The floor of the Great Deep gap was an eerie, vaulted gallery of cold black dark rock, spared from the scorching heat of Pip’s solar purge. But as Arthur Vance stepped off the final rocky switchback, his tactical lantern lit up a scene of chilling, hungry preservation.
Hanging in clusters from the ceiling struts and propped against the cave walls were thirty-six massive silk cocoons, each six to eight feet long, spun from thick, rainbow-bright purple fungal thread. The silk was dense and rubbery, pulsing with faint veins of stolen mana that drained into the floor plates.
Arthur approached the nearest cocoon. He drew his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe close to the semi-clear stringy casing.
Inside, suspended in a thick, amber-colored preservative jelly, was a human figure clad in torn Vanguard scout fatigues. Through the distorted silk window, Arthur recognized the weathered face and silver rank insignia of Sergeant Nolan. The leader of the forward scouting patrol that had vanished three weeks earlier in the upper rifts.
The man’s eyes were closed, his breathing slowed to two shallow respirations per minute, his body curled in a fetal stance. Fine white fungal threads had entered his sleeves and collar. He wrapped around his wrists and throat like living intravenous shunts. He drained his life force directly into the catacomb’s fungal network.
