Auri woke up to a splitting headache. His whole body hurt, but that was the least. He actually cared more about the dusty and charged air surrounding him, which made it hard to breathe. If he enjoyed one thing, it was breathing in clean air. Unfortunately, the dark and cold hole didn’t allow him to do so. Though calling the place he was in a ‘hole’ was a massive understatement.

  Once he cracked his bones and joints back into place, the first thing he did was light up his lantern. It took but a tendril of light for the glass to amplify the rest of the light. This lantern had accompanied him into many travels, and unfortunately, it was so old that it was no longer produced, the secrets of the manufacturing lost to time and trillions of plants, so he’d rather not lose it.

  The light wasn’t powerful enough to vanish the surrounding darkness, but that surprised him not. What minimally surprised him, however, was the corpse right next to him.

  “Achala!” Auri cursed in a language that he hadn’t used in so long of a time that he forgot its name. “I told him not to follow me!”

  The corpse pertained to the man who had guided him to the entrance of the depths, and apparently, he hadn’t followed the traveler’s advice about not jumping inside the hole that went all the way past the planet’s crust. What was more surprising was that the corpse was even recognizable, taking into consideration the massive fall.

  “I guess he used my body to cushion the fall,” he scratched the back of his head. “Obviously, that wasn’t enough.”

  Whatever tricks the dead man had used to mitigate fall – whilst not perfect – were endearing, as judging by the bloodshot eyes and twisted extremities, he hadn’t seemed to die instantly. Human bodies were like that; sometimes falling from a staircase was instant death, and sometimes you could fall kilometers into the bowels of the earth and survive for a handful of seconds.

  Surely those scarce seconds were enough for the guide to regret his decision as that was without a shadow of a doubt the most painful moment of his life.

  “You should have just embraced your death and died instantly, man,” Auri cracked his neck again. “I know how much that must have hurt.”

  Gracefully, the cave explorer infused his lantern with more light. Still not enough to see more than a handful of meters before him, but better than before. He tried looking upwards, but only darkness met him. He tied the lantern to his belt, as handling it would make no difference.

  “I’ll be damned,” he put his hands on his hips. “It should be midday, and yet not a single ray of light makes it down here. Can I even make it outside? No, probably not in this lifetime. Dunes! Andalushia must be so angry… Oh, well!” Auri didn’t let the darkness sap away his wanderlust. “If upwards isn’t the answer, downwards it is!”

  However, he wasn’t alone in the depths. That much became clear the moment he stepped on top of a vein of agate. The pressure sent a ripple of light through the mineral growth, the pulse extending far and wide before disappearing into the horizon hundreds of meters away. One ripple went upwards, the other downwards.

  “This vein alone must be bigger than cities!” He chuckled.

  He had seen many things in his life, but a vein of agate that extended for kilometers up and down was certainly a first. A single continuous growth of agate bigger than meteorites if not outright planetoids and satellites. His enthusiasm, however, was muted by a growing cacophony of growls and chirrs.

  “It would seem I have alerted the local monster population,” Auri commented with all the calmness of the world.

  The traveler hid behind a rock formation and dimmed the light from his lantern. The sounds became more plentiful, striding shrills echoing across the walls, yet he still hadn’t managed to see anything.

  I think that’s a form of echolocation, so illuminating the place won’t matter. I guess it makes sense that the critters here don’t guide themselves through eyesight. Yet as he rekindled his lantern, the obscurity of the depths was still too potent to be dispelled. Auri mentally sighed before rolling a tendril of graceful light into a ball and shooting it forward with a flick of his finger.

  In the absolute darkness of the depths, the ball shone like a second sun. He actually first saw the monsters from a reflection rather than a direct hit of light. What he saw were many glints prowling in the darkness. The snaps of the pincers then followed. Pincers already had an interesting sound as it is, but pincers made out of glass were even more enthralling. The sounds lingered for a moment after the act as they remained and echoed on those vitreous appendages.

  Darkglints, interesting, Auri mussed. I guess it makes sense that they are here as they are made out of obsidian. A column of magma must pour out here from time to time, enough to cool down and crystallize. Preserver knows that this place carries far more silicon in the magma than normal.

  Unnatural element disposition – whilst massively intriguing with its overbearing presence of silicon, gold, and osmium – notwithstanding, Auri was trying to think how to get around those darkglints without alerting them.

  These bad boys don’t die went they are killed, instead they regenerate from the small fragments and birth new darkglints through the strangest form of mitosis possible. But, well, it’s not like I can hurt them in the first place. So, what to do? What to do?

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  Remaining still wasn’t the best option, considering that the darkglints kept clanking their pincers and using that echolocation of theirs, so his time was limited until they inevitably found him.

  Should I use an echolocation of my own? Auri pondered for a moment. No, that will alert him. I shouldn’t interfere; otherwise, that will give him a lot of leeway. Well, it’s not that he hasn’t interfered himself… Ah, what an insidious bastard. He’d rather not make use of his skillset lest he might be noticed, even in the bowels of the worlds. And he’d rather go unnoticed for the time being from prying cyan eyes.

  Auri climbed the rock formation he was hiding behind and intensified even more the light of his lantern until day was brought down to the bowels of the earth. It was a bit blinding at first, but nothing he could deal with. Once his eyes became used to the star-like light, he explored his surroundings.

