Liv couldn’t help but sigh in relief the moment she stepped into the shoals of Bald Peak Rift. She’d led Rosamund and Sidonie partway up the miner’s road to the cut, where she found the boundary of the shoal had withdrawn quite a bit upslope now that there was no eruption in progress. Bald Peak was only a minor rift, after all, and she had no expectation of finding the corpse of one of the Vædic Lords forgotten somewhere inside.

Stepping into the zone of higher mana density was much like slipping into a hot spring: it felt like every muscle in her body immediately began to relax, and the throbbing, stabbing pain that had been lurking behind Liv’s eyes passed away as easily as a summer rain shower.

“Are you alright?” Sidonie asked from beside her, reaching out to place a hand on Liv’s shoulder.

“Mmm-hmmm,” Liv responded, allowing herself a moment to simply luxuriate in the feeling of relief, her eyes closed, as she swayed on her feet. She took a deep breath, and the air tasted fresh, crisp and cool. It was almost with a feeling of regret that she opened her eyes to check on her friends.

Sidonie seemed to be adapted easily to the mana of the shoals, but Rosamund was clearly taking her time to do so deliberately. While Liv’s lover had gotten better at using the Elden breathing techniques to avoid mana poisoning, it was always a deliberate effort, never the sort of natural ease that someone like Keri seemed to have.

For the first time, Liv tried to picture what it might be like to live inside the shoals of a rift permanently. Or, at least, most of the time. She wondered whether Aira tär Keria, or the other children of the Vædim, had eventually gotten used to living in lower mana densities, or whether they’d simply put up with the headaches. But if Liv and her friends were going to build fortifications here anyway...

“I’m ready,” Rose said, once she’d gotten her breathing under control. “We can keep going.”

Liv nodded and set off again, climbing up to the cut where she, Emma, Matthew and Triss had entered the rift a year and a half before. Rose wouldn’t ever be able to make a home inside a rift, though. And the problem for her wouldn’t just be persistent headaches - it would be mana sickness, sooner or later.

“So do they just let everything sit for the winter?” Rose asked, once they’d stepped into the cut. Here, the wooden wagonway was clear of snow, and the rock walls of the tunnel shielded them from the winter winds.

Liv shook her head. “Not any other year. Look down there.” She took Rose’s hand and led her back to the entrance, then pointed downslope to the camp along the mine road next to the River Aspen. There was no smoke, but the snow-covered buildings stood out as clearly human-built, geometric shapes.

“Most winters, the men stay at the camp, unless there’s a particularly bad storm coming,” Liv explained. “Once you get down into the mines, it's actually rather temperate. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. They’re never actually exposed to the elements very much at all.”

“But this year, everyone is preparing for an attack from the south,” Sidonie guessed, stepping up next to them.

Liv nodded. “I haven’t seen what they’ve built down at the south pass yet, but if I had to guess, they’ve had the miners pulling stone out of the nearby mountains. I don’t see how else they’d build something this quickly. Not that I’m an engineer, or anything.”

Rosamund snorted. “Not in that crown, you aren’t. You said it’s warmer down below? Let’s get walking, then.” She shivered.

Liv reached a hand up to touch the silver circlet around her forehead. There wasn’t an immediate connection to the all workings of the rift, like at the Tomb of Celris. She could feel the crown attempting to make a connection, but could already tell that here, she’d need to get to the control room, just like they’d done in the Painted Desert. Thankfully, she had an idea where it would be.

The three women made their way deeper into the mine, toward the subterranean river. As they walked, they found that most of the mining equipment had been removed, and that what was left had been neatly stacked or packed away along the sides of the cut. It all gave a clear impression that the mana stone mines had not been abandoned, but merely set aside to be re-opened at a later date.

“Watch out for the stone bats,” Liv warned her two friends, as they continued deeper. Veins of mana stone running through the rock walls glowed bright blue, with flecks of gold, and provided enough light for her to see by, if only dimly. “We culled them less than two years ago, but they can sense concentrations of mana, which means they come right for mages.”

It wasn’t until they actually reached the immense cavern where the river was exposed, and the cascades that led down from it toward where Liv had fought the over-sized, enormous bat from which she’d taken her prize casque, that they found a colony. A dozen or more bats, each no larger than a hunting hound, hung from the ceiling of the cave, and for a few heartbeats Liv began to hope the mana beasts would ignore them.

Then, with piercing shrieks, the stone bats woke and spread their wings, erupting in a cloud of flapping, dark shapes that dove down at the three women, horrible jaws open wide.

“Sidonie, shield us!” Liv ordered, drawing her wand. At her right hand, Rosamund’s rapier cleared her sheath with the scrape of steel against leather. Sidonie drew her own wand, but didn’t bother with an incantation, instead choosing to cast silently.

