The Cindermaw hit the first Crimson Wyrm at Junction Nine like a geological correction.
Gellan felt it from three corridors away — a shockwave through the stone that hit his bare feet like a kick, followed by a heat-bloom so intense that the air in his corridor shimmered for a full two seconds. Then came the sound: not the humming of the Wyrms, but something deeper, older, a basso profundo rumble that the Pallid's tunnel network had never been designed to contain.
He was halfway to the garrison supply route. Blind. Navigating by touch and stone-sense through lightless corridors, his shoulder still bleeding from the Archive collapse, the bioluminescence dead in every passage — the heat from the Wyrms had killed the fungi within a quarter-mile radius, and the Cindermaw's arrival had extended that dead zone further. Gellan was moving through absolute darkness, his fingertips trailing along the wall, reading the stone's texture and temperature the way a sighted person read road signs.
