With Pip’s snout steadying the bottom of the brass tally-plate and Ysabet’s left hand guiding the tilt, the pale circle of daylight burned straight into the middle of the fungal blockage without wavering.
Five minutes passed, then ten. Up the dark gallery, someone—Osha or Ashaun—gave a single pebble-knock, shifted her cramped knees, and brought the beam right back into line before Ysabet even had to answer.
Under the steady touch of the sun, the last thick ribs of gray-violet mold began to pull apart like overstretched dough. They did not burst or scatter their yellow spore-dust; the swollen blisters simply flattened, drank their own moisture back into the dark root-threads inside the limestone, and peeled away from the vault of the vent with a dry, ticking sound like cooling pottery.
A crack the width of a fist opened near the top of the chimney.
Hot air pent deep inside the mountain’s geothermal pipes whistled through the gap. The whistle rose to a hollow roar, and then the whole dried crust of the fungal shelf folded inward and tore loose in a single rubbery mat, sucked back into the side-crevices by the cross-draft as a solid column of hot, wet air burst out of the opened vent.
