The first steps onto the ground below were strange. Despite a light wind that made small eddies in the mist, the ground had no back-and-forth sway underneath his feet. There were no creaking sighs as branches moved in the wind, no rustling leaves, and no animal sounds, not even birdsong. With each step, the ground didn’t flex at all; it felt like a dead thing underneath his boots.

They’d passed beyond the inner wall early that morning, accompanied by two squads of full Achivian Guards. The last portion of the stairway went quickly. With each step, the crystal torches illuminated a bit less of the world around them, and the mist above them felt heavier. By the bottom, it felt like they were carrying a great weight.

On the ground, the masks were the only things clearly visible. The shape of people’s bodies were obscured by swirling tendrils and eddies of mist that didn’t always move with the breeze, but those same tendrils and eddies did nothing to hide the masks. Everything else, even the faces beneath the masks, looked faded and unreal.

Captain Merrin yell of “Assemble!” felt dampened, but the cohort still gathered up in a tight semi-circle around her. “This close to the protection of the trunk, the mist is still somewhat diffuse. Out there,” she said, gesturing away from the trunk, “it gets thicker. And more dangerous: the outer fortifications hold back many twists from coming this way and this area is regularly patrolled.

“Take the next thirty minutes to acclimatize yourselves to the ground. We’ll then go on a quick patrol to the closest lighthouse before heading back up. Guard your minds; the masks help, but they’re not inviolable.”

Reg started to wander around, trying to accustom himself to the feel of walking on the ground. He poked his spear into the earth, loosening the hard-packed soil and picked up handfuls of it. It was like bark-dust mulch, but full of miniature boulders. Pebbles! That was the word. The pebbles were surprisingly hard and heavy for their small size. Some of the rocks were a little larger and looked like they’d make better sling-bullets than the carefully shaped and hardened bone bullets he had in his sling-pouch. He started looking around, trying to find more.

Val, in a fat-cheeked chipmunk mask made of a light, golden wood, scampered around: picking up handfuls of soil; looking underneath the small rocks that littered the landscape and licking other rocks; and lying on the ground and listening to the earth. Reg couldn’t see her expression beneath the mask, but despite the gloom, she seemed overjoyed to be exploring.

Not everyone was so excited about being in the below. Two recruits, one in a red-streaked panther mask and the other in a mask that looked like dark flowing water, were both clutching the side of the root that they’d walked down. Reg couldn’t remember who’d grabbed those masks and both their faces were hidden in shadow. Jashal, his mask looking like a wise owl from this angle, was trembling as he pushed himself to walk back and forth. Yeva just looked angry: she was summoning and dismissing handfuls of actinic sparks that pushed back the shadows around her.

The thirty minutes of mist acclimatization went quickly. Reg had the occasional intrusive thought flit through his mind — it was so dark down here, maybe he should pluck out an eye and replace it with crystal to see through the darkness; His skeleton was weak like spongy fungus. Why wasn’t he regularly consuming bones to make it strong?; Why had his parents removed his tail after he was born? Wouldn’t that have been useful to have? — but between the shield of the mask and regularly weathering the mental attacks in Instructor Mossgate’s class, he acknowledged the thoughts and let them pass.

There were aural phantasms too: melancholy whispers, an almost-heard melody, cries of pain, monstrous snarls. Many recruits were jumpy, twitching this direction and that, at sounds that only they could hear. The sounds’ strength seemed attenuated by the mask, and they felt unreal. Ignoring them was simple. The hardest part was fighting his curiosity to listen more carefully, and perhaps even take off the muffling mask. The melody sounded like it could be the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard; the whispers bore a secret — maybe how to light up his doll?; and the cries of pain sounded like they might be someone he knew.

Captain Merrin organized both the escort squads and the recruits to head further into the darkness, towards a lighthouse. One of the two escort squads ranged in front of the recruits, and the other brought up the rear. Instructions from Captain Merrin ensured that the recruits attempted to move silently, but the sounds of recruits tripping over the unfamiliar ground, scuffs of boot on rock, whispered curses and moan, and clacks from people running into each other as they clustered tightly together, all stood in stark contrast to the silence of the full guards.

