Three days had passed.
No sleep.
No time to eat.
Not that Kai needed to, anyway.
When he finally came across it, covered in blood, guts, and dirt, he sighed.
Before him stood a seemingly normal tree.
It was anything but normal.
Kai pulled down on a small branch, and the ground shifted beneath his feet. The tree rotated as it moved through the soil, revealing a hold in the boulder it was almost merged with.
Steps led down.
A lot of steps.
Kai counted, as he'd done for the longest time.
Half a day. That's how long it took to reach his destination.
The village looked exactly as Orlin had described to him: a hollowed throat under the earth, carved streets and low roofs covered with lichen and the pale fungus that lit the underdark, but here everything lived in a damp, artificial dusk. The sky was a ceiling of stone, ribbed with faint veins of mica, a type of mineral that shone in the bioluminescence of the mushrooms and scattered it into soft pools of colour.
