“Being woken by birdsong is often evoked by the romantic poets, but the reality is more of a cawing and cackling jolt than the soft twittering of songbirds.”

  They left… well, to call anything morning was probably an uneducated guess at best. Since becoming subterranean, Hexadecimal wasn’t even certain her day had the same number of hourglasses it once had. Underground folks kept longer days, she’d heard. Days being a word which had lost all meaning.

  She caught sight of Hope amongst their number, but she was kept sequestered by a bodyguard of purple-coated priests. Even the glimpse of her, of her dignity and coiffure, was enough to make Hexa long for another improper introduction at the very least. She’d never thought so much about what the texture of someone’s gloves must be before finding out that Hope was never seen without hers. The hands beneath them would be so soft, but she would never violate the ritual purity of the great Teacher, and so she just wondered about gloves. Silk would be an ideal material, if there were silkworms beneath the Orth.

  Hexadecimal slapped her cheeks to bring some sense to herself. Reigning theocratic leaders did not tarry with itinerant chroniclers. Besides, what would she do, settle down in Amonite territory and follow the proverbial drum of Hope’s calling? Well, actually, that might not be so bad, were it not for the tons of stone overhead at all times. She might not get eaten by dread beasts and abomin—

  “Amoebas! Blades to the front!” The cry came from the head of the caravan, echoing down the tunnel. What an amoeba was, and why the club-wielding guards of Hope were excluded from dealing with them, she had no idea, but Hexadecimal hurried to the front of the caravan. There, she was just in time to watch someone be engulfed by a large, semi-translucent, tentacled blob. Wasting no time in response to the unfortunate’s screams, she drew her knife and sliced the thick membrane of the creature, and reached in to pull her out. She hissed in a breath as she did so, for contact with the creature burned like fire. So getting eaten by one would be bad. That was a good rule of thumb with most things, but they lacked any obvious mouths so she’d have to be light on her feet.

  Lunging like a duelist, Hexadecimal lacerated the amoeba she had just rescued someone from, until eventually it lost cohesion and pooled on the floor. They didn’t seem especially intelligent, the same pattern of withdraw and lunge had fooled it repeatedly. The other, around the same time, seemed to be reduced to a similar sizzling pile of ichor. “Some help would have been great,” she said flatly to the three men who had been facing the other amoeba. They looked at each other and lacked the dignity to do more than scratch their heads.

  “Sorry,” one of them finally managed. “Seemed like you had it. We had our hands full.”

  Hexadecimal sighed and turned back to the reeling caravan. She examined her knife; she’d have to sharpen it again, but the acid of the amoeba had left interesting patterns on the steel. So, whatever they were, amoebas would necessitate getting a second knife just for killing them.

  The man who had apologized found her in the slowly walking group. “Seems strange, an abomination taking on abominations.”

  “I’m an abomination?” She kept her voice carefully level.

  “A nephilim. Such things require mediums to create.”

  “Maybe to your faith.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my faith!”

  “And what is your faith?”

  The man veritably preened. Maybe his whole goal had been to evangelize. “I’m an Amonite. The old faith.”

  “Dualist, or Exolineal?”

  He sagged a little. “So you know a bit of Amonism.” Why would he sag unless he’d wanted to lord his knowledge over her?

  “Mostly the Exolineal side, and not really all that much of either. You wanted to tell me about your faith? Ah…” she looked for the word and couldn’t find it. “Spread the word a little?”

  “Amonites do not evangelize.” Ah, there was the word. “We are a faith of bloodlines. Each of us is descended from one of the original families led out of bondage to dragons by the Prophet.” Bloodlines. All society was matrilineal because of the human obsession with bloodlines. So far as she knew, dragons had no such preoccupation. Then again, if society were patrilineal, she’d be in good with the Lord already. But regardless of the debate she’d heard the night before, she wasn’t convinced angels had a gender.

  “So you came by just to insult me?”

  “You didn’t have to take it that way.” He frowned deeply. “It was complimentary, overcoming your nature.” Was he hitting on her? Boy was he barking up the wrong tree. Blood ran true, and one of the few things she agreed with her mother on was a lack of interest in men.

