The shift across the two-hundred-and-ten-pace line was not merely an office boundary on Ulvan Dret’s calfskin sheets. It was a physical descent into an unmaintained, decaying underground world. As Kezra Venn, Yseld Arken, and Paxa Sel stepped past the collapsed fir timber barrier, the carefully dressed stonework of the royal survey corps gave way to raw, unlined rock and crumbling shale walls.
Here, in the region that Ulvan had only drawn with light, dotted lines copied from pre-Host archives, the mountain had been moving in silence for two ages. At two hundred and forty paces depth, Kezra paused beside a wide fracture plane where the dark metamorphic flaky rock had buckled outward into the stairwell. Slow earth-shaking creep and seasonal frost wedging had pushed the eastern wall half a pace inward, shearing through the rock like a huge high-pressure wedge. Jagged shards of brittle shale littered the steps, grinding like crushed glass beneath their heavy climbing boots.
The descent through the fractured zone between two hundred and ten and two hundred and sixty paces was a grueling, nerve-stretching exercise in friction and balance. Water trickled continuously down the eastern wall, heavily stone-hardened with iron oxides that had stained the fractured mica-flaky rock a deep, oily rust. The rock surfaces were coated with a thin, dangerous film of wet clay gouge. The crushed debris of ancient earth-shaking movement that turned every foothold into grease. Kezra kept her sounding rod grounded ahead of her. She used the hardened steel tip to chip…
