Once out past the shoals on the same sea aedra that had brought the Judicator and the tidings from Blackbloom into my life, I settled in for a long voyage. It was several cycles to Blackbloom, without stopping, and though we had a klepsydra to measure turns, the time still tended to mix together like tea steeped overlong.

Out here it became very dark. The only others aboard were a departing marden, Luryn, who I did not really know, and the inscrutable drover. The drover did not introduce and mostly kept to the helm, watching over the aedra, seeing that it fed and rested at intervals.

One cycle passed, then another, and we grew distant from the S’uldra. It became very dark. We had on the boat several glowshrooms that still possessed a good amount of light in their gills. I spoke a bit with Luryn during our meals, wherein we supped on prepared hard galvaseed biscuits spread thick with tangerine jam, sometimes a slab of fish jerky laid atop.

“So, you got family in Blackbloom or?”

“No,” I said, frowning. “I’m to work for a master artisan.”

“You’ll want to rent, but not in the depths, ya ken? If you can help it.”

“I’ve around fifteen talons,” I blurted.

It was Luryn’s turn to frown. “Best to find a friend then.”

“What’s…uh, what’s wrong with the depths?”

“Heh. What’s wrong is they’ve no means or money. It’s a rough place. Guess you don’t really know if you’ve never been further than the village. Keep out. Stay to the middles: Shuraz, Turaz, Enthris, that sorta thing.”

I’ve been further than the village! I thought, but held my tongue. Luryn grinned.

“And I’ll tell ya boy, if you get to the golden mushroom mansions—they call that the Upper Fate—t’means you’ve got it made.”

In the interminable depths of darkness we rode on. The aedra’s long legs skimming the waves. The cave sky curled with distant flame. I watched for several turns a massive, distant plume of green smoke rising, pooling among the fangs of stalactites into a sick sky.

That sleep at sea everything became a memory, and I dreamed I was home once again. I dreamed I had never left. I rose to the two chimes of sleep, strangely enough, and not the myriad chimes of wakefulness.

I found in the kitchen my mother, father and brothers. They were all seated at the table and speaking and eating and laughing. Though Drakot had not been home in years from his sea voyaging, he was here now, and he looked exactly as he had when he’d left, but shiny. When I walked in my mother rose and whisked around me like a ghost, gathering a breakfast and ushering me into a spot at the table.

I looked at Drakot, thinking how long it had been, but the room was fuzzy and misshapen. As I studied him I realized he was sopping wet everywhere. His clothes and everything else. As he sat there, water mopped and glistened. He opened his mouth and that, too, was filled with water. He tried to scream.

I woke suddenly to the ululating screeching of the drover out over the waters. Perhaps similar to the kayak-calls every child of Silsern learns before going out into the S’uldra. The cycle to come passing uneventfully until the klepsydra drew low, was refilled, and again drew low, and I felt the burden of my ancestors.

But there was something different here, I realized, squinting, looking forward. The horizon dappled with low-slung color. We were headed right to it. As the aedra proceeded it became clear, and I rose and shook Luryn awake, that we were on approach. I chewed a few strips of jerky watching it come on, mushrooms rising as we proceeded.

The cap-brims of Blackbloom burned all colors in the dark ahead. The sea wavering and prismatic in the city’s shattered halo. Giant-stalked mushrooms rose, tallcaps, bioluminescent in greens and pinks and blues and smoking yellows into fungal colonnades.

The sea aedra trilled and pushed onward. Perhaps it too sensed the mystic city. It dipped into the water with a slurp, slender legs skimming. Mist sprayed around us. From Blackbloom a rainbow of tendrils spilled out, cascading specks of pink and green and orange, stretching out toward us.

I took in my breath, but Luryn called forward: “It’s just sporesong, boy, won’t hurt you.”

I nodded dumbly. Lines of these dancing lights—spores, I guess—overtook the boat, threaded through the windows, caressing my hands and face. Out the window the cloud of spores kept pace with the boat like flying fish or deepdolphins.

“What’s this for?”

“It’s just how it is,” Luryn growled.

“What?!”

“Sporesong don’t do much. I don’t know what else to tell you, boy. It’s a feature.”

With a gush the sporesong parted and I saw beside us giant erect tubal fungi protruding from the water, their sidegills glowing azure. Beyond I saw the shadow of a cliff, and the cave harbor within, and beaches with rainbow sand.

