The fall took probably three seconds, but it felt much longer. After the first second, I was relieved, because I knew that we couldn’t possibly have fallen into a trap. Most pitfalls only had enough depth to ensure that whatever sharp implements were at the bottom impacted the falling body with enough energy to penetrate, so more than about five meters of fall distance was redundant. I hadn’t seen any pitfalls in Uwriy, but I assumed they were used for capture instead of killing due to healing magic, so my other information was likely still accurate. When the ground finally met me there was no sharp stabbing pain, just a blunt impact and unconsciousness.

Sometime later, though I couldn’t say how long, I woke up covered in mud. Healing magic had put my body back together, so there was no pain as I pushed myself to my feet and looked around, but the surroundings didn’t bode well for the immediate future. What little light there was shone down from a small hole about fifty meters above me, illuminating the inside of a muddy pit. Initially, the area appeared to be roughly circular, but when I ignited a light magic orb I saw that it was actually a long chasm-like scar in the earth, grown over with roots and mostly covered in dirt above. It didn’t look like it was formed by tectonic activity though, instead appearing more like the ground had been slowly worn away by flowing water; a theory that also explained why the ground was so damp.

“Seytodh ngaazmayjh,” a female voice gagged on the ground beside me, and Vaozey started to push herself to her feet, spitting out blood. Evidently, she hadn’t had the good sense to try to right herself in midair to use her legs for impact mitigation and had landed directly on her stomach and chest. If the ground were harder, the impact might have killed her, but the mud must have diffused enough energy to render her landing survivable. “What happened?” she asked.

“You were right about the ground,” I replied. “The area we were standing on was actually just covered in roots and mud, with a pit underneath. Judging by the shape of this place, that whole section of forest might be similar.” Looking off to both ends of the chasm, it appeared to curve after a few dozen meters in either direction, indicating that it might have a river-like winding structure.

“Seyt,” Vaozey swore again, pulling the backpack around so she could look inside. After a second, she sighed in relief. “Nothing broke.”

“You landed chest-down, so the contents were spared,” I informed her. “You would be dead if the ground was harder, in the future you should try to land on your feet if possible.”

“Oh yeah, if I fall down any more zoydhtshervz I’ll be sure to remember that,” Vaozey sighed back. “How the seyt do we get out of here?” Good question, I thought, walking up to one of the walls. Like the ground, it was soft and made of mud. Even without trying, I knew I wouldn’t be able to climb it conventionally, the material was simply too delicate to support my weight. Using force magic on my hands and feet I tried to get a bit more friction, but I didn’t even get off of the ground before the roughly spherical volumes I was gripping came out of the wall.

“It has to let out somewhere,” I reasoned, looking above me to see where the roots above us extended to. As I expected, the closest ones were at least thirty-five meters up, with the majority being over forty. Even using magic, there was no way I could jump that high.

“Was that a joke?” Vaozey snapped. “You’ve told a few jokes, but you always screw up the delivery so it’s hard to tell.”

“We can’t climb this,” I replied, getting close to the wall and adhering my entire torso to it, “watch.” I managed to get three meters off the ground before the mud below my climbing volume started to deform, causing me to slide back down. “If I tried to go faster, I’d probably just fall off,” I said, sliding back down the wall to the ground. Vaozey looked at the wall, walked up to touch the sections I had deformed with my magic, then sighed.

“If you tell me that we wouldn’t have fallen if I didn’t jump-” she began.

“We might not have,” I said. “That specific section was highly stable, enough to hold three people, but others might have been less so.”

“Of course,” Vaozey grumbled. “So, what, we just start walking?”

“Upward gradient is that way,” I said, pointing in one direction down the chasm.

“Looks flat to me,” Vaozey grunted.

“It might be a long walk,” I replied. “Do we still have the rations?”

“Deer meat is starting to go, but we have the jerky,” Vaozey nodded.

“There’s that much, at least,” I grunted back.

