???
I wake because something moved that shouldn't.
Not a noise. The Pit swallows noise. A shift. A weight added to the air, a finger pressed into the side of the world. My eyes open to the same black I closed them on. The dark here is complete until it isn't.
I take a breath and taste metal.
Above me, far up the shaft, the Red Moon has opened. Its push comes down in slow pulses. Not light—pressure with color. It squeezes into cracks, into seams, into mouths that shouldn't open. The Pit accepts it the way a wound accepts a thumb.
I sit up.
Bone dust rises in a small cloud and sifts over my cloak. The thorns stitched into the collar scratch when I move.
The bottom is not a bottom. People think a hole must end. The Pit does, but it opens into something bigger than an end. The ground under me is flat for a time and then it isn't. It splits into plains and ravines and plateaus that go on and on in every direction. I have walked for days and not found an edge. I do not need to find one. I am whole.
There is light, but not the kind that explains anything. Long smears of crimson lie across the stone where bodies ended. They glow very faintly, the way rotten fruit glows in memory. Some are small, no longer than an arm. Some run for miles, thin as veins. When you stand over them you can see things that look like letters. They are not letters.
The shaft above me hangs like a throat. From where I am, it looks like a narrow oval punched through the ceiling of the world. It drops a single dim column of color, more felt than seen. Everything else is lit by the corpses.
I stand. My knees complain and then obey. The skin on my hands is stretched wrong, pulled tight over long bones. When I make a fist, the knuckles jut forward like little stones trying to break out.
The ground here is a field of old ribs; the rock grew around them like a blanket. Some of the ribs still ring if you kick them. I don't.
The first pulse arrives. It crawls down the column and spreads over the floor in a slow ripple. The crimson lines brighten and then dim. For a breath they look wet again.
The pulse wakes the coffers.
That's what I call the little ones. Not because they hold anything. Because when they open, something leaves. Air, heat, the little brave sounds that try to live here. You hear them before you see them: soft scraping, claws on mineral, breath moving through tubes that were not made for breath. They live in the cracks under everything. They come up when the Red Moon presses. They do not think. They gather. They climb. They Hunger.
I know their routine. I have watched it a long time. I counted years once. I stopped because the numbers started to sound like names.
I walk toward the shelf where I like to watch. The shelf is a slab of rock that hangs over one of the larger basins. The basin used to be a lake. You can tell by the smooth bowl and by the way the floor angles to it from every direction like a mouth. The water is gone now. The corpses at the bottom glow in long tangled sheets, as if something fell and tried to unfurl on the way down. When the pressure comes, the sheets brighten. When the pressure leaves, they wait.
I climb the broken steps I chiseled years ago with a shard of black stone. The shard dulled after a day and turned to powder inside my palm. The powder itched for a week. I didn't mind.
The shelf is cold enough to keep its own weather. I pull the cloak tight and kneel on the rim. From here, the basin looks like an eye that knows too much. The glow at its floor shakes at the edges, as if it isn't sure if it should continue.
The second pulse hits. It is heavier. It makes my teeth ache. The corpses brighten again, and the hair along my arms lifts as if called by a name I don't like.
Then the coffers open.
I don't see them open. You don't. You hear the sound that isn't a sound. It is the sound of something deciding to be a mouth. The ground exhales. Dust lifts and slides toward the basin in a slow tide, like sleep leaving a body. Cracks that used to be lines widen into rooms. Rooms pinch and lengthen like throats being cleared.
They arrive in lines, like ants that forgot how small they are. Grey, black, some with plates, some with pale wet skin stretched thin over wire bones. Too many eyes. Too few faces. Some drag extra legs that never learned to stand. Some crawl on hands that look like human hands until they turn and show you there are too many fingers and the nails are bending the wrong way. None of them are new. You can see the pieces they are made from. The Pit builds from what it has.
They don't look up yet. They don't look anywhere. The column from the shaft tells them where to go. They slide over each other without fighting. When one falls it doesn't protest. The ones behind step on it or climb around it and keep moving. By the time they reach the middle slope, you can't tell which belonged to which.
They fill the basin and begin to climb its far wall. The sound they make is constant—scrape, pull, wet breath, click, scrape, pull—and beneath it, the old bones in the rock make noise of their own, a small tuning hum that finds the soft places behind the ears.
I lay my palm flat on the stone. It is cool. It shakes.
The pulses from above space out. Long, slow, steady. The Red Moon pressing with the patience of weather. My chest picks up the pattern without asking me. In. Hold. Out. Hold. The holds get longer. The air tastes worse. The glow deepens from tomato to flesh.