In the cave harbor once the sea aedra docked, shuddering, I lugged my shellcase down a couple of steep rungs down to the dockwork.

“Good luck,” Luryn told me gruffly, shouldering past without much more thought.

Tufts of sporesong teased at my clumpy hair like errant, glistering birds. It didn’t feel like much at all. I followed the marden out into dockwarren, assuming that he knew where he was going.

I tried to follow him through the weave of the living city, the people, slicing like a dancer through a mix of darklings, taroe, nefra and aedra, but before I knew it Luryn was lost and I walked alone in the crowds through a bazaar of fishmongers and bone carvers and hopeful carpenters.

It carried a considerable stench of the dying sea, which brought me immediately back home. Sometimes the breeze if Urchembalax had not refreshed his catch in a while would carry all the way up the coral hill to the manor.

In the fugue of memory I barely noticed when I stepped out of the dockside bazaar onto wet cobble. It was wet beneath, from the deepness of the earth strangely enough, rather than above as from a rain.

Low-slung groved tenements here gave off soft reddish light from their gills, and spores floated, and among it all fragments and servants of the all-color sporesong swept and recombined endlessly. The towercap skyline beyond burning redly as well, towers upon toward going all the way up into the cave sky.

Among them bats and taroe and sightless winged cephalopods swooped through a maze of webbed streets and paths and platforms. This daunted me. I had not been prepared for such scale. I walked a bit more then took a seat on a set of old, hardened bloodcap benches, just to reconnoiter.

The sporesong came up to me presently. It seemed inquisitive. I was vaguely aware of this phenomenon, despite my stupor with Luryn earlier. An elder magicka of Blackbloom, something from a lost age of a previous dragon perhaps, it was not really known except that it had always been, and would always be. It lived and changed.

“I admit, I am lost. I should say—I mean—I just don’t know the city a scant bit. Could…you take me to the Blue Anvil Atelier?”

I peered at it hesitantly as one of its vestiges hovered in front of me. When I spoke it stayed very still as though it was listening. Then it split into the three strands, looped back on itself, and became one again, drifting away from the bench. I glanced around.

A little nefra clung onto a tubal potted fungi spout nearby, its waxen eyes flaring in the shifting light as it regarded me. It wore a dirty little tunic. It turned its head and licked one of its spindly legs in disregard.

I gave the spidercat a little nod, then followed the sporesong.

I was led through the cobbled streets at a hurried pace, through pockets of whirling spore lit warmly red and pink in a wide intersection where a dragonmetal pulled by lime-green behemoths rumbled past. The paths here diverged into many possibilities. Some led on into Lower Blackbloom’s other cantos, while others, these enwebbed in a silvery-gold sheath of material, led upward into the towercap structures.

We went onward here, but not for long, and found the next canto glowing with pink housecaps, and at a similar intersection I followed the bit of sporesong which had grown into a bit of a procession into an upward tunnel and ascended.

The tunnel opened up into a street of red mycelium, hemmed by thin light-casting mushroom pyres a few times taller than me. Large towercaps all around, close and inviting, doors and windows and flourishes carved into the fungus, railed stairs wrapped around the stems. Marks and glyphs of business shining in this promenade.

People walked and talked here at intervals. I did not get much of a second look, still, for which I was grateful. I wore my Tarlanis-best olmleather coat, and a dark plumcolored hat from my father. I saw many strange fashions, some of which were hard enough to comprehend on the strange amorphous bodies of aedra, and the little tassled gowns or shirts of many of the nefra.

I walked past a fruit merchant in the midst of haggling, and past several other stalls bearing fruits and spices. I meandered slightly here, past a few storefronts, looked at clothes sewn from fabric that seemed to dance the light within it like water, and looked at baked goods, purple and green pastries, that held a sweet and heady aroma.

My mouth watered, and I almost went in. Perhaps I should have. When I looked around for the sporesong, I didn’t see it. I thought to call out again, but felt foolish about it if not addressed directly. I hadn’t seen anyone really talking to the sporesong, truth be told, though it did seem that most people were followed or attended by the sporesong, always.

I saw an establishment directly across the way, written in curling letters to be the Flaming Flagon, which I knew a little about.

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My friend Jrashao got his claws on a handle of this once. We’d huddled together, us a few other beachcombers, Jaky and Ziveyo, in a little driftshroom shanty that had deposited itself. In the low wet hollow, out of sight, we cracked it, and the flame engulfed us all. It was not hot. After the initial backdraft the beer was drinkable and actually very good.

