Location: ARDH — the cavern, the bottom step of the shaft, the strip of bare stone, Isha's door
Date: 3 Frostforge 9943 AZI, Temperday, late morning
Realm: Lower Realm
Eden's mouth tasted of copper.
She knew what that was. A great many patients had been told what it was, by her, calmly, with two fingers on the inside of a wrist. The gums bleed a little when a body is pulling from places it does not usually pull from. It meant nothing on its own. It was a line on a chart. It went down when she swallowed, and she looked at the datapad.
Sixteen thousand two hundred. The count had stopped climbing, and she did not trust the stopping. The braid had not stopped. The instrument had reached the far edge of what it could see through that much warm, moving mass, and it was handing her the same figure every four seconds, politely, as it would have handed her a figure for a wall. Somewhere past that wall the floor of the cavern went on into the dark, and on it there were more of them.