  “My ‘nature’ is higher than yours, my ‘father’ was a member of the One God’s angelic host.” Hexadecimal made the God-Star over her chest and let her aura glow. The man’s eyes grew wide and he backed away from the golden light. With a sigh, she dropped her arm and the light faded. “Is this what I should expect from all Dualists? Or all Amonites?”

  “Don’t lump Dualists with all Amonites! We adhere to the original Scriptures, and believe in the two Virtues the One God created for humans!” She wondered if she’d hear his jaw hit the ground if she told him of the seven Virtues prayed to on the surface.

  “So you are a Duelist. I’ll take my leave. I have no interest in fighting over matters of a faith not my own.”

  “So I can’t call you an aberration, but you can call me a Duelist?”

  “I can call you a pig, leave me alone.” Hexa took a centering breath, reminding herself that volatile people could inspire others to be the same way, and that losing her temper was beneath her dignity. She slowed down and slipped into a group of red-robed Oozekennen, counting on his aversion to the faith to keep him away. She let out an irritated breath and turned to the woman next to her. “So what brings you so high above the primordial ooze?”

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  The woman shook her gray-haired head and smiled at Hexadecimal. “Are you actually interested, or just looking for a palette cleanser after that argument?” Ah. Right. Tunnels are known for carrying sound.

  “Both, believe it or not. I’m a chronicler—” she proudly used her improved Draconic vocabulary. “I want to learn everything there is to know about Gargol—what? What’d I say that was so funny?”

  “If you want to know everything, you’re going to the right place! The Great Ken, Dread, is said to immerse herself fully in the waters, something no other Oozekennen can survive. I imagine her Speaker can answer any questions you have about… well, everything. But you are not Oozekennen yourself, are you? Otherwise you’d know that knowing everything is the aspiration of every Oozekennen. To learn so much as to escape the untold Ages of life, afterlife, and whatever comes after that.”

  “Isn’t the afterlife meant to be eternal?” Hexa’s chronicler instincts were tingling that she was about to learn something fundamental to the Oozekennen faith, that just might change her own hybrid faith if she believed it.

  “Your Draconic is rusty—or modern—if you believe that. The word is ‘age’.”

  “As in ‘Age of Stone’?”

  “You could say that, though I don’t know what it would—” After a few iterations, Hexa got “signify.” The afterlife not being eternal… that would overturn so many precepts of the Wholist faith. They hold that the world itself will be eternal, with the Ninth Coming of the Savior. Hexa’s own faith was less concerned with that, more interested in the boons of faith in the present age, and the promise of justice in the afterlife. Sure, it promised eternal glory, but she doubted any of the strongest adherents would object to an Age of Paradise. “Orth to… what is your name, young lady?” Hexa introduced herself, this time leaving off “von Spirithome” to hopefully get at the meat of the conversation. “A pleasure to meet you, Hexa. I am Smooth, of Marcidus.”

  “So what do the Oozekennen believe follows the afterlife?”

  “Oh, well, by then ‘afterlife’ will be ‘life’ and what follows will be the next afterlife.”

  “The One God didn’t get it right the first time?”

  Smooth waved her off with a laugh. “You won’t get me with that theological trap. The One God got all things right in His first effort, but where’s the fun in eternity unchanging? Even the Lord must get tired of angels singing His praises. Perhaps the next afterlife will be like a great game of chess, played against Himself.”

  “If I understand you, isn’t this reality a great game of chess, played against Himself? He punted a great number of angels from Heaven towards the beginning of time.”

  Smooth laughed again. She was a cheerful old woman. “Now you’re getting it! Everything is cycles. The only way out of the cycle is to know the way out, and the only way to know it is to open yourself completely to the divine and be subsumed—” boy did that word take a lot of iterations to convey “—by the Divine. To become One with God.” Well that was some kind of heresy, to a Wholist, but then Hexa was Paxite turned Charismatic. The former might not agree with it, but Dominion would have a field day with Smooth’s summary. “And we know this will happen, because it has already happened, and the One God made all things from the primordial ooze, to which returning creates nothingness.”

  “Bless you, Smooth. You have given my imagination something to have a field day with.”

  “Well drat your imagination, let your soul have a field day with it!” Oh, Hexa would. She wished she could assure the old woman the field day every part of her was having with it.

  “You never did answer my question, as to what brought you so high above the waters.”

