Grey cursed under his breath, his arms flailing wildly as he tried to catch his bearings.
Who would have thought that falling through open air wasn't as fun as it looked. Birds made it seem so effortless, soaring and diving with a grace that had always made him want to try it himself.
Standing on the cliff back home with the wind coming off the water, he had imagined it would feel something like freedom.
There was nothing elegant about his descent. He was tumbling, spinning, completely unable to decide which way was down in any useful sense.
He was grateful, deeply and sincerely grateful, that there was nobody around to see this. He would die of embarrassment before he hit the ground.
'Not a word about this to anyone,' he told himself firmly. 'Ever.'
He called out to Kaz and got nothing back. The Bat's voice had cut off the moment he jumped, clean and immediate, like a signal lost to distance or interference.
This was the second time the connection had dropped and he liked it considerably less than the first.
'Great,' he thought. 'Alone again. Falling. No Bat. Fantastic start.'
He adjusted himself and tried to remember what predator birds looked like mid-dive, the way they tucked everything in and pointed headfirst at their target with total commitment.
He tried it and It helped. The tumbling stopped and his descent organised itself into something that at least felt intentional, even if it wasn't.
He exhaled slowly.
'If I survive this I am absolutely making Kaz teach me how to fly properly. He has wings. There is no reason I should be figuring this out alone.'
The thought settled into a plan the moment it formed. Kaz was a bat. Bats flew. When the bonding happened, assuming it happened, Grey was going to sit the Divine Titan down and have a very direct conversation about transferable skills.
He almost smiled.
Almost, because the darkness below him still had no bottom and the cloud layer he had seen from the edge above was nowhere in sight and the longer he fell without hitting anything the more a particular thought he had been successfully avoiding began to push its way forward.
'What if Kaz had been lying to me all along?'
He didn't want to entertain it. He pushed back against it the way he pushed back against most things he didn't want to feel, with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing that since he was eight years old.
But it was too strong this time.
The older villagers had stories. He had grown up hearing them, sitting at the edge of the firelight on festival nights while the adults talked and forgot he was there. Stories of creatures that smiled like friends and ate like wolves. That wore kindness the way a hunter wore camouflage, slowly and patiently, until the right moment.
'Wolves in sheep's clothing,' one of the elders used to call them.
Those stories had frightened the other children considerably more than they had frightened him. He had always assumed that was because of his relationship with animals, because he understood them better than most and fear had never been the foundation of that understanding.
But what if that was exactly what made him the easier target?
He hadn't wasted a second before deciding to trust a creature that had introduced itself as the Death Bat of the Underworld.
A creature that had nearly crushed him flat at thirty percent of its presence, that had watched him get ambushed by Ghosts of Despair without intervening until the last possible moment, that had then sent him jumping off the edge of an enormous chasm with nothing but a promise that it would be fine.
'At what point exactly did I decide this was a reasonable series of decisions?' he wondered.
Fear rose from somewhere deep, the genuine childhood kind he hadn't felt in years, the kind that sat in the stomach and didn't respond to logic. His spirit form shivered with it.
He was still a kid. That was the truth of it. Twelve years old, falling through darkness in a spirit realm, having trusted a Titan he had known for less than a day.
Then the darkness broke.
He cut through it into shimmering atmosphere, soft and warm, white clouds drifting around him like something out of a dream.
The cold of the upper dark gave way immediately to something gentle and enveloping, and the fear in his stomach didn't disappear but it shifted, made room for something else alongside itself.
'Okay,' he thought, watching the clouds drift past him. 'Still falling. Still alive. Both of those things are good.'
He kept his senses sharp regardless. Kaz could be listening to his thoughts at any moment and if the Bat did have plans that involved Grey ending up as a meal, the least Grey could do was not telegraph his suspicions.
'Better safe than sorry,' the Chief's voice said in his memory, in the particular tone he used when he was trying to teach something without making it feel like a lesson.
Grey had always been better at remembering things the Chief said than things any teacher said. He wondered sometimes what that meant about him.
He had decided a long time ago that it probably just meant the Chief was more interesting than his teachers, which was obviously true and didn't require much further analysis.
An unknown feeling spread through him the moment he entered the clouds. Warm and formless, moving through his spirit form without leaving any visible trace. He checked himself over carefully and found nothing changed, nothing damaged, nothing that suggested the feeling was dangerous.
He decided to accept it and keep moving.
The clouds were thick enough that he still couldn't see the bottom. Some kind of restriction, probably. This entire place had the quality of something deliberately constructed, rules put in place by something that knew exactly what it was doing and had taken its time doing it.
Then his descent slowed.
Gradually at first, then more deliberately, until he was no longer falling but floating, drifting downward at a pace that felt almost considerate. The clouds parted around him like curtains being drawn back, and a whole new world came into view below.
He had been expecting something grim. Kaz had called this place a prison and the word had conjured images accordingly, darkness and rock and the kind of desolate emptiness that suited something called the Heart's Abyss.
He had mentally prepared himself—without realising he was doing it—for something that matched the weight of everything that had led him here.
What he saw instead was a vast green plain stretching from horizon to horizon. Grass, scattered rocks, gentle hills rolling away into the distance. The air was clean and still. The light came from everywhere at once, the same sourceless quality as the upper Heartlands, but softer here, warmer.
'Of course,' he thought. 'Of course the ancient Titan's prison is a meadow.'
An invisible force took hold of him gently and guided him the rest of the way down, slow and deliberate, steering him toward the grass below. He considered struggling and decided against it when it became clear the force had no interest in doing anything except setting him down safely.
His feet touched grass.
He stood still for a moment and just breathed.
Then he looked up and saw the mountains.
They rose at the far end of the plain, one to the east and one to the west, and the contrast between them was so stark it seemed almost deliberate, as though whatever had built this place had wanted to make a point.
The eastern mountain was alive. Dense forest covered it completely, thick and ancient, every shade of green from the deep near-black of the pines near its peak to the bright lively green of the trees lower down. Mist clung to its upper slopes. It looked like something that had been growing for a very long time and intended to keep growing.
The western mountain was its opposite in every way. Bare grey rock, hard and angular, streaked with the white scars of old rockfalls. No softness anywhere, no greenery, nothing except the bones of the earth breaking through the surface. And near its base, a dark cave mouth opened in the rock face like a staring eye.
Grey looked at it for a long moment.
'That's his,' he thought, with the particular certainty of someone whose instincts have been reliably accurate all day despite everything else going wrong. 'That's definitely his.'
The other mountain was someone else's business and none of his. He had one job here and he intended to do it.
He set off across the plain toward the western mountain. His slow walk quickly turned into a run, as he tried not to think too hard about how far away it looked.