Tied up in my thoughts, I walked into the back of the hand Ipoh held up in warning. He’d stopped, his floating lights up ahead of him, and resumed the path more slowly, beckoning me carefully forward.

I saw it a few arm’s spans from the edge; a sudden drop at a right angle, ground falling away into a huge, wide void. The walls ended with it, the whole passage opening out into vast space.

With a twitch of his fingers, Ipoh sent the lights further out to the middle. The orbs disentangled, spreading out to cover a wider – if dimmer – area, and revealed a clearer picture. The space wasn’t quite as unknowable as it had initially seemed, only a little longer than the grove and equally wide. The sense of vastness originated mainly from the vertical axis, where they disappeared upwards and downwards into mystery.

The sides were crumbling, but lined with metal and perfectly straight where they remained intact. A shaft of sorts. For what purpose, I couldn’t begin to guess. Something huge.

“Dead end,” the Servant murmured, almost in a whisper. He hadn’t been cagey with his volume before. “We’ll have to backtrack.”

“It leads up. There’s no magic to help in this situation?”

His lips formed a thin grin. “There is. But not my speciality.” He waved me back with a wrinkled hand further away from the edge, sending the lights gliding back towards the original path. “Magic isn’t something one masters overnight. Most people with an interest pick one or two spells to focus on, work towards becoming great at what they do. Otherwise they’re out-competed by those with more skill. I –” he gestured towards his chest, “– am an observer, not a thrill-seeker. We go around.”

His voice had grown louder again in putting distance between ourselves and the ledge. It was still lower than before. “Do you know what that was?” I asked.

“No. Again, not my field. Even if it was, hundreds of civilisations have had their time in the shadow of the suns. All the world’s libraries put together would only scrape the surface of it. What matters is impact, and whatever this is or was, it seems to be deserted. That’s a good thing, but it means we could be far from civilisation.”

“How far down?”

He only shook his head.

I gave in and asked the underlying question that had been weighing on my mind since we started. “How long will it take for Blue to catch up to us?”

“Not nearly long enough. We have to hope she’ll send scouts who’ll lose the trail.”

Judging by the state of the stations we’d passed through, I wouldn’t be betting on it. Ipoh seemed to catch my mood, and conversation ceased. No sign of pursuit had revealed itself so far, which somehow made the anticipation worse. The silence weighed down, oppressive in contrast to our breaths and footfalls, and every miniscule crack and crumble made me wonder if it would be the one.

But nothing came after us.

My thoughts turned to promises and how to exploit them. Not… to allow the idea any genuine entertainment. Purely as a thought exercise. I could specify no surprise attacks, for example. No getting lost. Rule out those possibilities before they had a chance. If I promised Ipoh I’d see him home within the hour, would we turn out to have been under it all along? Or would reality, limited and restricted in how it could bend, find some worse contortions to go through to make it real?

If the other Ancients wanted to get their hands on me so badly, couldn’t they make it happen? If so, why didn’t they?

Warnings. It all came with warnings. Until I knew more, I needed to heed them.

Just ahead of me, Ipoh’s foot came down hard, eliciting a dull ringing noise shaking a few fakes loose from the walls. He paused to check the ground. “More metal. If only I had a map. This place would be worth a lot of money to the right people.”

I crouched to check along with him. Under a thin layer of rock dust, I spotted rust. Tentatively, I nudged it with a boot, but it held. “Money? How?”

Ipoh straightened up again, sending the lights out to check the walls and ceiling. Sure enough, they resolved into clean angles just up ahead. We were walking into another shaft, this time on its side. Covered in rust.

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“There was a time back in the distant past when resources were plentiful,” Ipoh explained. “A lot of things were built out of metal back then. Places like this are where most of ours comes from; extracted, purified and remade into usefulness. This is a big lode. Who knows how much could be salvaged here?”

“What about the rust?”

“Reversible.” He glanced at me sideways, continuing on at a slower pace. “I find your knowledge interesting. Red gives me hints of it sometimes, too, even now. Seeing it from a fresh Ancient is enlightening.”

I frowned. “What are you saying?”