  “It is the way of the tunnels. I had to go through Abyss to get from my Speaker to the Great Ken.”

  Hexa weighed the benefits and costs, and ultimately decided to confide in the old woman. She hadn’t been believed the time before, but one never got anywhere being indecisive. “You know, I met her.”

  “You met her? What are you doing, bothering an old woman like me for answers when you’ve already met the greatest Oozekennen of all?”

  “Well, I didn’t know I’d met her, at the time. And by the time she’d said who she was, she was melting down into the stone to avoid the Amonite tomb guards.”

  “You’re saying you met her all the way up in the Amonite tombs? That’s a little hard to believe.”

  “You’re… not the first person to tell me that. But thank you, Smooth von Marcidus, for your insights. You have given me a great deal to think about.”

  The old woman waved her off again, and in high spirits Hexadecimal sought out the priests around Hope. Feeling as she did, she wanted to try and talk her way past them to discuss theology with the great Teacher in anticipation of another encounter with Dread. She hung back as the caravan progressed, until she was about to be run into by the priests or guards surrounding Hope.

  “Hello! You might remember me from, well, yesterday. I was hoping I could talk to Teacher Hope?” The priests—perhaps templars? She didn’t know the nature of their obvious devotion, but they were not mere thugs. Then again, they held hefty clubs, so clearly they weren’t pacifist monks—turned a stony expression to her request, and adjusted their grips on their weapons. “I’m not going to insist, there’s no need for that.” Hexadecimal felt just the slightest bit offended that they made a show of force rather than answer what was a perfectly reasonable, and also probably quite common, request. She turned back from trying to walk backwards before she fell on her own behind, and picked up her pace. The Oozekennen were much more agreeable, it seemed, to be outdone only by the Exolineals who had offered her room and board for a night.

  Hexadecimal shivered, feeling the chill of the Deeps. She invoked her aura, for the comfort of the light if nothing else, and noticed the color of the walls had changed. They were still descending into the bowels of the Orth, clearly, for the stone had gone from gray to almost green. Filled with geometer training, she wondered how the mechanics of how volcanism had allowed for the harvesting of enough gabbro to build up Mount Barber. It was a pedestrian train of thought, much chewed over by those before her, but it was a comforting mental exercise after the flat rebuttal of Hope’s guards. In Barber, in the city of Coldpass, a dragon was responsible for the ongoing volcanism of the range nearby. Perhaps such aid had been enlisted in making Mount Barber, but to what purpose? All it was was a tomb of forgotten secrets and the locus of energy for the necromantic pulses that resonated throughout—say, were they below the range of that effect, now that they had moved from gabbro to olivine? Why had the Amonites chosen to bury their dead where they would forever be restless, when there were tunnels below the reach of Mount Barber?

  She couldn’t easily search out an Amonite to ask, she’d alienated the group she’d first met by calling out male attitude, and Hope’s guards were resolute. She supposed she could ask a guard, as opposed to trying to ask the Teacher herself. She lagged back again, but her question was met with a brusque shake of the head. No answers would be forthcoming today. Ultimately, she went back to Smooth to ask her whether the Oozekennen had taken all the suitable burial sites below the line of transition.

  “Why, no! We Oozekennen do not bury our dead, we return them to the primordial ooze from which we all come, that we might shorten the journey of their soul. I don’t actually know much about Amonite burial practices. Sorry.”

  Hexadecimal assured the woman it was no bother at all, that it was informative enough to know that the Oozekennen practiced the most profound water burial of all. The primordial ooze, then, was not merely a metaphor, and was effectively endless to judge by the vast expanse of the Amonite burial crypt—one of many, doubtless. The One God had drawn creation from the waters and the waters remained, unmaking what the One God had made, to judge by the appearance of Dread. She could immerse herself, somehow, in the “waters of nothingness,” without losing herself entirely. But her body was practically melted, and perhaps extended contact with the primordial ooze was to blame. Hopefully, she was not surrounded by guards as Hope was. For that matter, hopefully Hope would actually Teach at the Temple in the Cavern of Dread, and she could learn from her even if she couldn’t talk to her. So much hinged upon the unknown, but for now all Hexadecimal could do was keep walking and hurry up and wait.