The tavern’s entrance set into a towercap stem. I pushed through. The door creaked. Inside fluxing orange lights hung from the ceiling. The walls darkly panelled, not the natural dried fungus here it seemed. It was a round chamber, with stairs leading both ways.

Further rooms led on, dilapidated, one a patio sloughing off from the step itself into open air and the burning city beyond. That made me nervous.

The air smelled heavily of beer and stew and smoke. I waded in, through all kinds of Myrlings. A large crowd two dozen strong in the far corner huddled about the glow of a cloqune set.

The bar was seated with plush long chairs, some nested together, a meandering setup that does not run a straight line but surfs through the nook and crannies of the room. I took a seat at a quiet crevice, a rose-glass window cut into the hardened fungal wall behind the bar. It overlooked the far sweep of the sea.

The barkeep approached. An older darkling, his hair just wisps remaining, pale white skin, red eyes.

“What’ll ye be?”

“The firebeer,” I said, spreading my hands. “I… I am not sure what to call it to tell the truth.”

He nodded and melted away.

“Ssyoth,” said a voice to my left.

I looked over. It is a darkling, not much older than I, sitting back and watching the slow fire in his capped glass. He gestures.

“This. Ssyoth. Do you ken?”

“’Fraid not, stranger. I just came in on a skimmer, truth be told.”

“Oh? Where from?” he asked idly.

While I answer he uncapped his glass and takes a burning sip. Beerfirelight everywhere.

“Well, the S’uldra. Silsern. I am to apprentice to a master glassblower. Do you—where is the Blue Anvil Atelier?”

“Ah—it’s pretty close. You’re in the right canto, Shoraz. Once you’re out of here, head left, then…” he hesitated. “You know, if you’re staying here you’ve got to learn. Ask the sporesong—you know the sporesong right?”

I nodded. “I know how to do it.”

“Good, good,” he said absently. “I’m Glym, by the way. Afryr.”

“Klask Pax.”

He flicked his hand, a little motion, and a glyph of sporesong appeared and drifted over to me. “Charmed.”

“Neat. How do you do that?”

Glym just offered a hard smile. “Anyway. Here’s my date. Nice to meet you Klask.”

A taroe clad in dark velvets drifted through the periphery and perched beside him. I turned my attention back to the Aelsea. The barkeep swept back with my so-called ssyoth in a capped flagon.

“Thanks,” I said clumsily to the barkeep, flipping over a few small coins.

He pointed at the bar. I gave another lantern.

“Keep it capped when you’re not drinkin it. It’ll burn away.”

I uncapped the flagon and took a sip while he watched. I looked over at Glym, and caught his eye.

“Shamara,” I said.

An old phrase just about anyone I ever knew could relate to. An old phrase in the old tongue. Forever night.

Our bodies have a memory of the long since past, my father once explained to me. That deep and back into the bone of time, before the Fall, our ancestors had been slaves to light itself, that they would wake when the light fell upon them and sleep in the darkness. And that ever since, our bodies have carried this primal rhythm, even now in the folds of Valthyr.

It was the rhythm I carried now. My face flushed from the burning beer I had consumed. Tendrils of sporesong approached me, streaming along the smooth polished mushroomwood streets.

“Take me to the Blue Anvil Atelier.”

The sporesong flowed into circular motion before me. I followed it deeper into Shoraz, mercanteel and swanky, past further upscale bars and massage parlors and bathhalls and restaurants and theaters and galleries. A cadre of nefra of varying sizes clattered by.

There are homes here, at least I think they’re homes, but fewer. Balconies ripped into the aggregate fungal walls, hundreds of feet up, sometimes gleaming inside with their own light, wrapped in hyphae.

I passed by a fountain, rounded, spraying water upward, sporesong dancing around it like swirled flame lotus petals. The water marked within the fountain with Wake and Sleep runic lines, draining toward Sleep. Again my father’s voice: The time for living is between those two lines.

Then the sporesong stopped in the lane. On each side of us ruby towercaps. It drifted left, then I scryed it: a placard bearing a blue anvil, and a set of burly, dark brown double doors.

“Guess this is it then,” I said to the sporesong, and knocked.

As I waited a cluster of blind cave birds whipped past above, pale and nakedlooking, ululating dully. I startled, and gazed up, watching the flock careen through the middle city.