A far place pops open and lets out a column of air. The column runs along the ground, pushing dust like a wave, and falls into the basin. I listen to it move. I can place most of the breaks in my head, like counting the ribs inside a chest by tapping.
I try not to remember how those sound on the outside.
Something bumps my shoulder. I turn. A moth big as a hand works its way out of a seam in the rock and beats itself to pieces against my cloak. Its wings leave paste where they touch. It will die soon. All the flying things die here. The ceiling is a sky that hates.
I flick it away and slide my feet to the edge so my heels hang. The basin breathes, slow and ugly. The crowd inside it climbs the far wall and spills onto the plain beyond like a slow red waterfall. The glow paints their backs in streaks. It makes them look warm. They are not.
The shaft column tightens. It stops bleeding at the edges and turns into a clean cylinder of pressure. It pushes straight down. When it does, the cracks in the stone light up in my mind with a tiny sting. Old scars of the world remembering that it split once and might again.
The little ones love it. They climb faster. There are hundreds of thousands now. The plain beyond the basin turns to a moving field. Their bodies touch and carry each other, sliding in sheets toward the nearest slope, toward any wall that trends up. Not because the shaft promises escape. Because up is the only direction the Pit allows when the Red Moon looks.
I watch them and feel nothing I would call pity. They are not cruel. They are not kind. They do what hands do when they find a ladder.
A long time passes. I don't count it. Counting makes holes in my head that never close. The column above breathes in again, longer, deeper, like it's bracing.
Then the ground speaks.
It starts like a bow pulled slow across a string too thick to move. The shelf vibrates. The nails of my left hand dig into the stone before I tell them to. A rain of grit slides from the ceiling and comes down in a curtain I can taste. The glow in the basin flickers and smears, as if the corpses are melting and trying to hold their shape.
The next sound isn't a sound. It is a feeling the bones prefer to recognize. Something vast lifts one foot and sets it down somewhere on the plain beyond the basin. The plain notices. The notice runs out in rings. When the rings hit the basin, the crowd inside shifts as one creature.
Another step. Another place. The rings meet the first rings and make new shapes between them. My jaw hurts. I unclench it and it clenches on its own again.
I don't look for them. Looking wastes time here. The Pit hides big things unless they want you to see them. These things don't care if I see them. That is worse.
More steps. Closer. Farther. Answering each other across distances I once tried to walk. The coffers pause. The little ones hold where they are because their bodies remember what happens when the large ones pass. They do not look down. They do not look up. They freeze and let the world choose.
The column above widens. It pushes harder. It shoves red through the cracks, and for a moment I can see. Not faces. Edges. A shoulder where a mountain shouldn't be. A ridge line that starts to bend and then decides to be an arm. Something like hair dragging over rock, long and wet and threaded with bony hooks that catch and pull loose with a sound like teeth being pulled. It fades and returns and fades again as the pressure breathes.
They are heading toward the same point. Not because it is marked. Because the middle is where they wait.
The shelf heaves once. A thin line opens next to my heel and runs to the edge like an idea that found its words. I slide my feet forward an inch. The line stops at the rim and thinks about becoming a fall. It doesn't. Not yet.
Below, the climbing resumes. The little ones pour over the basin's lip in a thick ribbon and make for the nearest rise. The sound rises with them, a constant grinding that eats the smaller noises underneath. When one breaks, the ones behind step higher.
The steps converge. Left. Right. A pattern forms: four heavy impacts, a pause, three, a pause, and then the ground gives a long sigh as if it is tired of pretending to be hard.
I lay back on the shelf and put my ear against the stone. The thorns press into my jaw. I accept it. From here, the steps come cleaner. They are taller than the ones I remember. Or the stone here is weaker. Or both.
I keep my ear there until a shard of grit crawls in. I sit up and tip my head until the shard falls out. It leaves a small raw taste that runs down the throat. I swallow and it keeps tasting.
Far out on the plain, corpse-light brightens along a fault line and shows a silhouette that is wrong in three ways. It is too narrow where it should be wide. It is too jointed where it should be one thing. It is too many. When it moves, whole sections of it drag behind as if remembering how to follow. The glow fades and the shape is gone, but my body keeps believing it's there. That is how the big ones introduce themselves.
