Zephyria glided silently through the Hollow Core.
The five-mile-wide floating city, plated in gleaming Celestial Adamantine and protected by a pitch-black Void-shield, looked like a tiny, insignificant speck against the staggering immensity of the subterranean world.
Lucifer stood on the high balcony of the central keep. Elara, Lyra, and Isolde flanked him. They did not speak. The sheer scale of the environment commanded absolute, horrified silence.
The "sky" of this inner world was the jagged, glowing crust of the mantle they had just fallen through. Upside-down mountains of solid rock dripped slow, viscous waterfalls of green and purple magma that plummeted into the abyss, never seeming to hit a bottom.
But there was no bottom.
The entire interior of the core was a massive, zero-gravity biosphere. It was entirely biological, and completely corrupted.