After rounding the corner, the chasm doubled back on itself, lending further credence to the idea that it might have been formed by an underground river of some kind. After two more turns we came to a fork and chose the upstream direction again, then found another fork after just three more turns, this one formed by the joining of two separate downstream paths instead of the breaking of a downstream path in two. We’re not going very far uphill for how much ground we have to cover, I thought, mentally measuring the turn angles of the passages, it might be better to continue straight here and hope this passage came from a stream with a more favorable path.

“Can you make that a bit brighter?” Vaozey asked, squinting into the distance down the path we were about to take. I made my light magic ball brighter by about fifty percent, then followed her gaze, looking slightly upward from the ground path to the sections of wall five meters above the ground. It appeared wet, like the rest of the chasm, but that appearance of wetness was actually an illusion.

All along the upper sections of the walls, black biomass writhed and squirmed, flowing over itself in an endless and continuous collective motion. The ants didn’t pay us any mind, going about their work, but their presence made both Vaozey and I nervous. As we approached, walking slowly, the flowing motion of the workers began to slow. Finally, just as we were to pass beneath them, it stopped entirely, and an uncountable number of small compound eyes turned in our direction.

“We should go the other way,” Vaozey said.

“They haven’t taken any hostile action,” I countered.

“And if they decide to?” Vaozey retorted, glaring at me. “Look how far down the tunnel they go. There’s no way we could get away.” I could probably burn them all off, I thought, but, depending on the number of them, it could be dangerous. Looking further up, I saw the ants extend to at least twenty meters above us along the walls, perhaps higher. Quick math told me that their overall volume would be enough to cover me several dozen times over.

“Fine,” I relented, backing out of the tunnel with Vaozey. The ants, apparently pleased with the result, went back to work, and we took the other path, trudging back along the same horizontal distance we had crossed five times over, and gaining another meter along its perpendicular.

As we went, the walls of the chasm around us started to become rock, but only near the bottom where we were walking. It seemed that whatever underground water flow had formed the place had worn down the bedrock in parts, but was still working its way through the mud in others. As a consequence of our newly-found hard ground though, the slight gradient we were walking up became even slighter, to the point that it might as well have been flat. After close to two hours of walking, each straight section had become nearly five times as long before it doubled back, and we were no closer to getting out.

“I’m starving,” Vaozey announced, slumping down into a squat and pulling off the backpack. I stopped as well and took one of the pieces of jerky she held out, feeling my hunger as soon as I took a bite of it. The near-silent sounds of chewing echoed across the bottom of the chasm as we ate, and Vaozey looked up into the darkness above us. Occasionally there were small points of sunlight visible through the roots and mud, but in our current position, there was nothing but blackness. “Might be night,” she grunted.

“Probably not,” I replied. “We’ve only been down here three or four hours,” I replied.

“We were both knocked out, how do you know?” Vaozey asked.

“The sun was still high when I woke up,” I answered. “We were both out for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Hm,” Vaozey grunted, taking another bite of her ration. Using her left hand, she made a few gestures, then sighed. “Still can’t do it,” she muttered.

“Light magic?” I guessed.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “I suppose it makes sense, but you make it look pretty easy.”

“It’s easy when you understand what’s happening,” I replied. “It consumes very little energy, being used like this.”

“I know what’s happening,” Vaozey sighed. “It’s making a ball of light, it’s not complicated.”

“This magic is temporarily exciting the electrons in the air to cause them to emit photons by shedding energy,” I corrected. “That’s why its normal color is purple, but I can do this-” I mentally flexed to change the color of the light to orange, through a process that I admittedly understood less well than the initial one, “-and change the color.”

“Aren’t those the same things Rehv’s binding uses, according to you?” Vaozey asked. “I think I heard that word before.”