I think of the hunters above. Only the sound of their boots on the cobble taught me that streets can sing. Down here, boots would rot before the first hundred steps and the feet inside them would learn to do without. I imagine the boy with the scythe. I imagine him smiling when the Red Moon opens. I don't know why I imagine that. It makes the air taste worse.
Another impact. Very close. The shelf ripples. The thin crack next to my heel widens enough to show a seam of softer stone. If I press with my toe, I can collapse it. I don't. I want the shelf a little longer.
They gather.
I don't see it. I feel the way air behaves when large shapes stop pretending they are traveling. The little ones lose their rhythm and then find it harder, faster, as if chased by a silence with teeth. The corpse-light dimly reveals fog moving where there should be rock. The fog is not fog. It is breath that doesn't know where to go.
The column above narrows. It drills. It finds the center.
The ground pulls tight the way skin pulls around a thorn. The basin under me stops breathing and holds, as if waiting for permission.
I slide forward again until my toes hang over the lip and look into the glow. The corpses at the bottom twitch. There are hands down there that don't remember death and try to close. A jaw opens and shows gums like fresh bark and then gives up. A long spine arches like a cat and then turns to paste and lies back.
The little ones ring the basin. None enter now. They hold the rim and lean toward the center because all directions lean toward the center now.
The big ones arrive together.
You don't hear the last step. You feel the choice not to step. The silence that follows is full and thick. The Pit recognizes relatives. It makes room.
I stand because I don't want to be seated when they speak.
They speak.
The roar doesn't begin. It is simply there, inside the stone and inside my teeth and behind my eyes. The shelf blurs. The corpses at the basin's floor boil without heat and spread, and for a second a thousand red fingerprints print themselves onto the underside of the air and then smear away. The thorns in my collar drag blood. I don't notice until it cools.
The roar peels layers off the plain. Distant ridges slump like tired shoulders. The air around the column shakes and leaves lines—wrinkles that refuse to smooth. The little ones fold. Some are ground into paste without sound. Some throw themselves forward and are ground into paste with sound.
It is not anger. It is a check. A deep sound that asks the world if it is still there. The world says yes and then thinks about it and says maybe.
They roar again. Lower. Longer. The ceiling replies with a hiss like rain that isn't rain. The column above widens to hold the answer. It pushes harder. It shoves red into the middle until the middle feels like a new mouth that wants to learn.
My knees shake. I let them. It saves other parts for later.
I look up the throat of the Pit. I see nothing. I see the shape of nothing. The column is so tight now it makes a hole in the dark. The hole is not light. It is less dark in a straight line. The line reaches the circle the big ones have made. The line trembles as if held in two fingers.
I think a thought I know better than to think: they are helpless. I don't mean small. I don't mean weak. I mean made to move toward a thing they can't have. The roar sounds like that. The shape of it is a hand that never stops reaching.
The coffers answer with their tiny hunger. The edges of the world answer with shift and grind. The column answers with pressure and patience.
I lower my head and speak inside my mouth where the sound cannot climb out.
"Wake, then."
Not a prayer. An observation. The Pit doesn't listen to prayers. The Gods are dead.
The big ones hold their circle in the center and pull the ground a little closer with each breath. They do not climb. Not tonight. Not yet. They remind the stone that it will have to let go soon, and the stone begins to believe them.
Far up the shaft, the Red Moon breathes out again. Slowly. The push cools. The corpses at the basin's floor settle. The glow stays deeper than before.
The little ones break and flood outward in sheets, their bodies a moving skin that covers the plain. They take the slopes. They take the walls. They find old cracks and turn them into new mouths. They begin to make the stairs the big ones will need later. They don't know that is what they are doing. It doesn't matter. Use is use.
I wipe the blood from my collar with two fingers and taste it. Sour. Flat. Old.
I stand on the lip until the third roar fades in the wires of my teeth. When it is gone, the Pit seems wider. The dark stretches its arms and finds there is more of it to hold.
The column from above goes thin again, a string under tension.
They will wait. The waiting is part of the climb. The waiting is what teaches the rock how to break.
I step back from the edge and the thin crack finally chooses to be a fall. It runs to the rim and tears the corner of the shelf away with a dry cough. The missing piece drops into the basin without a sound. I watch it fall and disappear into the red. A small ripple breaks and closes.
I pull my cloak tight and turn from the drop. The thorns tug at my throat. I let them.
Behind me, the plain moves like a slow ocean made of backs and limbs and joints that click without friction. The circle at the center holds. The ground beneath it learns a new shape.
Above, the Red Moon draws breath for the next push.
The Pit breathes with it.
And everything climbs.