The moment Sunless stepped through the hole in the trunk, she did not find herself underground.
There was no tunnel. There was no soil, and there was no darkness of the ordinary kind.
Instead, she arrived in a place that felt like it should not exist at all.
It was a dimension hidden beneath the withered tree, but calling it a dimension almost felt inadequate. It was like a wound in reality. A folded space.
A place that had been buried not beneath the earth, but beneath the laws of the world itself.
Sunless stood on nothing.
Or rather, she stood on a surface that looked like shadow made solid. It stretched endlessly beneath her feet like a black sea that had forgotten how to move. Yet every now and then, faint ripples passed through it as though something vast and sleeping stirred beneath it.
There was no true sky above.
Only a vast expanse of dim, unnatural gloom that seemed both near and impossibly far away.
Sometimes, pale grey light flickered in the distance.