“They are, yes,” I confirmed. “Though, technically the effect of Rehv’s binding is caused by a certain cycling frequency in the electric field, not the electrons themselves.” As I said the words, I felt a strange wave of understanding come over me. That’s what I was doing wrong, I realized, Current isn’t just a flow of electrons, it’s a specific phenomenon that conducts energy through the electric field. Looking back, I hadn’t ever tried to use a field model to produce current, and I felt a bit stupid for omitting that model since it was much easier to imagine than the electron one. I need to do some experiments once we’re out of here, I sighed.

“Hey, look at that,” Vaozey said, pulling my attention back to reality by pointing down the tunnel. A small, eyeless rat was sniffing around nearby, probably drawn in by the smell of our food. Since it couldn’t see us, it approached along an indirect and snaking path, then suddenly jumped at Vaozey when it was in range, causing her to shout and jump back, dropping her last bite of food. The victorious creature snatched up its prize and scampered off down the tunnel, rushing around the bend and out of sight.

“Well that was a bit foolish,” I remarked, taking the last bite of my own food.

“Seytoydh little npoyt,” Vaozey grumbled. “Didn’t think he would jump at me.”

“Either way, let’s go,” I replied. “The rock is getting higher along the walls as we go, we might get lucky soon and find a way out.”

We weren’t lucky. Only three more turns after the place where we stopped, the rocks on the walls started to climb slowly back down, going from five meters above our heads to just one. I couldn’t make sense of how it was possible, since it appeared to defy conventional logic about how water flowed on surfaces, but regardless of how it happened the reality was that we weren’t getting much closer to the surface, and had climbed maybe five meters in total over the course of several hours. As the chasm began to widen out a bit, Vaozey and I slowed down, occasionally glancing at the ceiling for peeks at the sky.

“I think it’s night now,” Vaozey muttered.

“Yeah,” I grunted. Though neither of us said anything, we both seemed to decide to stop walking at the same time. “No wood for a fire or anything,” I commented.

“We must have passed under the road or something, right?” Vaozey asked, slouching against one of the walls.

“Probably not,” I replied, sitting down. “Even if my sense of direction is off, just think about it: If a caravan with a cart and an animal pulling it walked over one of those cracks with only roots and mud sealing it, they would fall in. The cracks must not extend to the road.”

“Or they go under it,” Vaozey suggested.

“That would be exceedingly unlikely, considering how this chasm appears to have formed,” I replied.

“Oh, you can tell how it formed too?” Vaozey asked, presenting a challenge like she often did.

“Running water wore down the rock and mud,” I replied. “It’s strange though, there isn’t much water down here.”

“Yeah, I’m getting thirsty,” Vaozey agreed. “Maybe there’s only water when it rains?” That would be bad, I thought, keeping my ideas private, That means this chasm probably floods, so if it rains, we’ll get washed away. “What’s that?” Vaozey asked, pointing to a spot on the ground beside me. Looking at it, I saw a strangely-shaped indentation in the rock, probably made by some softer stone washing away in the water while the harder stone that was fused to it remained.

“Just a rock,” I replied.

“No, look, there’s another one,” Vaozey said, pointing to a second spot between us. Though the first just looked like an “S” shaped line, the second one was more of a spiral, a shape that was far less common in natural rock formations. Some kind of imprint from a shell? I wondered, leaning over to get closer and see more detail.

“A fossil, maybe,” I suggested. “I don’t know the word for it, it’s when something that died a long time ago ends up turned to stone.”

“That doesn’t happen,” Vaozey replied.

“You’re telling me your people have never seen bones from some animal in the ground that were made of stone?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I haven’t heard of that,” Vaozey replied. “How would bones turn to stone anyway? Bones turn to dust and soil, everyone knows that.”

“It’s a process called-” I started, pausing as I realized my explanation was pointless. This isn’t from a shell anyway, I thought as I ran my finger along the spiral, It’s too smooth, and not regular enough. It’s almost like it was deliberately worn into the rock. “Could it be from the forest men?” I wondered aloud.

