him. Nassun gasps, but they do nothing other than march and ignite others in turn, spreading and glowing until a roughly rectangular shape has been etched out on the stone at Schaffa’s feet. There is a faint, barely audible hum that makes Nassun twitch and look around wildly, but a moment later the white material in front of Schaffa vanishes. It doesn’t slide aside, or open like a door; it’s just gone. But it is a doorway, Nassun abruptly realizes. “And here we are,” Schaffa murmurs. He sounds a little surprised himself.
Beyond this doorway is a tunnel that curves gradually down into the ground and out of sight. Narrow rectangular panels of light edge the steps on either side, illuminating the way. The curling bit of metal is a railing, she sees now, her perception reorienting as she moves to stand beside Schaffa. Something to hold on to, as one walks down into the depths.
In a distant part of the grass forest that they just traversed, there is a high-pitched grating noise that Nassun immediately identifies as animal. Chitinous, maybe. A closer, louder version of the screeches they heard the night before. Nassun flinches and looks at Schaffa.
“Some sort of grasshopper, I believe,” he says. His jaw is tight as he gazes back at the pass they just traversed, though nothing moves there—yet. “Or cicadas, perhaps. Inside now. I’ve seen something like this mechanism before; it should close after we pass through.”
He gestures for her to go first so that he can guard the rear. Nassun takes a deep breath and reminds herself that this is what is necessary to make a world that will hurt no one else. Then she trots down the stairs.
The light panels ignite five or six steps ahead as she progresses, and fade three steps behind. Once they’re a few feet down, just as Schaffa predicted, the white material that covered the stairwell reappears, cutting off further screeches from the forest.
Then there is nothing but the light, and the stairs, and the long-forgotten city somewhere below.
2699: Two Fulcrum blackjackets summoned to Deejna comm (Uher Quartent, Western Coastals, near Kiash Traps) when Mount Imher showed eruption signs. Blackjackets informed comm officials that eruption was imminent, and that it would likely touch off the whole Kiash cluster, including Madness (local name for the supervolcano that triggered the Madness Season; Imher sits on the same hot spot). Upon determining that Imher was beyond their ability to quell, the blackjackets—one three-ringer, the other supposedly seven although did not wear rings for some reason—made the attempt anyway, due to insufficient time to send for higher-ringed Imperial Orogenes. They successfully stilled the eruption long enough for a nine-ring senior Imperial Orogene to arrive and push it back into dormancy. (Three-ringer and seven-ringer found holding hands, charred, frozen.)
—Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Syl Anagist: Three
FASCINATING. ALL OF THIS GROWS easier to remember with the telling … or perhaps I am still human, after all.
At first our field excursion is simply the act of walking through the city. We have spent the brief years since our initial decanting immersed in sesuna, the sense of energy in all its forms. A walk outside forces us to pay attention to our other, lesser senses, and this is initially overwhelming. We flinch at the springiness of pressed-fiber sidewalks under our shoes, so unlike the hard lacquerwood of our quarters. We sneeze trying to breathe air thick with smells of bruised vegetation and chemical by-product and thousands of exhaled breaths. Their first sneeze frightens Dushwha into tears. We clap hands over our ears to try, and fail, to screen out many voices talking and walls groaning and leaves rustling and machinery whining in the distance. Bimniwha tries to yell over it all, and Kelenli must stop and soothe her before she will try speaking normally again. I duck and yelp in fear of the birds that sit in a nearby bush, and I am the calmest of us.
What settles us, at last, is finally having the chance to gaze upon the full beauty of the amethyst plutonic fragment. It is an awesome thing, pulsing with the slow flux of magic as it towers over the city-node’s heart. Every node of Syl Anagist has adapted in unique ways to suit its local climate. We have heard of nodes in the desert where buildings are grown from hardened giant succulents; nodes on the ocean built by coral organisms engineered to grow and die on command. (Life is sacred in