Morning didn't happen in the Precipice. The pitch-black air of the new layer simply thinned into a miserable, steaming grey, and the shadows stopped hiding the mess I had made.
We had made camp on the underside of the shattered cliff, on the one broad slab where down had stayed down all night. Around us the old nesting shelf of the fire dragons hung at every wrong angle, scorched bowls of rock tilted sideways and upside down, slowly grinding lower.
I stood near the edge of the slab with my right hand resting loosely on Wren's hilt. A ring of mangled black water-flesh and shattered bone circled our position, stacked waist-high in places. I had spent the last nine hours holding that perimeter alone. Things had come crawling out of the folded rock from every direction the gravity allowed. The entire lightless ecosystem of the abyss had smelled the pregnant god sitting in our camp, and it had spent the night trying to eat her.
