»We go left.«

Seven bodies moved accordingly, dragging their feet and frayed hems around the corner into the offshoot. All that laid there was the color purple, dancing around the cragged edges of rock and cement the light could reach, and lacking in the crevices it couldn’t.

It was taunting them, one of them at least, though Rannek doubted that the irony of their situation had escaped the others. Wellan must have noticed. Purple. Color of the Ore. The color of power, true power, the very power the Gralinn Empire was built on. The color that claimed oceans, lands, the skies even, if only one knew how to process it, turn it into explosive dust, Krissin fuel, gels to fill candles. The color that seeped the blood of those once called gods.

The color of his doom. Two days, and no other lights had appeared, nor had water, nor food, nor anything but collapsed and half-collapsed tunnels. They grew weaker by the frag, or at least he did, feeling his guts curl up with a pitiful wail every other tunnel they passed. They’d grown tired of talking even, moving through the maze of broken concrete accompanied by nothing but the shuffling of their feet, the clacking of the crutches, and a vague underlying frequency that, according to Ibiko, miners called ’the mountain’s snore’. Only Wellan spoke up each time they encountered a crossing.

»We go left.«

Yet the purple’s taunt went deeper than that. For Rannek knew the purpose of these tunnels, and it was the same purpose that had brought him onto this vohlforsaken journey. The Empire fed on Ore. Even a single unproductive mine raised alarms up to the highest levels. The collapse hadn’t been felt in Koeiji, but it had been far up north in Tyn Ryswen, two-fold capitol of Grale and the Empire. Few Rysweninn spoke even a word of Tahori, yet they did not need to in order to protect their interests. They had people in place for that. Businessmen. Steads. Prefects. So, he’d been deployed on the Chancellor’s orders, and so, foolishly so, he’d been forced to take little Penroe Kyetana with him to appease the locals.

And now they were walking through a drab purple hell.

»We go left.«

Shortly after entering the next tunnel, the group slowed as private Kysryn helped Rannek cross a fallen support beam. Private Staen, the senior of the three guards, waved aside Kysryn’s offered hand and vaulted across the beam landing safely on his un-sprained foot. As his brother in harms, Rannek had been relieved to see the stout broad-shouldered man all but shake off the injury. Yet as the group’s slowest member, he did grant himself a smidge of resentment.

»Stop.«

Their journey left had spiraled into a dead end. The rubble rose before them like a ramp bereft of an opening to ramp up to, and Wellan focused his ore candle, shining the purple beam at the point where it met the ceiling. Before long, he sighed, untwisted the candle again, and turned to Ibiko with a question asked so many times before that it had all but shed his accent.

”We go back?”

Ibiko nodded, so they did just that. Twitches of his head and hands aside, it seemed that the young miner was slowly learning to keep the fear at bay. A hard task Rannek was all too familiar with. He thought back to the first hanging of a traitor they had forced him to attend back on Lhan, or rather the first moments of it before he had to evacuate his stomach.

One had to learn to manage it, like one managed life under all kinds of previously unknown troubles: being a stranger; making compromises; keeping tabs on a teenager; being shot out of the sky; fracturing one’s leg; considering one’s own demise in the bowels of a never-ending maze of tunnels… Their continued survival did sometimes bless him with a peculiar sense of pride, not for his person, but humanity as a whole. They just kept moving.

Yet the sullen realization always followed that they had only a few days ago been more than twice as many, and those left behind would never, ever move again.

»Stop,« Wellan said.

It took Rannek a breath to realize that there was no rubble ahead of them, no blockade at all. They had stopped facing an absence of tunnel. Wellan once again sent out the purple beam, and it showed them an immense open hall, and a roof reaching over fifteen birks high held up by two dozen thick concrete pillars. A silence long undisturbed hung in the cold damp air.

”The old base,” Ibiko said. Wellan turned with a raised finger, but then lowered it, bidding him to continue. ”The first of its size my people built down here,  it’s…” He hung his head. ”It’s no help. I’ve never been here, only heard my father’s stories. They abandoned it decades ago.”

”Is it safe?” Wellan asked.

Ibiko shrugged. ”It should be. We’re deeper inside than I thought, th-the Liberation shouldn’t have been able to get ahead of us.”

”It leads where?”