The door opened. Within a small waiting room and beyond it a hallway that led inward. Both carved from the natural structure of the towershroom it seemed. The room radiated heat. Indeed, I could smell the sharp fragrance of sand slag.

The person who had opened the door was, I thought, undine. Though I’d never seen one before, I had heard tales. They were told to me in the same breath as the Lord of Lights, though I’d seen him once. Undine were a fragment of a tale of ages past.

The undine was skinned in blue and purple stripes which were rough and smooth at the same time. She stood about a half-head taller than me. Her teeth were sharp like a shark’s. She wore a roughspun shift of long leathered strips that looked like unwound scrolls.

“Ya?” she asked in a short tone.

Her wrist flexed as I searched for a reply, just an instinct, as though she was about to slam the door in my face.

I cleared my throat. “I’ve come for Dryskar,” I said. “I am—”

“It’s too late. Chrome hells—it’s just about time for the last bells. How bout come back early cycle?”

“I’m to work here,” I got out. “I’ve just gotten in to the city…I’m Klask Pax.”

At that last bit, her face changed. “Ahhh…why didn’t ya say? Where’d ya come from again, Klask Pax? Come in…”

“Silsern,” I said gratefully, watching as her purple-blue face remained blank. “The S’uldra,” I explained.

“Bet ya’ve never seen a place like this, ya?”

“Blackbloom?” I shook my head. “Never ever. It’s, uh, it’s a lot to take it.”

I blinked. I was unsure how much she could read from my physiology. I was surely tired but unwilling to admit as much.

“Worth it all.” The undine gave a curt nod. “Tell ya oft people come here from somewhere else. Not as oft ya see them leavin.”

“Take it you know the city? Know a place to stay?”

She grinned, showing several rows of teeth. “Ya can stay here I bet. Let’s ask the master.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose…”

“No imposin,” she said. “As I kennit ya’re to work.”

She flipped her hair. It was strange, like a flower or a cusp of kelp or lettuce, darker purple than her skin, burnished with a dark hint of red.

“Tell ya the truth I’m glad for it. I’ve been keepin th’fire for a couple years now, Klask Pax. Bout time I move up, ya ken?”

I nodded dumbly. I knew, as my father had explained and demonstrated to myself and my brother, how the guilded learning started with low-level tasks and eventually allowed apprentices and journeymen to take on more responsibilities over time.

“I used to keep the fire for my father.”

“He in the Guild of Glass too?”

I nodded again. “He’s back home in Silsern.”

“Gotta wonder why ya’re not workin for him, ya?”

“I did,” I said defensively, frowning. “I suppose it’s not every cycle you get an offer to live in Blackbloom. I suppose…I suppose I wanted to see the paths of the dragon for myself.”

She offered me a big smile at that. “Me too, Klask, me too. Tell ya they’re well worth a look. Tell ya see all ya can. I’ve seen Tretho, Oceanflame, Vahana. Stuff you couldn’t believe.”

She stuck out her hand.

“Listen, I’m Rozraheth. Roz for short.”

I clasped her hand, my clawed hand engulfing hers. She felt like sandpaper.

Shortly, the undine Rozraheth led me through an inner door into an ovoid corridor that ran straight back. The dried mushroom walls in the Blue Anvil were a mottled shade of pink. She strode at a quick pace which I had to hurry to match. The heat swelled as we went. Down the corridor a little ways I saw a blue dragonmetal wall with a little door on it.

“You got the furnace cooking?” I asked, though I well knew the answer.

“Been all cycle, been a long one,” Roz said without turning around.

“That the furnace down there?”

Now she turned and grinned, walking backward briefly.

“Ya, the Blue Anvil herself.”

“How big?” I asked.

“I’ll show ya, but later. Let’s go meet Dryskar.”

We veered into an upward-sloped, curving corridor flanked by glowshroom-sconces. We passed a set of immense windows that looked out over a long, stemmy drop to smoldering tenements, beyond them the Aelsea. The windcaps out past the waves churned, gills etched in blue.

The view made me a little dizzy. I had been cliffdiving from Haldyr’s Knife, when I’d been younger and more foolish, but even at the tip of the Knife I’d never felt this high up. Somewhere out there a lighthouse shone under the waves, though I could not see it now. Somewhere out there the S’uldra began, at first undersea, then erupting into rugged reefislands.