The bats slammed into a curved, translucent dome of sparkling cerulean mana. Several of them fell, stunned, sliding down the smooth surface of coherent magic, while others flapped off in confused, erratic flight paths. The mass dive broken of its momentum, Rosamund went on the offensive.

“Stai’ent Aiveh Æ’Mæ!” Rose cried, raising her hand up to the ceiling of the cavern, making a fist, and then yanking it down. Half a dozen stalactites cracked at the base, then snapped off the stone roof and fell down in a rain of dust, pebbles, and broken rock.

For every bat that was skewered by the tip of a falling stalactite, three more were battered down out of the air, slammed into Sidonie’s globe of mana or all the way down onto the cavern floor. A cloud of dust rose around the three women, obscuring everything outside the dome from sight.

“Rose!” Sidonie shouted over the roar of falling rock. “If you bury us underground, I’m going to be furious with you!”

When everything had finally settled, and Sidonie allowed the shield to wink out, they found rubble built up a hand deep around them in a perfect circle. A few broken bat wings twitched, poking up out of the debris, but any surviving mana beasts must have fled the cavern.

At least, any which had been in the air.

Liv walked down to the shore of the river, where she could see that chunks of stone had fallen into the water, and waited for a long moment, with her wand drawn. It was difficult to see by the light of the mana stone veins, but she thought she could pick out enormous, sinuous shapes beneath the surface.

“Please tell me there aren’t eels,” Rose complained.

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Liv shook her head. “Last time I was here, it was some kind of enormous waterbug. Almost like a centipede or something. Wren and Triss fought the thing, I didn’t actually see it. But it got away alive.”

“Wren left something alive?” Sidonie asked, doubtfully.

“Matthew was wounded and they were carrying him out,” Liv explained. “I don’t think anything’s going to come out after what Rose did. Everything in that river must be hiding. Come along.”

She led them to the top of the cascades, where the river crashed down over sharp, jagged boulders into the darkness. Every stone surface was slick and treacherous. “If we’re going to be coming in and out regularly, we’ll want a staircase here, I think,” Liv said, glancing to Rose.

“That’s going to be a pain, but with Stai, I’m sure I can do it,” Rosamund said. “We’ll want a sort of half-wall facing the waterfall, I think. At the height of a bannister, so no one falls off and breaks their skull open.”

“Perhaps a disc, for now,” Sidonie said, and conjured the same sort of flat circle of mana they’d encountered so many times in rifts. She stepped on, Rose followed her, and they both turned to wait for Liv.

“Go on,” she said, waving them ahead. A grin crept over Liv’s face, and she didn’t even try to stop it. “I’m going to have a bit of fun.”

Liv stepped up to the edge of the rocks, turned around, and let herself fall backward. Rose shrieked from above, but Liv simply whispered: “Aluthent Aiveh Dvo Fetim Æn’Mæ.”

Blue wings spread out, coalescing from pure mana in time to catch the air and lift Liv back up with a single downbeat. The mist of the waterfall piled around her like clouds in the darkness, and the glow from their spells created a faint arcing rainbow through the fog.

Liv spread her arms, twirled through the air, and couldn’t help but laugh in glee.

“Don’t scare us like that!” Sidonie called to her, from the descending disk, but Liv simply gave them a wave with one hand, dipped her wings, and banked around in a shallow curve, exploring the immense cavern. There, below her, was the tunnel from which she’d emerged a year and a half ago, which meant the corpse of the enormous stone-bat would be waiting not much further down. She wrinkled her nose. With any luck, the body would have had enough time to decompose, or would have at least been mostly eaten by other mana beasts.

She met Rose and Sidonie at the bottom of the falls, tucking her wings in for a landing before allowing them to dissipate into motes of essence. “This way,” Liv said, and marched down the corridor.

To her relief, the gargantuan corpse had been picked clean, down to a skeleton which would, no doubt, make for incredible enchanting materials. Liv wasn’t quite certain what ribs the size of a stone buttress could be used for, but she supposed they could get to that later.

Sidonie ran forward to run her fingers along the curve of - was it a leg bone, perhaps? “I can’t believe something got this big down here,” she muttered. “What did it even eat?”

“I wondered that myself,” Liv admitted.

“This is where you got that enormous casque, isn’t it?” Rosamund said, approaching the head. “What did you do, hack it off with an axe? This skull is absolutely ruined.”

“I’d never exactly butchered a carcass that big before,” Liv told her. “There was another tunnel, one I didn’t have time to explore all the way. But - here.” She led them over to the tunnel in which she’d briefly taken shelter from the stone bat.

“The floor and the walls are flat,” Rose said, running her hand on one wall. “And the mana stone doesn’t run in veins, but in strips. Someone made this.”

“That’s what I thought, as well,” Liv said. “But I didn’t have time to explore.” She stepped forward, out of the shoal and into the depths of the rift. “The mana’s stronger here; take a moment to adjust,” she advised Rose.