”Back where we came from, most likely. But there is a…” He took a step, but was stopped by Wellan’s hand. ”They built it by a spring of some sorts, I think. At the long end of the hall. This is one of those, but I-I don’t see it, so—”

”We go through.” Wellan looked not too pleased at that notion, but he stayed quiet. Eyeing the massive pillars, he took his first step into the hall rotating his candle left and right, and the others followed. Rannek felt the room expand to an enormous open space around him, something he’d missed without being aware of it. Contently, he noted that he wasn’t the only one: the girl stretched her arms, walked on the balls of her feet, and even started on a path a few birks beside the group, sometimes disappearing behind pillars.

»Stay in line,« Wellan said.

Pen did no such thing. »There’s no one here.«

»We don’t know that.«

»Ibiko said so, and besides, we’re few, and we’re broken. They wouldn’t need to ambush us.«

»They may not be aware. Please don’t advertise it.« He sighed. »Kysryn, cover her.«

The man did as he was told, following her behind the pillars with his rifle at hand. Rannek had grown wary of Pen’s behavior towards Wellan; she did not speak up often, yet when she did, it was to object to his plans. Pedantry wasn’t a foreign concept to her, not by far, yet somehow it seemed to him that she was trying to get Wellan mad.

Still, Rannek hadn’t approached her about it. In fact, they hadn’t spoken for over a day, and her eyes seemed distant and unwilling to make contact with his under the purple light. He couldn’t blame her for resenting him. What horrors his mistakes had let loose upon her. She’s seen worse, he tried to convince himself, but that judgment rung not as true as it once had. No matter how heavily her father’s crime weighed on her—she hadn’t been a witness to it.

Meanwhile, she had seen the end of Glane, and of Mallaslyn. She had felt the absence of the guards after their escape from the cavern. Rannek limped off to the side and joined private Kysryn in keeping watch over her. Whether she acknowledged him or not, he had to keep her safe.

For a breath, Rannek thought he heard the waves of Lhan calling for him again, and grew frightened. But they vanished as soon as he turned his head.

»Stop,« Wellan said off to his left. »Ahead. You see that?«

Rannek looked, but it took him a while to see. »There’s a pillar missing.«

»Two of them. Yet I don’t see a wall.« He turned to Ibiko. ”Is it safe?”

”… I don’t know.”

A moment passed before Wellan spoke again. »Stay here. Dhav, hand me the rope and keep me covered.«

Rannek, Pen, and Kysryn walked back over and watched Wellan tie the rope around his waist. Dhav held it tautly as the head of the Guard proceeded further down the hall, his focused candle sending a cone of purple flickering across the floor.

Something eerily black laid there. »Be careful!« Rannek shouted. He was shushed by Kysryn and Dhav, neither of which showed any remorse for doing so. They had stopped treating him as anything more than a civilian at some point, though he hadn’t noticed when exactly. He had often enough encouraged them to drop the courtesies, so he could hardly disapprove. It shamed Rannek however that part of him wanted to do so quite badly.

”Ibiko”, Wellan shouted back. ”Rannek, you should see this.”

Surprised, Rannek limped down the hall struggling to keep up with the young man. He spotted a few black insects scurrying up the pillars at their passing, roaches most likely. He wondered how long it would take until he’d start to consider them as nourishment, and heard his stomach urging ‘now' with a magnificent growl. Yet it wasn’t until the two of them approached the source of Wellan’s cone of purple that his gut really started writhing.

A few birks ahead of them, a lack of floor swallowed the light. Even the focused beam couldn’t penetrate the darkness all the way through to the other side. Rannek’s senses tried to play tricks on him suggesting that there was no such thing as an other side. Of course there was. The mountains were finite, he knew that.

”O-o-oh no,” Ibiko stammered. ”That’s… It c-can’t be…”

”This is not safe?” Wellan asked.

”What? N-no, of course not! We’ve—” Ibiko took the candle from Wellan faster than he could object and lit the edges where the hall ended. Deep fissures ran into the concrete there, on the walls, the ceiling, gaping not unlike the bites of monsters of unfathomable size. A different vision of the dark entered Rannek’s mind, one he had up to now written off as ramblings. A mouth. ”This is all wrong, I’m t-telling you.” Ibiko sounded frantic. ”This—this looks bigger than any cave I’ve ever seen. I don’t understand how this could have happened, we… we know what we’re doing!”

