The First Drop

Sorcha held her bare knuckles over the lip of the basalt roost, reading the pulse of the rising sulfur draft before she gave the order.

The heat coming off the abyss was thin and erratic, carrying the bitter tang of subterranean steam. Above her boots stretched the solid rock of the ceiling realm, where the clans of Ceann-Aghaidh built their hearths and anchored their cradles. Beneath the iron rim of the platform lay a thousand feet of empty void, yawning across the chasm to the pale, phosphorescent ridges of the floor realm below.

To stand on the roost was to stand upright on the ceiling, held fast by the upward pull of the upper world's stone. But looking over the edge meant looking into the floor realm's domain—an inverted expanse of moss plains and pale limestone towers hanging in the blackness.

Sorcha turned back to her strike team. She stepped to Eachann, reached out, and jerked the thick tendon cinch at his collarbone until the knot seated deep into the boiled leather. She ran her thumb along the bevel of his eight-inch obsidian spearhead, checking the black smear of pitch. It was thick, distilled three times from the western boiling seeps.

"Your lashing was loose on the left shoulder," she said.

"It holds," Eachann grunted.

"It holds when I say it holds." Sorcha moved to Mhaire, tugging the brass toggle on her harness and inspecting the glass point of her six-foot ash spear. The soot across Mhaire's cheeks hid any gleam of sweat, but her grip on the haft remained steady. "Rations in the upper caverns are down to ground lichen and dried crickets. If we do not bring back meat from their nursery pens, the Elders will be chewing harness leather before the next moon."

"At least the lowlanders have the decency to know which way their vomit drops," Eachann muttered, adjusting his ash shaft. He spat off the ledge. The spit rose upward, curving back toward the ceiling rock and splattering harmlessly against the basalt three paces away. "No thinking about it down there. Just fall until you hit."

"You won't fall down unless your spark bites," Sorcha said.

She raised her wrist to show the iron pyrite ring welded to her bracer. The mechanics of the chasm were unforgiving. In the upper five hundred feet, natural gravity pulled toward the ceiling. To cross into the chasm, a diver had to strike pitch. Distilled pitch, once set ablaze on obsidian, inverted the weapon's polarity along the north-south axis for exactly thirty seconds, dragging the diver behind it like a descending stone into the abyss.

Once past the five-hundred-foot midpoint, the chasm’s natural gravity reversed, pulling violently down toward the floor realm. In that lower half, the burning pitch became an upward brake, fighting the floor’s pull so a diver did not smash into the limestone below. Without burning pitch past the midpoint, a body fell unchecked into the rocks.

"Strike on my mark," Sorcha said. "Step off the moment the glass catches. If the draft snuffs your flame in the first three paces, kick your heels back to the roost ledge. Do not chase the drop on a dead point."

Eachann nodded once, setting his jaw. Mhaire unhooked her safety line from the basalt strut.

Sorcha stepped to the edge, brought the obsidian leaf of her spear against the iron ring on her wrist, and struck hard.

Sparks showered across the black glass. The pitch took instantly with a muffled whumpf, flaring into a fierce turquoise flame that hissed against the sulfur updraft.

Weight slammed into her hands. The inverted polarity seized the spear, dragging it violently downward toward the distant floor. Sorcha bent her knees and leaped from the ledge.

The ceiling roost tore away above her.

The plunge took her breath, the violent drag of the burning spear wrenching through her shoulder muscles as it pulled her body down through the upper air. Wind battered her leather tunic, roaring in her ears with the force of a subterranean gale. Her hair whipped wildly beneath her neck guard.

She held her arms rigid, steering the spear’s northern axis with her shoulders to cut through the rising thermal drafts. Behind her right flank, Mhaire's point burst into blue fire, diving cleanly into the designated descent lane fifty yards out.

Sorcha looked across the void to her left.

Eachann had leaped, his ash spear extended, but his point remained pitch-black. The initial gust from the western chimneys had chilled his resin before the spark could catch.

He was falling by sheer outward momentum, slowing down as the ceiling's natural gravity began to arrest his descent, preparing to yank him back up toward the upper rocks like a tethered stone.

Frantic, Eachann struck his wrist ring again in midair. Sparks sprayed into the darkness. The flint scraped against cold obsidian, but the wind tore the embers away before they could seat into the hardened grease.

"Kick back!" Sorcha yelled, though the howl of rushing air swallowed the words.

Instead of tucking his legs to catch an updraft back toward the ceiling, Eachann swung his arm in panic, trying a third strike. His momentum carried him across the invisible boundary.

They hit the five-hundred-foot mark.

The midpoint offered no sound, no marker, and no mercy. The moment Eachann’s unlit body crossed the center line, the ceiling's upward pull vanished completely, and the floor realm’s natural downward gravity seized him.

Without a burning point to invert polarity and pull upward as a brake, he had no defense against the lower world's mass.

Gravity caught him with sudden, brutal acceleration. He didn't drift. He plunged downward at terminal speed, his six-foot spear trailing helplessly beside him like a discarded twig.

Sorcha felt the midpoint hit her own bones a second later. Her stomach churned violently as the chasm flipped. Instantly, the turquoise fire on her spear ceased to drag her down and began to heave upward against the fall, biting into the lower realm’s gravity like an anchor hooked into the air. Her bones groaned under the sudden braking shock, her descent slowing to a controlled, howling glide three hundred feet above the floor.

She tracked Eachann’s plunge through the glare of her own turquoise flame.

He was a black speck hurtling through the pale phosphorescence of the lower cavern, dropping faster than an arrow.

A heartbeat later, the speck collided with the white limestone shelf at the edge of the lowlander hunting pens. There was no sound across the immense void—only a tiny puff of red dust that bloomed against the pale stone, instantly wiped away by the dark.

The flame on Sorcha's spearhead sputtered, shifting from turquoise to dying amber as the thirty-second burn consumed the last of the pitch.

Sorcha locked her knees and flared her heels, dropping through the final fifty feet of enemy air toward the moss-covered rocks.