“Why would you think that?” Vaozey asked.

“That tree we saw, with the patterns, they liked those sorts of things, right?” I asked back. “This looks like it was made deliberately.”

“I can’t say no, but why would a forest man have been down here?” Vaozey asked rhetorically.

“Maybe one fell in, then starved to death,” I replied. “It could have written this before it died.”

“They didn’t have writing though,” Vaozey responded. “They couldn’t even speak.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” I said. “Primitive humans drew all sorts of things, it stands to reason that even if the forest men weren’t human, they might have done the same. After all, they did make those trees, that shows they had the impulse.” Vaozey just grunted subvocally in response, looking down the chasm into the darkness again. There’s another one, I noted, spotting a small circle on the ground that was worn away worse than the others.

“I’m not really sleepy,” Vaozey said.

“Me either,” I replied.

“Then let’s keep walking,” Vaozey suggested. “We can stop when one of us is too tired to keep going. After all, it’s not like the sun will keep us up.”

I spotted more characters on the walls and ground as we walked, about one every few meters or so. They didn’t seem to have any exact repeats in their designs, indicating that they probably weren’t alphabetic, but none of them were particularly complex either. There were some shared motifs between the characters as well, like spirals and curved lines, but the meaning of them was inscrutable. It was almost as though they were hieroglyphics drawn by a child, or someone else with an underdeveloped ability to render an image into reality, furthering my theory that they were drawn by a primitive hominid like a forest man.

“More ants up ahead,” Vaozey said, drawing my attention away from the floor. In the dim purple light, the undulating blackness of the ant flesh looked as though it was consuming the stone it lay over, turning it into nothingness. We were still five meters away, so the ants hadn’t stopped to watch us yet, but it looked like there was no way we would be able to pass by them without drawing attention.

“We have to go through,” I said.

“I’m not going through that,” Vaozey stated firmly.

“Then we have to go back about an hour to that fork we saw,” I said.

“Seyt,” Vaozey swore. “Why can’t we just burn them?”

“With what?” I asked. I had an idea of what we could use, but I wasn’t going to volunteer it unless Vaozey knew as well, since it would be a waste of resources.

“We have the black powder, we could use it,” she suggested.

“An explosion wouldn’t do much,” I replied. “Look how far they go down the tunnel. The lethal radius for the pressure wave wouldn’t be nearly big enough, plus, what if there are ants hiding in the walls? All we’d succeed in doing is angering them. We should try walking through, we still have the repellent.”

“It doesn’t seytoydh work though,” Vaozey hissed.

“It works, just not how we thought initially,” I countered. “Give me some, you take some too, pour it on yourself.” Vaozey gritted her teeth, then took out two waterskins from the bag, handing one to me. We both dumped their contents over our heads, letting the oil inside drip all over us, then I handed the empty container back to Vaozey for storage.

“You go first,” Vaozey said.

“I was intending to,” I replied. “By the way, the repellent oil is probably flammable at high enough temperatures, so if you have to use heat magic to fight off the ants make sure to be careful.”

“Absolutely seytoydh wonderful,” Vaozey muttered, and I began walking forward slowly, watching the ants on the walls. Like the other ones, they began to slow as I approached, stopping entirely by the time I was within two meters and watching me closely. After a few tense seconds, I took another step forward, and the ants receded slightly, making a few quiet hissing noises. Not good, not bad, I thought, watching them closely for signs of aggression. Instead of freezing or rushing at me, they slowly started to spread back out to where they were before they receded, still watching intently.

“They’re not attacking,” I said to Vaozey. “Look.”

“They hissed at you,” she scoffed. “You’re not even inside their territory yet. Go on, take another step, but I’m moving back.” I heard some footsteps on the stone behind me, but I didn’t dare look back, unsure that my sudden head movement wouldn’t trigger some kind of hostility. Suddenly, from above me, I heard the faint sound of claws struggling to get a grip on wood, followed by a long squeak that fell quickly to the ground. Just a few meters ahead, a rat impacted the stone, splattering its surroundings with blood.