”Nobody’s blaming your people,” Rannek said. ”If you don’t understand, imagine how we feel. It’s… breathtaking.”

”My breath is fine,” Wellan said, turning his back. ”We are not moving there.”

Rannek gently took the candle from Ibiko, and they followed. ”Could there be anything useful left around here?”

The young man shook his head. ”I don’t see how. But… there have to be storage rooms, at least. Beds. Lockers. Maybe some weapons, even—drills, axes, a-and such.”

”Wellan. You hear that?”

»Our luggage is already slowing us down,« Wellan said in Gralinn. He’d come to refuse debating Rannek in Tahori. »Unless there’s a chance of food or water, we’re leaving. You may doubt me, but I know what I heard. The Liberation’s taken the mine.«

»I don’t doubt you,« Rannek said. »But that doesn’t mean they’re going to go inside, let alone into the abandoned parts.«

When they rejoined the others, Rannek earned a rare stare from Pen as she started calming Ibiko. Sitting down, he rocked faintly, staring back to where they had just faced the mouth. Wellan meanwhile took the rope off his waist. »We know they’re after something,« he said. »They always are. If they take a mine, chances are, they’re looking for something underground.«

»You heard Ibiko, the lode’s mined out.«

»They’re not doing this for Ore. Far too much hassle, they could rob a transport and get near as much at half the risk. They will get slaughtered up there, just you wait.« Looking at the others, he said, »We go back.«

They set to returning the way they came from, Pen gently urging Ibiko to keep up and stop looking over his shoulder, Rannek limping. Wellan’s words were the same he kept repeating to himself. This will have consequences. It had to, hadn’t it? He refused to believe the enemy could get away with an attack this bold, especially now that—skeptics withstanding—there was Ore involved. »Still then,« Rannek said, »what are they looking for?«

Wellan shortly shone his candle back over his shoulder, blinding him for a breath. »Something we don’t know about, evidently. Like giant holes underneath a mountain.«

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Rannek was puzzled. That he hadn’t thought of. »You think? But why would they? What’s down there?«

»You may wonder in quiet, and know I’m doing the same. We won’t keep chatting once we’re back in the tunnels. Everyone understand?«

A huff and puff went around the group. Pen walked off to the side again, prompting Rannek to reach for her arm. Why in the world was she so determined to get on Wellan’s nerve?

He stopped. Something very peculiar had happened just then, and it took his mind a breath to recalibrate. The waves of Lhan. Hearing them once may have been a random mix of noise his ears mistook for an apparition, yet twice seemed unlikely. Not only that—the first time had sounded to his right, whereas just a breath ago, his left ear had picked up on it. It had cut out just like before. But maybe, just maybe, if he took a step back—

There it was again. Soft, distant, but distinctly fluid. Only it was missing the swell-and-fade of the island’s tide, calming him somewhat as this meant that despite giant holes, there wasn’t also an ocean hidden underneath these mountains.

»Wellan?« Rannek raised his voice. »You may want to hear this.«

Wellan stopped. »What is it?« He waited before reluctantly walking back.

»There.« Rannek pointed where the whooshing sound came from.

Up until a birk away from him, Wellan kept an annoyed expression, but then it changed. He cupped his ear. Raised his candle. »Kysryn, Staen, hold position with the young folk«, he said. »Dhav, you’re with us. Stay quiet.«

Like that, he took off, and Rannek limped after him trying to keep his crutch from thudding too loudly on the ground. There, ahead, illuminated by the candle, a tall rectangular entrance loomed in the wall flanked by other, similar ones. The closer they got, the clearer the sound became. Water. Wellan stopped once more, and then entered the corridor.

It was strewn with rubble, forcing Rannek to rely on private Dhav’s wiry arms for support as they climbed on. Metal gates lined the walls on either side, barred with rotted wooden beams. As the sound got louder and louder Wellan suddenly stopped, and signed them to do the same.

The corridor ended in open darkness just like the hall. Only this darkness was sizzling with noise, the noise of splashing water rising from the black void before them. Their candles darted around searching for something other than black. Something purple.

Private Dhav found it first. About twenty birks into the empty space, barely within the candle’s reach, a ghostly mist rained down into the dark below. »A fountain«, Rannek said.