  Oh, this goes deep, deep… He couldn’t see the sky, but it was more worrisome how he could not see the bottom either.

  The shaft down to the depths had almost a laryngeal shape to it, with many bumps that pushed in and out of the hole, making many protrusions hundreds of meters wide. Enough to fit a whole ecosystem in each level of those laryngeal protrusions. In a way, he had descended into the mouth of the world and was on his way to the literal bowels.

  Interesting, interesting… Unfortunately, his time had run out. The darkglints had found him.

  “I’m too old for this,” he cracked his neck, and with a smile on his face, he darted for the massive hole that extended even more kilometers downwards.

  The traveler wasn’t particularly fast, but neither were the obsidian crabs. They were legion, but they had no cohesion and stepped on top of one another, slowing themselves even more so. Their lateral walk didn’t help either.

  Taking advantage of the fact that it would still take a handful of seconds for the darkglints to catch up with him, Auri threw another ball of light into the hole, only to disappear a couple of seconds later into the abyss.

  “Divinity! I’ll be damned!” One thing was not hearing a pebble hit the bottom; another was seeing light literally vanish before his eyes, darkness having overwhelmingly prevailed. “I’m not going to enjoy this. I’d prefer to be deep down into a woman instead of a planet, but oh well, that’s how life is. Let us see what the bottom hides!”

  Hesitation wasn’t part of his vocabulary, so Auri plunges into the depths of the abyss, or rather, the abyss of the depths.

  He fell.

  And fell.

  Terminal velocity had long been reached, and yet he continued to fall. He knew that the crust alone was thicker than the whole atmosphere, but this was far more than he had ever expected.

  “At this point, I’m going to reach the mantle, and oh boy, I’m not looking forward to it.” He calmly commented with his palms pressed against the back of his head as he lay in free-fall with his belly facing upwards.

  The surroundings moved too fast to pay attention to detail, but the deeper he went, the fewer agate veins he saw. Instead, as silicon decreased and iron became more abundant, the agate was substituted by veins of vivianite. Green as emerald and jade – depending on the shade – the vivianite was everywhere. And much like the green he was used to, it glowed. Agatecraft and vivianite shared an interesting story, one that he still didn’t fully understand, but it was known as the ‘mineral of the dead’ for a reason.

  Soon, even rock seemed to fade away in order to give place to more vivianite. The boundary between planes grew thin in this underworld, and Auri found himself having problems breathing. Being almost in the upper mantle thousands of kilometers underground certainly didn’t help either.

  He began thinking that there was no liquid mantle in this world – which was a real possibility – but soon those theories came to an end as the bottom approached. A tenebrous spectacle it was as the light from his lantern bounced back to him from the walls and the bottom instead of being scattered and lost. The light came back as a deathly green, the color of hellfire.

  Auri abandoned his relaxed, prone posture and instead rotated midair into his two feet. It was hard to maintain his position, but this wasn’t the first time he had gone skydiving without any type of assistance.

  For he needed it not.

  His feet collided against the ground, but instead of having become a meat accordion thanks to all that accumulated momentum, he just walked it off. All that potential energy just vanished into nothingness. The same happened with the zephyr that had surrounded him during the whole fall. One moment, he was moving at terminal velocity; the other, he was at a complete rest. Simple as that. He heard a crystal shatter inside his satchel, but he could always get more back. His kilometric niece surely would insist on helping, though he doubted that her father would be so eager. These enchanted manites were rather expensive.

  The traveler took a few steps forward before he knelt and inspected the ground he was walking on. It clinked like crystal and glowed like hellfire.

  “Some type of… vivianite, but not the one I’m used to. Could this one be made with star metal instead of iron? It feels… powerful.” And he didn’t use that word lightly.

  But what mattered most wasn’t the chemical composition of the mineral, but what happened around it. The vivianite was glowing by itself – whether it was out of fluorescence or radioactivity – and not by the byproduct of his lantern. If just to experience more of the abyssal light, Auri dimmed his lantern, and he found himself able to see just fine.

  What was worrisome, though, were the wails that he was hearing in the back of his head. That dreadful cacophony was familiar, and he couldn’t say it was one he enjoyed much. The pressure kept mounting up rapidly as if he no longer found himself in the corporeal plane, even if he clearly knew that was the case.

  He continued walking for a handful of minutes in a silence laden with the groans of the long gone. The mineral of the dead tried to whisper to him, but it failed. Some of the darker splotches of vein started to move, as if coming to life, but he heeded them no attention. The undead only reacted to the living or to observation, and Auri planned to give them neither.

  It was then that he came before it, a pillar of vivianite as tall as the spire where speech fractured into a myriad of tongues. Tall and wide, but not that much considering how far he had fallen. A tower instead of a mountain. He pressed his hand against the monolithic and megalithic vivianite structure.

  One single crystal.

  He felt the backlogged power call for him. This wasn’t just the power of the world or Agatecraft, but also the accumulation of the dead. The vivianite formation had become a singularity. One natural and accessible.

  “Alright, Preserver, let us see what you are hiding.” And Auri was swallowed by the vivianite as if it were water.

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