We walked down.
That's the thing nobody tells you about the Precipice — there's no staircase, no gate, no helpful sign reading DEEPER, THIS WAY. The layers just get older around you. You keep going and at some point you notice the rock underfoot has stopped being rock and started being something that was rock a very long time ago and hasn't decided what it is now.
The dark thickens by degrees. And the dead in it get less recent, which sounds abstract until you understand that recent dead are the ones that still remember being alive, and the older ones don't, and that's worse.
Brunhilde walked point. Frost fanned out ahead of her in slow fern-shapes, mapping the ground three steps before any of us reached it, which was useful and also meant I spent an hour watching a woman turn the bottom of the world white just by existing in it.