»Hardly the one Ibiko was talking about«, Wellan said. »Regardless, we’ve got no way of getting over there.«

»We don’t need to. We can go down. You can hear the water, it’s close!«

»Sound can be deceiving, especially down here.«

Rannek attempted to reach for a rock on the ground, but all it brought him was a shooting pain from his leg. »Private, would you mind being my arm for a breath?«

Private Dhav waited for Wellan’s approval, then picked up a stone. As it left his hand and shot out into the dark, Rannek prayed it would not sail into a crevice, not vanish in the darkness, but send the lightest click up to them, a noise close enough they would know it was safe without having to see.

Instead, the rock landed with a splash.

The prospect of water lifted all their spirits, most notably Wellan’s. He bid Dhav to get the others, and after only the slightest resistance gave his go-ahead for Ibiko to climb down the broken face of concrete and rock and sediment with a ring of bottles looped around his chest, and a candle hanging off his belt. The young miner’s eyes stayed hectic, but his hands held the rope tightly as he rappelled down wrapped in a purple circle. Rannek noticed a pair of bright eyes searching his as the light shrunk below.

Yet they ignored him as soon as Ibiko announced his arrival at the waterside. ”Rannek! Wellan!” he shouted, forgetting both stealth and courtesy in his excitement. ”There’s a pool down here, not that big, but big enough—and there’s more! I think I see plants!”

”Stay calm,” Wellan said. ”Use the candle how I showed you.”

The orb of purple morphed into a cone, and Rannek carefully bowed forward to make out what the light revealed. There, about twenty to thirty birks below, he did see plants, or at least a growth of deceptively soft tissue nestled in a corner beside the water. The cone wandered along the edges of the twin pools intersecting where Ibiko stood, his tiny body barely visible.

When it wandered further, Ibiko grew ecstatic, and his voice grew more echoes. ”It’s… This is huge! You see that? It opens up over there, we—”

”Stay calm”, Wellan reiterated. But the cone moved nonetheless, leaving the pool behind. ”Don’t rush, you could get yourself killed!”

But the cone did rush, flickering across moss, fallen debris, a foaming stream going off the pools, a carpet of peculiar growths covering most of the rock on the opposite side… Rannek felt dumbfounded. There was an entire landscape down there the dark had hidden from him. Ibiko moved on, and soon, his light had traveled so far his voice carried only faintly, forcing them to silence and listen. ”The water, I tried it, it’s good! It’s better than good, it’s the best f-fucking thing I’ve ever tasted! And I think I just saw marimoss—if we can start a fire, I know how to cook it! We have to camp down here!”

Pen and the three privates joined Rannek in looking at the head of the Guard.»We don’t know if it’s safe«, Wellan said, quietly.

»It can’t be less safe than the tunnels behind us«, Rannek returned. »You said it yourself—who knows what the Liberation’s up to?«

Wellan silenced for a long while before fixing his eyes on Rannek. They looked somewhat uncertain. »You’re on board with this?«

He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been sure of anything. So Rannek simply shrugged, and mustered the best smile he could. »What other way is there?«

For as short as it lasted, the descent made him regret agreeing so quickly. As he dangled in the air with the rope cutting into his windpipes, Rannek wished private Kysryn below hadn’t turned on his candle. The height made him think back to the cliffs of Lhan, and the rope made his stomach think back to its hangings. Two frags it took, he learned from his watch, yet it felt like an eternity.

That eternity however transported Rannek to a wonderland of peculiar things. Helped by Kysryn, he climbed down the rubble heaped up near the wall, and found the pool. It contained the clearest water he’d seen in all the Empire. Before Wellan could touch down after him, he had already fallen to his knees, and drowned his face in the cold liquid. It carried tastes he did not know one could find in water: it was sweet, with a hint of bitterness only palpable frags after consuming it. He gorged himself without even using his bottle, scooping handfuls of water to his mouth and struggling to breathe as he drank. Shame seized him when Pen’s feet approached his unbecoming display of thirst, but she just knelt beside him, and drank with the same ferocity.

