I stepped out of the armored corridor and, for the first time, felt the Night in its purest state. Not the filtered crackle that seeped through the Pyramid's hallways, but its true blood: a cold pulse that blew without wind and smelled of rock that has forgotten the sun. The door sealed behind me with a rasp of metal scales. No light survived outside the protective sphere—only a thick penumbra, mottled with sparks of biolight blinking in the bark of a few wild fungi.
I planted my feet and waited for my eyes to accept that mire of shadows. At first I thought the darkness was absolute, but soon I made out gradations: the outline of leaning rocks, a dry riverbed carved into the earth, and, far away, an even darker band as if the Night had opened its mouth there to drink another night. I remembered the legends of the Whispering Valleys—huge fissures where the land mutters with voices not its own—and realized my steps were headed straight for one of them.
I carried no map; none worth anything existed beyond the Electric Circle. My only guide was the Voice, a whisper that sometimes brushed my mind with an intimacy so tender it made me doubt its reality. I moved slowly, probing the ground with my boot tip so I wouldn't plunge into an invisible ravine. Every stone I dislodged rolled a short way and then lay still, as though gravity itself were a weary creature.
As I walked, memories carved beneath my skull opened up, ready to bloom. I recalled Kren sliding the jade amulet between my fingers the night before I left. "For when you forget who you are," he said. The medallion bore no carving or edges: an oval shard, smooth, dark green. They say that stone grows in layers inside the Pyramid, where the Earth-Current's heat seeps like a mineral heartbeat. According to superstition, each layer of jade traps a dream of the people who live above it. That's why it's worth more than any weapon. I had sworn never to let it go. Now I felt it through my sash, seeking comfort that the darkness spat back with sharper cold.
The first hours were easy despite the fear. I walked with clouded resolve, reciting verses to keep my sanity. When the ground began to slope downward, my feet sank into a gray dust that rose in plumes around my calves. It clung with an acrid stench, like burnt teeth. I realized it was ash, though I had never heard of fires in this region. I bent down; the ash was warm, as though something slow burned beneath it.
To my right, threads of biolight zigzagged through cracks. They flared up suddenly and died, leaving green phosphenes in my eyes. I began to feel nothing was solid. The earth seemed to breathe: it sank under each footprint, then bulged, leaving my body hanging a heartbeat in suspension. It must have been an effect of the ash itself, but the thought tasted like the first sip of a gentle madness.
The air changed. It smelled of rotten parchment, of dried algae. A current stroked the back of my neck. Nothingness opened at every step and taught me new sounds: creaks, snaps, a huge drop exploding without water. All of it distant, yet so stripped of logic that my skin raised its own armor.
Then I heard it. Not the Voice—not the sweetness repeating the name that had been mine in another century—but a choir of whispers that seemed to grow inside the very ash. They passed through the earth, telling something my human ears couldn't understand. My mind, though, felt it: sounds born before words, before even the wish to name. I stopped, because the Pyramid had taught me that when the Night speaks, the wisest thing is to fall silent and count your own breaths. Otherwise it confuses you with a thought that can swallow you.
The whispers ceased so abruptly I nearly tripped over the silence. I had the impression the Night was waiting for me to answer. I offered nothing and walked on, every muscle taut, as if crossing a bridge of unseen beings.
I passed between two rocks shaped like giant ribs. A greenish mist drifted among them and photons clung to my bare skin. Something inside the rock-moss began to beat; I felt a fine hum, so low it became shrill despite its depth. I detoured, searching for firmer ground. The ribs wept a resinous liquid. The smell was sweet, almost inviting, but I eyed it warily: sweetness seldom brings a good death.
At the end of the pass I reached the edge of the Whispering Valley. It wasn't a simple gash in stone: it opened like a human throat, with tense folds twisting inward. From its depths rose a continuous moan, a lament carrying a thousand voices at once—or perhaps a single voice multiplied. I stood at the rim, dizzy with the drop. The Night hid the floor, but now and then phosphorescent flashes revealed a reddish thickness thirty meters below. The entire valley was a beating organ, and I a mere insect at its lip.
I crept along the wall. Every few steps I leaned in, touching the rock and feeling its vibration—a pulse marking a rhythm not my own. Suddenly the Voice—the real one, the only one—brushed my mind with a tenderness that made me waver over the abyss. *"Jareth."* Nothing more. It wasn't imagination; no subterranean whisper could mimic that sound. My knees weakened and I dug my fingers into the stone to keep balance.
I looked ahead. Something moved a few meters away: a thin silhouette, upright, head cocked like someone listening underwater. Its very long arms hung inert, yet I sensed it was tasting the air like an ancient reptile. If the Voice came from it, reality had burst into bloody mockery. If it didn't, then this was a simple encounter with the impossible.
The figure halted. I held my breath and pressed against the rock, wishing to merge with shadow. I watched the contour of its shoulders glide, knowing they were not human bones—too angular, too flexible. The creature bent its backward-jointed knees, almost comical, and hopped to the opposite wall. The valley echoed the impact with shifting tones. The being tilted its head again and a near-metallic click escaped its jaw. It hadn't seen me—or did not deem me important.
When it vanished behind a curve, my muscles took time to loosen. I found a natural ledge that sloped downward, throat still tight with fear. I couldn't stay, waiting for another meeting. Carefully I set one foot after another and descended to the bottom. The ash swallowed my steps to the ankles. It smelled of wet iron. I felt that beneath the valley's crust pulsed something more alive than any organism.