We wheeled past the windows, past what I was sure was a workshop where a ruddy-lit figure blew a molten bit of gather, and the corridor kept its curved path until we reached a room. I thought it would surely be the atelier, but it was simply a little room set with a few plush chairs. There were several doors. Roz used a gilded knocker to rap on the leftmost.

“Come in,” a muffled voice called.

Roz popped the door and called in, “It’s the new journeyperson just in.”

She gestured to me.

“Go on then.”

I went. The brightness in the atelier surprised me. The walls the same selfsame pink as always, but the ceiling vaulted, with silvery-golden strands stretched between some of the nooks. In the center of the room stood, as I had been taught is standard, an annealing chamber, this one of a blue metal, filled with glasswork. Nearby at a table two nefra dined on little hammocks of the webbing.

Aside from what I had seen in the streets of Blackbloom, I had only really met one other nefra, that one a storyteller in Lheren. From what I knew they were a chatty and capricious folk, but they were much unlike me. Eight legs, spindly and furred, their eyes waxen and compounded like a cut gem.

“You came quick,” the nearest called out.

It had turned in its woven hammock to regard me.

“I had thought perhaps you would not come at all.”

It turned back to the other. “I am sorry Thyra-svava. He is new to me. This…is the one I was telling you about. The one that made that vase.”

The other nefra waved a leg. “Greet him, Drys!”

The one which had spoken to me first slipped from its hammock. It was all black, its whiskers and fur coated in a thin bit of ice and lichen, and it chinked as it burst into motion. It skittered up to me, and using one leg it grasped the bottom of my hand and used two more to imitate a handshake.

I smiled despite myself. It was, really, impressive dexterity, and I wanted to see what kind of glasswork such creatures could create. I had not really thought of that. Nor had I considered, I supposed, too much about Dryskar until this very moment.

“Klask Pax.”

“Dryskar.”

“It’s an honor,” I said.

Dryskar’s whiskers twitched. “It is near sleep.” He gestured back with two legs. “And, I have the mistress Althyra to consider. But you here, shall you start next cycle then? You’ve met—who—Roz?”

I nodded. “Aye, just Roz and you.”

“She’ll introduce you around. You will stay with us—if it please you.”

I inclined my head gratefully. “Yes. Thanks.”

With that he skittered from me and leapt back into the hammock where he landed with an icy puff.

True to Dryskar’s prediction, Roz introduced me plenty. With me, there would now be four people shadowing Dryskar. Roz had been a journeyperson for two years already, and my arrival allowed her to ascend from firekeeper to work in the studio alongside Dryskar, and the eldest journeyperson, Hakru.

“Come then, Klask,” Hakru said after we’d briefly met. “Come, and take water with me.”

The chairs scraped as Roz sat as well. We were all about a glass table.

“Who else is there?” I said.

“Pretty much Elfyro and that’s it.”

“The apprentice,” Hakru explained as he poured a stream of water from a large hollow gourd into three clear glass cups.

He was druan, darkling like me, but thinner and smaller. Green haired. He had some tattoo work of vines and roots and mushroom-flower going throughout his face.

“He pretty much just comes and sweeps, does dishes, stuff like that.”

“Maybe let him do something once in a while,” I said, without really thinking.

“Yeah.” Hakru laughed. “That’s an idea, eh? He’s not my apprentice, though, you ken?”

I nodded. Hakru slid a full cup of water deftly to me. Then one to Roz.

Hakru raised his glass. “New beginnings, eh?”

“One new one at least. Mine.”

“Yeah. New beginning, then,” Hakru corrected.

“To the deep,” Roz said, toasting as well.

The water was cold and invigorating, and once we’d drank to quiescence we sat back and spoke slowly of things. I asked Roz and Hakru if they were waiting for something.

“Are you waiting for something?” I asked, and with that, suddenly, my tiredness seemed to surge. “I am not familiar with this place. It is nearly sleep, yes?”

“Soon,” Roz said. “You’ll hear it in the fruit-walls. The last bells, the clarion rings, ya ken?”

I supposed I did, and nodded. “I’ll be off then, it’s been a bit of travel from Silsern, and I’m none too fresh...”

“What, ya don’t want me to show ya the furnace?”

I stopped, mid-rise from my chair, but Roz just cackled.

“Hah! We can show ya tomorrow…don’t fret Klask.”

“Get some rest,” Hakru called.