“That your knowledge comes from the distant past. You know what rust is, but not that it can be reversed. You speak the Ancients’ language, but not the common tongue. And you don’t seem to know about magic. If we could put you in a box, take notes on the things you know and don’t, we could get a clearer picture of what life was like in whatever era it came from. And I think you’re not as in control, in the grand scheme, as your kind like to pretend. Or you wouldn’t set yourselves back so much upon rebirth.”

It felt like a veiled insult. “Does it matter? I’m learning.”

He sighed. “Perhaps not. Your kind have existed as far back as anyone knows how to look. Plenty of people out there who think nothing came before. Not me. You’re not gods. You’re something else. But if anyone knew how to find out what, it died with them a long time ago.”

A crack sounded under the older man’s sandal and he stumbled forward, shin scraping against a sharp edge as his foot fell through a hole that had given way. I caught his arm as it wheeled for balance, and eased him back up to stability.

Under the broken metal lay darkness. We were out over open air. I hadn’t heard the broken metal land.

Ipoh shook off my arm. “I’m alright,” he said, though a dot of red poked through the rip in his trousers.

“I didn’t see any other passages back there,” I pointed out.

“I know. We’ll proceed with caution. One at a time, close to the wall. Spread the weight out. I’ll go first.”

I watched as he picked his way along the edge of the shaft, three of the lights circling around his feet and ankles for illumination. The fourth stayed behind, hovering in a docile pinprick within arm’s reach. I touched a finger to it, only for the digit to disappear harmlessly into the sphere. I wondered if it could pass through walls.

Once I was several body lengths behind, the light began moving, keeping pace with Ipoh’s progress. I followed it. Creaks groaned through the tortured metal and grew louder the more I progressed.

The light stopped, waited. I waited with it. More distance between us.

The trek felt like an age, progress slow and stressful. Ipoh tested every footstep before committing to it. More holes opened in the floor, which we inched around. Conversation ceased, and it felt like hours. Eventually, however, the metal gave way to more stone and I caught up with the Servant, who sat down to take a breather.

--Capacity available,-- the Guide informed me conveniently. --Next capacity availability in six hours. Upgrades withheld until a time of greater need.--

I let out a long breath. I didn’t even care; I was just happy to be back on solid ground.

“A crossing like that, we might be at the edge of the Drift,” Ipoh said in a normal voice, breaking into my thoughts. “Closer to home than I expected. But not forgiving. Then again, I didn’t see any light. We might just be in a long-forgotten buried tunnel.”

“So, we still don’t know, then.”

“No.”

“What’s the Drift?” I asked, joining him against the wall and covering the back of my trousers in rock dust. “You mentioned it before.”

“Hm. It’s the bank of islands overlooking the Crater. Red’s lands. Large, but not much competition for it. Too inconvenient, not good for travel or salvage. Not a lot of people to rule over, either. It looks dangerous, but it’s one of the safest places you can go, if you don’t mind a little vertigo. Lots of light. A lot of the threats got blasted out with the Rending. Which you wouldn’t know about,” he added. “That’s a story in itself.” He didn’t tell it; instead sitting with his head bowed for a few minutes, then stood up. “Enough rest. Let’s put some distance between us and our potential company.”

Much to my confusion, he paced back towards the metal shaft. A broken pole jutted out of one of the walls, and, in a display of strength I’d never have picked, wrenched it free. Rather than using it, he then stood still and looked at the tunnel for long enough I thought he’d forgotten what he was doing.

Just as I opened my mouth, he snapped back into action, moving a few more steps forward and to the right. He brought the end of the pole straight down, hard, and scrambled back from the site of the impact.

The struck metal crumbled. First the centre, then the edges, until a hole the width of the had opened in the middle. Rust continued to flake off the edges for a few seconds after, even as the Servant hurried back to join me. The resulting blockage was wide enough to jump, but I had to imagine it would give any sane person significant pause. The edges looked ready to disintegrate in a slight breeze.

He’d effectively cut off pursuit, and it hadn’t looked like he’d been trying. “How –?”

Under different circumstances, the look Ipoh shot me might have come across a touch smug. “I observed,” he said, which wasn’t an answer. “Let’s get moving.”

“Alright,” I breathed, gave the gaping chasm a final glance, and followed him on.