The slow, surreal drift of the grey ash lasted about three seconds.
Then the inverted gravity caught up with the whole mass of the ruined seabed, and the silence left by the golden gear broke apart. The crushing weight of the Precipice had turned over completely. Thousands of tons of jagged basalt, shattered iron teeth and wet pumice stopped drifting and shot upward. It was an avalanche running the wrong way, a freefall into the sky, and it ripped us off the ground and hurled us straight into the pitch-black spiral of the Throat.
'Falling up still ends in a splat.'
The wind roared like a jet engine and tore at my dark mantle. A carriage-sized boulder of dead rock rocketed past my shoulder and spun away into the dark. If we just rode along with the debris, we were going to be smeared into paste against the walls of the chute.
I reached into my well, grabbed eight hundred units of spirit essence, and pulled through the open doors of the Soul Sanctum.