The ants didn’t hesitate for a second, swarming the animal while it was down and tearing it apart like a swarm of piranhas. In seconds its bones were showing, and in under a minute, there was little left but a skeleton that was slowly being disassembled and carried up the walls, presumably to be digested by a more specialized process. Throughout the entire process, the ants didn’t so much as get a centimeter closer to me, and it seemed as though the ones on the walls just ahead of me kept still, watching my reaction to the display.

“Vaozey, toss me the deer meat,” I called out, holding my hand behind me. “Don’t miss.”

“You cannot be serious,” she scoffed back, her voice telling me she was at least ten meters away.

“I want to test something,” I said.

“You’re going to get us killed,” Vaozey retorted.

“Deer meat, I’m not asking,” I ordered, gesturing with my fingers. I heard a sigh, then a few seconds later, a bundle of leaves passed through a force magic detector I made, and I caught it with my hand. That skill is very handy, I thought, unwrapping the food and smelling it carefully. There was definitely a hint of repellent in the meat, which was part of the plan, but I made sure to wipe the rest of the oil from my hands and the outside of the leaves onto it for good measure. Then, I tossed the hunk of food ahead of me just far enough that I could still see where it landed and watched the reaction.

At first, the ants moved like they wanted to swarm the meat, but then they stopped as if they were confused by it. A few ants came out of the group and probed the meat with their antennae, then returned. Finally, more ants broke off to smell the meat, then the swarming started and it was disassembled. So it’s almost exactly what I assumed, I thought, it doesn’t so much repel them as confuse them, or perhaps make some scent that blinds them temporarily. Maybe that’s why they’re not attacking, they can’t identify what I am, so they’re being cautious.

I walked back to where Vaozey was, armed with the new information, and began to try to explain it to her. She didn’t like the idea of walking through the swarm, but the fact that the ants took several seconds to even notice the cooked deer meat seemed to calm her nerves a bit. When I explained what we probably looked like to the ants in human terms: strange transparent creatures with indeterminate forms, she eventually agreed that trying to walk through was worth the risk. The promise of using some remaining repellent oil as a weapon in case we were attacked probably helped as well.

Before departing, we decided to have one more ration since we were getting hungry, and as we sat and chewed in silence I noticed a single tendril of darkness extending from the swarm, approaching us slowly. I told Vaozey calmly, to try to keep her from overreacting, but she still jumped to her feet and stepped back, startling the ants in the approaching line. After a few seconds of tension, the ants began moving again, approaching me in particular, then turning around just half a meter in front of me. As I watched, the line of ants then doubled back on itself again, making a rough figure-eight.

“What are they doing?” Vaozey asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, enraptured by the display. After forming the figure eight, the ants marched off to the right, then started circling around again, making a strange spiral shape that they then shrunk into nothing, before making three stacked ovals, one large at the bottom, one small in the center, and one medium-sized on top. Though it lacked any legs, it was difficult to interpret the shape as anything but a representation of an ant.

“What if they drew the pictures?” Vaozey breathed, voicing one of the swirling thoughts in my head. The shape that the ants were making resembled the characters in the stone very closely, though because they were formed of living ants, they weren’t just still images, but animated ones. Whether or not the motion was intended to convey additional information was impossible to know, but it was clear that the display was not just random, it was purposeful. The ants were trying to communicate.

“I don’t…” I began. “It shouldn’t be possible. Even for an intelligent animal, this is-”

“I thought you said they were just bugs,” Vaozey hissed, growing upset now that the initial shock had passed. “You said they weren’t even as smart as rats.”

“I’ll admit, I might have made a few incorrect assumptions,” I replied. “I still wouldn’t say they’re as smart as rats though. If this is any indication, they’re likely far smarter.”