Ibiko returned soon after, dumping a load of moss on the ground. Under his guidance, Rannek, Pen, and Wellan inspected the grounds around the pool while Dhav and Kysryn ventured off to conduct a thorough scouting. Everywhere he stepped, Rannek found new parts of an entirely unique ecosystem. Ibiko was eager to tell them about their dinner. ’Marimoss’, a fleshy blueish strain Rannek vaguely remembered researching for the Imperial Encyclopedia ages ago, had apparently proven essential to the survival of many a buried miner. Those gifted with the knowledge of how to cook it could dine weeks, in some cases even years on the ample supplies growing wherever there was moisture to be sucked out of the rock. They also learned about its downsides: when consumed uncooked and in sufficient quantity, the moss was said to become addictive, its withdrawal causing depressions of a caliber that had driven more than one escapee back inside the tunnels to never emerge again.

They found lichen, patches and whole fields thereof, pale as Rannek’s skin, its intricately fractured arms all reaching upward toward a sun that never paid a visit. It gave in to his foot when he stepped on it, but bounced right back up after with surprising elasticity.

And then there was the fauna. The first slug he failed to notice before it burst under his crutch. It shouldn’t be the last, as they proved nigh transparent. Now and then, he witnessed a slug’s participation in the food chain: eyeless lizards shot out of the crevices of rock and moss when the mollusks slid too close to their habitat, devouring them whole before disappearing. Rannek was certain their kind had never been catalogued by Gralinn science.

Back by the pools, private Staen constructed a fire pit using rocks and splinters he had hacked off a burst support beam lying amongst the rubble. Before long, the scouts returned, as did Rannek, Pen, and Ibiko, and they congregated around the slowly rising fire. Rannek warmed his hands and cherished the change from purple to a deep orange in the things around them. The cooked marimoss turned out ghastly, a mesh of bitter stickiness surrounded by a thin crust that stuck to every nook and cranny of his mouth. Still, their hunger was ghastlier, and within frags, they had finished the entire pile. Rannek’s mouth kept salivating long after; for the time being though, it stayed down.

His body rewarded the meal with a feeling of bloated bliss, and he wasn’t alone. Only Pen bothered to speak, arguing for some reason that Kysryn would make the best first guard. He didn’t need to interfere, seeing as Wellan’s eyes couldn’t stay open for more than a sentence. Only Kysryn seemed truly displeased by the argument. As he listened to their whispered back-and-forth, Rannek noticed that his own eyes had fallen shut, and found that he didn’t mind at all.

When he next woke, the fire had simmered down to embers, and purple once again ruled his world. He sat up to see four large bodies and a small one sleeping around him. Ibiko was missing. Rannek spotted another ring of purple at the other side of the pools next to the young miner’s sitting shape. He walked over and joined him, though not before taking a detour to drain some of the excess water he’d gorged on not too long ago.

”You cannot sleep?” Rannek asked.

Ibiko scooted over, and they sat by the candle peering at the dark. ”I did, some. I think I just needed some t-time alone to think.”

”I don’t mean to disturb you.”

”Please, I don’t mind. Been sitting here a while.”

Ibiko’s smile was genuine, so Rannek stayed. He did refrain from pushing the conversation. Time without pressure, without urgency was something he himself was deprived of, and he found he rather enjoyed the silent company of the young man. Fine mist hung in the air around them, descending from the spring far above. The water splashed softly in the pools sending a web of ripples over their surface. After a few frags, Rannek noticed faint movement not too far from them: a lizard had crept up slowly to quench his thirst on the pools. Its eyes looked about now and then between gulps that looked awfully like enthusiastic nodding. Then, it was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

”How strange this must all seem to you,” Ibiko said.

”To you it doesn’t?”

”It does. Then again, we encounter all kinds of strange things in the woods and mines. Not like this, in my lifetime, but still… My father a-always told me your people don’t believe in gods like we do.” He waved around at the purple field of moss surrounding the pool. ”How strange, then.”

”We do have the Allfather, but I get what you’re saying. He doesn’t interfere much with us mortals nowadays.” He waved himself. ”How truly strange. Cavities, fountains, eatable moss, blind lizards… A world within a world living without the sun. I understand any man unwilling to chalk it up to randomness.”

”Yet you sound li-like you still do.”

”Indeed.”

”Why?”

”Suppose there is a god behind the moss, the lizards, everything. Suppose there is a god that designed this place and wrote it into our fates to land down here.” Now Rannek smiled. ”I’d take him for no less strange than the lack of him.”

Ibiko furrowed his brow for a breath before donning a look of amusement. ”Might have to give that some thought.”