The path was marked at regular intervals by small piles of stones. Wooden plaques set into the stone piles had markings that showed distance from the trunk, direction, and the name of the path, “Lingonberry.” Like branch paths, generations of feet had etched the winding trail into the soil. The path wound around hills and gullies.

The blue glow of the torchlight did little to push back the darkness and sometimes hinted at shapes that weren’t there, but as they got further from the Tree, Reg started to see the occasional plant: bushes with red berries that glowed with a dull inner light, pale white flowers that somehow bloomed without light, and black mushrooms that grew up the side of a large boulder. Val retched quietly when they reached the first plant and Jackoby followed soon thereafter. Despite her obvious nausea, Val seemed to struggle with herself not to go explore the plant growths, but Captain Merrin’s instructions had been clear: no straying from the group.

After they’d been marching for an hour, they started to hear a wind. At first, Reg thought this might be another aural phantasm, but the windy sound was clear and got louder as they marched on. Other recruits could hear it too. As the group got closer to the source of the wind sounds, it started to sound like the breath of a massive beast: a long, low, wet inhale followed by shorter, sighing exhales. The guards guided them off of the main path and along a well-marked detour that curved at a fair distance from the source of the breaths before it looped back to the main path.

Reg poked Annise and hiked his thumb back towards the source of the breaths with a questioning look. She shrugged, eyes hidden behind her raven mask. Reg thought of one of Captain Merrin’s recent lectures, “The only acceptable number of twists in your controlled territory is zero. A single known twist might not be dangerous to patrols, but the idea of having an acceptable twist is deadly. One acceptable twist becomes two. Two becomes ten. Laxity around safety leads to disaster.” That detour had felt pretty permanent.

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Without the sun, it was impossible to track time, but it felt around noon when they arrived at the lighthouse. From the top of the tall stone structure, a gentle light gave dim illumination to a wide radius, revealing a barren landscape covered in ground thorns and deep trenches. The tower itself seemed horribly unsteady to Reg; it looked like it had been constructed by stacking heavy, rectangular stones on top of one another. The multistory height made it clear that enchantments were responsible for its structural stability. Large wooden shields as tall as a man at the base of the tower were engraved with glyphs that reflected and amplified the tower’s light.

As they entered the radius of light, everyone relaxed, including their escorts. There was no longer a need to travel silently, so a few whispered conversations broke out. Another squad of seven guards had been waiting at the tower, and one of the escort squads seemed like they were swapping roles with the squad stationed at the lighthouse.

Reg saw Captain Merrin pull the leader of one of the squadrons, a fox-masked elf named Gullian, off to one side of the tower for an intense-looking conversation. Reg tried to get closer to listen in, but was only able to hear a few angry snippets before Captain Merrin’s glare drove him away: “unacceptable,” “nights-heart extract,” “requisitions,” and “finagled the schedule.”

The recruits had only a few minutes to relax in the tower’s light before the squads finished switching off, and the group headed back treeward.

On the way back, the attack came suddenly.

From the darkness to the left, pounding thumps rapidly approached. Some monstrosity was charging at them out of the mist, but Reg couldn’t see anything about what it was. He readied his sling with one of the stones he’d found, and stared into the swirling darkness.

The guards’ response was sure and swift.

First, the fox-masked guard, Gullian, shot off a magical flare. An explosion of greenish light burst above them, illuminating a wide area. A massive twist was charging down a hillside towards the center of their traveling line: a twelve-foot tall humanoid with metal plates melted into parts of its skin like the protective carapace of a beetle. Oozing red-tinged doughy flesh popped out between the plates. Where hands should have been, the creature instead had axes. It was riding on an even larger four-legged beast. No, not quite riding; it had melded into its mount the same way it had melded into its armor plates. The beast was shaped vaguely like a goat, but on a massive scale. Instead of a beard or horns, the fur on its head and back of its neck had been shaped into a mohawk that flopped down on either side of its thick neck.

