The ancient stairs carved into the western wall of the Great Astral Crater was known to the desert nomads as the Abyssal Ladder.
It wasn’t a stairs of stonework or timber. It had been carved directly into the sheer face of glass-fused black glass ten thousand years ago by the first human refugees who had followed the fallen star into the desert. Each step was six feet wide, three feet deep, and worn smooth by the passage of millions of forgotten feet. He curved down the cliffside in a sweeping, two-mile spiral that dropped into the sapphire mist of the crater floor.
Ren Vale led the descent. He held an unlit pine torch in his left hand to test the air currents, his mammoth ivory awl securely sheathed at his belt.
The descent was a descent into an entirely different world.
They dropped below the three-hundred-foot mark. Then, the dry, searing desert gale that had whipped their faces on the rim began to die away. In its place rose a warm, dense, underground air soaked with tiny droplets of stone salt water.
The mist was not cold or choking. It tasted of clean salt, sulfur. A sweet, bitter-salt freshness that coated Ren’s throat like a soothing balm. His lips, cracked and bleeding from three days of bitter salt sand, softened within minutes. The angry, red chemical scalds on his knuckles—where the water drops water had burned him forty-eight hours ago—cooled and faded to pale pink scars as the stone moisture…