”As will I. It’s not a matter I’m all that certain of.” Rannek wrung his hands at the darkness. ”I would readily change my mind if said god threw us a pack of smokes right now.”

A deep, enthusiastic nod was all Ibiko could add to that. Their heads turned when a noise sounded, but it was only from the camp. Everything inside the circle of light slept peacefully still. Rannek decided that before he went back to sleep, he would wake Kysryn so he could resume his watch; even a more rested Wellan wouldn’t take kindly to his men dozing off.

Rannek had a thought, one that had crossed his mind before. ”Ibiko, what are you going to do after we get out?”

”… I’m not sure. What do you mean?”

”With your life. You are still young, ever thought about leaving Bitaab for a few years? Study, perhaps?”

”Why would I? My people n-need me, they’ll do so more than ever a-after all this.” A troubled look flashed over his face. Rannek knew he’d made a mistake. ”Leaving them, th-that’s… I could never.”

”I’m sorry for the suggestion. You’re a good man, the way you care for them. All I meant to say was that you have potential.”

”I s-stutter.”

”When you are afraid. That hasn’t stopped you from discovering these strange lands, has it?” Rannek patted his shoulders. ”Now, I will cease talking, and you will tell me more about what you saw out there.”

Ibiko seemed eager to do so. As Rannek learned about a possibly nutritious species of worm that dwelled only a three-frag run from where they were sitting, he soon lost track of what the young man was saying, and just stared at the purple wonderland of rock and moss and slow-moving mollusks.

There was so much more than Ore to be found down here. He certainly wouldn’t mind there being a Rannekian Slug or a Lorne Lizard entered into the annals of biology; but those were follies of his youth. Even without the wonders of the cave, the list of sciences he’d love to take a shot at was long, making the choice of what he would spend his retirement doing a soul-crushingly hard one. He knew himself well enough to not try his luck at more than a single discipline—he felt he was build for the all-consuming pursuit, and enjoyed it more than any other thing in the world. Still, that meant once he chose that pursuit, it would be the last one of his life.

Except if maybe, he’d retire prematurely. Slipping death again and again had made him acutely aware of the fact that once he escaped, there was no necessity for him to keep being prefect. In fact, he couldn’t think of a better reason to leave office. Money wasn’t an issue, his stint with the IET had taken care of that. His sister surely wouldn’t mind a visit back on their parents’ estate. He would travel, and learn to relax again, and afterwards, he could choose freely where to spend his days. Perhaps, he’d even return in Tahor, where the peculiar things were ever plentiful.

Though there were arguments against it. Arguments nagging at his conscience, ones that reminded him his work here had barely just begun. Arguments posing that he at least had to make good on the promises he’d made as prefect.

One of those arguments suddenly stepped into the purple light. Ibiko stopped talking, and Rannek scooted over, making room between them. Pen sat down dipping her fingers in the water, and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. ”You’re talking to loud”, she whispered.

Rannek lowered his voice, too. ”Sorry. We didn’t mean to wake you.”

”Not me. Wellan. He’s dead tired, he needs it more than any of us.”

He couldn’t stop himself from asking. ”Why talk back to him, then? You seemed… disagreeable before.”

”I’d rather have him be mad than sleepy.”

”Oh.” That did make more sense than he’d anticipated. ”Maybe not tomorrow.”

”I won’t.”

No backtalk. Rannek’s mind began to entertain the possibility that the girl was sleep-walking, but her gaze was too vivid for that. She studied the surroundings just like he had, wrapped in her jacket and in purple. He remembered a moment she’d been like this not long before. She’d even joked with him then, in the jungle.

”Enjoyed the marimoss?” Rannek asked.

A pursed smile sought Ibiko’s forgiveness. ”No. But I won’t complain.”

Ibiko chuckled. ”It’s far from my f-favorite food, I get it.”

”Guess what he’s planning to serve us next.”

Pen shrugged, and looked at Ibiko once more.

”… Worms”, he whispered. ”He-hear me out, though!”

Pen’s smile warped into a grimace of disgust, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Rannek was relieved to hear that she was not holding back moss, but a laugh, bubbling through her hand, infecting both men to cover their mouths as well. They sat there for a while trembling, struggling to calm their breath until they did, and the purple circle turned quiet again but for the mountain’s snore.