While Reg was still processing the sight of the twist, the guards were already moving. Two hurled bundles of ground thorns into the path of the beast. Two others loosed arrow after arrow that burned with purple and blue fire at the left front knee of the beast. A third guard raised a hand to the sky and cried out a word of power. With a crack that left Reg’s ears ringing, the guard held a whip of scarlet lightning. Despite the charging monstrosity still being at least thirty feet away, when the guard attacked with her whip, it stretched across the distance, impossibly long, and wrapped around that same foreleg. Gullian and the last guard had both pulled out long staffs topped with curving daggers and started running up the hill.

Reg had a bullet in his sling, but held his shot; he wasn’t sure he could hit the goat-thing’s knee at this range. The line of recruits was a panicked mess: some struggling to nock arrows to bows, others holding spears in defensive postures, and others scrambling backwards off of the trail in terror.

Before the two staff-wielders could reach the charging twist, the beast’s left foreleg collapsed under it; Reg wasn’t sure whether it was the ground thorns, the burning arrows, or the whip of lightning that brought the beast down: perhaps the combination of all of them. The beast and rider fell in a massive crash, sliding further down the hill and kicking up dirt. The beast let out a cry of rage that was echoed by the rider, a painful howl that tore at Reg’s mind.

On the ground, the beast and rider were an easy target for attacks: volleys of arrows pierced the helmet of the rider and the skull of the mount, small fiery darts impacted with miniature explosions, and balls of acid that burned away the outer layer of flesh revealing silvery bones. Reg loosed a few bullets from his sling that thumped hard into the head of the goat-thing.

It took a long time for the twists to stop moving. The rider hacked itself free of its own mount and started crawling towards the guards, leaving behind a wide trail of black blood that hissed and sizzled on the ground. Both it and the mount eventually slowed and stopped under the onslaught. Once both stopped moving, Gullian carefully walked forward and cut off the heads of both the mount and rider with strong blows from the blade on his spear-like weapon.

The full guards had a celebratory air as three of them started to harvest the metal plates from the fallen rider. The process was bloody as a fortune in metal was hacked free from the flesh that had grown around it.

Reg started forward to try and find his bullets: good sling-bullets were hard to find. One of the guards, the lizard-masked woman who’d summoned the whip of lightning, stopped him. “Kid, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I was going to grab my sling bullets. Anything else I can do to help out?”

“Bark and bramble, you’re a calm one. You haven’t snapped or anything?” Her low voice sounded impressed.

Reg looked back at the cohort of recruits; two were retching by the side of the trail, a few, including Val, were sitting and trembling, Yeva was cursing loudly to herself, and Jashal was gathering up arrows that had spilled from his quiver all over the path. He shook his head, “I’m fine.” And realized it was true; this hadn’t been so different from a charging chimera cat or a prowling griffin harassing the flock.

The lizard-masked guard gestured him on, and Reg gathered what sling bullets and arrows he could find on the hillside. Many of the arrows had missed the twists by a wide margin, most short. He eyed the ruined foreleg of the massive mount: the accuracy and speed of the guards’ response had been astonishing. He had a long way to go. And so did the rest of the cohort.

The rest of the trip up to the inner wall was uneventful: whispers called, shapes swirled and beckoned, and the unrelenting darkness pressed down. Returning to the warm camaraderie of the inner wall was a relief. Captain Merrin dismissed them for the evening with a warning that they’d be discussing “that disgraceful performance” in class tomorrow.

Conversations that evening focused on the mist, recruits sharing what whispers they’d heard, what insanities they’d shrugged off. It was reassuring to know that other people had gone through the same things. Some recruits boasted about how well they’d stood their ground and fired arrows when they were attacked. Others remained silent.

There were other changes. Yeva kept complaining that the grilled goat was horribly overcooked. It wasn’t. Jashal whispered that doorways all seemed portentous; he had the feeling that stepping through the wrong one might take him elsewhere. One of Belladonna’s canines had grown sharp; it cut her lip as she ate her meal. What changes wasn’t he noticing? Had he changed without knowing it? What would happen with more trips to the below? Despite the comforting presence of others in the barracks that night, his night was restless and full of nightmares.