Both of her friends paused, once they’d stepped over the threshold, and began their breathing exercises. Sidonie, again, finished first, opened her eyes, and indicated with a nod to Liv that she was ready to proceed.

While they waited for Rose, Liv found herself examining her lover’s hands, watching and waiting for the veins at her wrists to go dark. If it happened, she decided, she’d send Rose back out of the rift and down to recover with the guards at the waystone.

But when Rose finally opened her eyes, her skin was still unblemished. “Alright,” the dark-haired girl said. “Let’s go on.”

After exploring the depths of so many other rifts, it was no surprise to Liv when they found the control room, so much like all the others. The panes of glass lit at her touch, scrolling bright Vædic sigils in a variety of colors and drawing a map of the original excavation and structures.

“Alright,” Sidonie said, pulling out her notes. “Let’s get you in control of this place.”

“Look at this,” Rose said, reaching out with one finger to the map. “Here’s the waystone, down at the base of the mountain above the river. But this -” she touched a pulsing blue line, which extended up to the mountain, beneath the surface, and then went dark. “It’s broken, see? It continues deeper, but it's interrupted. Here.”

“That’s where the mining cut is,” Sidonie said, after a moment.

Liv frowned. “But this place was never intended to be a mine, originally,” she said. “The translation is awkward, but it was something about storing power... Help me get through all the defenses,” she asked Sidonie. She had a suspicion she knew what had happened, and why the waystone had been unpowered for years.

☙

It was a long, laborious process, though at least their experience working through the ancient Vædic machines at Feic Seria had made it familiar. Liv and Sidonie must have worked for two bells or more by the time she had full access, as she did instantly at the Tomb of Celris.

Rose, in the meanwhile, explored, often running her hands along the veins of mana stone that ran straight along the walls, like they’d been drawn with a plumb line. “It’s different,” she muttered, but Liv was only listening with half an ear.

With the last permission granted, the crown awoke on her brow, and Liv’s awareness expanded throughout the ruins, and from there into the mines. She felt the huddled colonies of bats, wings wrapped around each other as they slept through the winter, the ambient mana soaking into their bodies.

She swam with the eels and blind fish that populated the river; Liv’s mind traced its path, deep underground, until it spilled out into the Aspen. She was swept along the veins of mana stone that grew upward from the lowest level of the ruins, threading their way through the rock...

“You’re right, Rose,” Liv said, opening her eyes. “It is different, and I know how. And I know why the waystone isn’t working. Follow me.”

Liv led her friends from one corridor to the next, her steps confident now. The crown guided her, and she knew every hall and every room as if she’d lived in them her entire life. She took them to a great shaft - but unlike those that led between levels of most ruins, this one was enormous. Rather than as wide as a bedroom, the opening in the rock was more the size of the Well of Bones. The curtain walls of Whitehill Castle might have struggled to encompass the entire footprint.

Nor was it dark.

Instead, a luminescent brightness rose from the depths, casting the faces of her friends into tones of blue. Motes of mana drifted freely up from the bottom of the shaft, like pollen on the breeze in the spring. It was a snowfall in reverse, with sparks of gold and cerulean blue rising up toward the top of the enormous cavern.

Liv leaned out over the granite railing that had, long ago, been worked from the stone of the mountain’s heart. Down, down, as far down as from the observatory at the top of Whitehill’s tallest tower to the courtyard beneath, the shaft ran. And at the bottom bloomed more mana stone than she’d ever seen in a single place before.

Stone seemed an inadequate description for it. These were no cracked boulders, or even simple veins that ran through the bedrock like any other mineral. No, the mana stone - the Aluthet'Staia, as Master Grenfell had insisted she’d call it, from the time Liv was a child - it bubbled up like sea foam, erupted like frozen crystals, grew like fungus. It pulsed like the sigils in the walls at the Tomb of Celris, and breathed like that ruinous enchantment.

“I can feel it,” Rose gasped, from beside her. “I can feel it all Liv, through Stai. It’s - it’s incredible.”

With every pulse, Liv could sense the veins of mana stone creeping their way forward, tunneling some infinitesimal distance forward through the rock of the mountain, expanding. Growing.

“It’s alive,” she whispered. “It’s not stone at all - or at least, not like any other stone in the world. Look at it. It’s beautiful.”

“If you’re correct,” Sidonie murmured, “We’ve only ever been using the dead pieces of this - this organism. It’s been trying to grow down here all these years, all these centuries, Liv, while the miners have been hacking pieces off of it and selling them. No wonder the waystone doesn’t work - every time it reaches out to connect, they cut its path off again.”

Liv reached a hand out, stretching herself over the stone half-wall so far that only the toes of her boots remained on the ground. Motes of glowing blue and gold essence drifted aside as she swept her hand through them, swirling around her body.

“We have to change everything,” she decided, in that moment. “I can’t let people keep hurting this. It’s all going to be different now.”