held whole forests' worth of blessed branches. Ygva had Heyou carry the Askavir Heart down and set it on Tlellic's stone. It was not the last piece, she said; the pyre was not ready to burn. And Sylvie's own heart was likely somewhere in that heaped offering — but she would not need it back.

There was a stone for each of the eight: Ulmira and Tlellic, Kreth and Brathis, Mollthain and Caranthalis, Ossa, and the last god-king, Otheidas. The piles before them were uneven — Caranthalis's and Ulmira's were full, Kreth's and Brathis's and Mollthain's were thin — and Ygva meant to even them before she lit anything. Passing the altars, Heyou saw weapons and jewels and a Caranthalis book of pressed flowers, and among God-King Otheidas's relics a metal-and-wood arm-band stamped with the sigil off his own chest — the same mark that had been pressed into his wood when he first woke — a thing, he judged, that might build a new being if it were ever powered. Ygva let him take it, and invited them to name what else might serve better in their hands; Draz gave up his compass that would only point upward, and she read it as pointing to Ossa, the Wanderer of the Peaks, somewhere in the sky — and then he took it back again.

She named the lion Valghast and said he would stay to carry them up and down at need. The pale disc above them — the "moon" — was the hole they had fallen through, and it was a road, she said, to the next world out beyond this one; that road was closed to her. Sylvie reached for her lunar power and found it ran stronger down here. At her asking, Ygva taught her a lesser summoning, a Summon Horror, and cut empowering sigils into Draz and Jamal and Heyou — not Sylvie, who was changed already. She spoke, once, of an apprentice she had made and lost, gone west, the thread between them cut.

Three roads led to the totems she still lacked: the fairies' guard at Thistleglass, for Kreth; the deep dark of Grithmaar Deep, for Mollthain — the digging thing Jamal had glimpsed there, long ago; and the Celsian Athenaeum to the west, which Ygva would raid herself. Jamal balked at Grithmaar Deep, where his own people's ruin lay, and then agreed to it. And Sylvie set down plainly what the plan would cost: every pyre above was going dark as its branches were carried down here to this one, every town left to the cold and the Umbral things — so that the gods might be dragged low and chained. Loose ends, and no shortage of them.

Retcon (storytime cleanup): Draz recovers his compass before the party leaves the world below.