At the floor I discovered the ash blanketed a bed of black clay. The footprints I left didn't last: they closed with a slow sigh, as if the earth inhaled my presence. It wasn't welcoming; it was possessive. The murmur grew clearer, more articulate: voices all speaking at once, trampling one another, unaware of their own confusion. Every minute a warm draft crossed, carrying luminous filaments like cobweb rain. They brushed my skin and melted, leaving a cold tingle that took time to fade.
I advanced, wary of every flutter at the edge of sight. I had no wish to know what crawled behind the ash walls. A persistent ache throbbed at my nape—the weight of darkness on the nerves. It sharpened when, to my left, a swirl of mist opened and showed a natural gallery plunging beneath the valley: an almost perfect arch, polished by hands or something that imitated hands. The murmur poured fiercely from that tunnel.
I edged closer, led by the incomprehensible certainty that the Voice lived beyond that arch. Inside reigned a mournful pallor, a grayish glow from no source. As I stepped in, the jade amulet warmed. I drew it out, studying it in the poor light. To the touch it felt as if it pulsed. Then I remembered the night Kren gave it to me: we were in a peripheral observatory checking cracks in the outer dome. With his farmer-big hands he placed it in my palm. He said he'd found it beside the axis-stone on level 488, where no one cuts jade because disrupting the base structure is forbidden. "I kept it knowing you'd understand," he murmured. Since then, the amulet had traveled with me as my only unauthorized relic—the last secret we shared before the Council reassigned him to the remote agricultural zone.
There, in the glimmering throat, I understood the jade was answering a force not mine. I looped it around my fingers and moved on. The tunnel smelled of stagnant water and old rust. The slippery floor forced me to tiptoe. When the gallery bent right, I saw a ulcerous light: a giant pool shimmered with purplish reflections, its surface skinned in viscous scum folding over itself. The murmur sharpened, and beneath the liquid mass I glimpsed shadows out of all scale.
I skirted the pool along a narrow walkway. On its far side a broken stone bridge led to a larger chamber. The moment I set foot on the first slab, the water stirred. A figure ballooned up as if suddenly inflated. Vaguely human, its face was a featureless oval save for a slit that smiled from side to side. In place of hands it bore two membranous extensions vibrating—useless wings, too small to fly. The creature crouched, stretching that smiling hole toward me, and out of the black well rose a chant: the same cadence of overlapping voices that had guided me from the surface, only now I heard it as an organ playing directly in my bones.
The amulet burned, searing my wrist. In my mind I heard the Voice's name—not as a pronoun but as a lash of affection. It was stronger than the monster's song. I dashed forward, almost running across the bridge. The slab quaked; behind me the creature screeched, slithering fast. The wet scrape of its skin on stone shoved vomit to my throat. I crossed and threw myself into the chamber.
Inside—a weathered cylinder—there was no visible exit but a narrow opening opposite. Its rim was scored with claw-like marks, and from the grooves shone jade light. I ran. The creature was coming; I heard it slip, heard its inverse chant licking my reason. The medallion tugged me. I shoved a shoulder through the crack and forced my way in, crawling along a passage only wide enough to wriggle. Behind, wet blows tried to widen the rock.
I emerged into a vertical corridor. No natural light, but the amulet glowed incandescent, casting green waves. I leaned against a wall, catching breath, and heard the far-off echo of the Voice—a lament promising rest. The passage spiraled upward, inviting me on. The creature fell behind; its song dwindled to a choked moan, as if the stone absorbed it. I thanked the stone. Another blessing: the valley's murmur vanished, replaced by a deep, solid silence, almost friendly.
I climbed. Each turn of the rocky spiral weighed on my calves, yet conviction ruled me: I was ascending toward a mystery greater than terror. After long minutes—or was it an hour, for there was no sun to measure—I reached an upper chamber. The air shimmered blue, as if a quiet flame burned beneath the floor. Overhead hung a canopy of glassy stalactites; drops fell from them into a stone basin, producing hollow notes. The dripping set an irregular tempo, and I felt my pulse syncing to it.
I approached the basin. A milky liquid floated within. The surface rippled for no visible reason, and when I leaned closer, I saw my reflection distorted: half of it drowned in shadow, the other half older, lined with years yet to happen. The image gave me a long look, full of compassion and contempt at once. I blinked, and it dispersed.
Then the Voice—warm, almost a breath at my ear—said, *"You still remember our name."* It was not a question. The air tightened. The liquid in the bowl darkened, coiling into vortices. From its depths rose a jade glow beating in time with my amulet. I pressed the stone to my chest to calm it, but it throbbed harder, far too hard.
"Show me your name," I whispered. The bowl quivered; the liquid arched up and solidified mid-air, forming characters that belonged to no alphabet. Not characters: luminous wounds engraving meaning straight into the mind. **Naani.** And behind it, another scar of light: **Mirdath.** The amulet cracked with an impossible snap—as if it had hidden edges—spilling a thread of green brilliance that flew into the air and completed the inscription. The letters closed into a circle and pulsed double—heart against heart.
In that instant I understood—almost—that the Voice was neither outside nor inside, but stitched into the seam between my two names; that the jade had drunk dreams for centuries because it acted as a magnet for what men forget when they die. Perhaps my lives were strung on a necklace older than the Pyramid, summoned all at once into that basin.
The flare dissolved. The bowl lay empty. The amulet returned to its hard form, oblivious to the miracle that had just passed through it. Yet I felt something left open inside me, a window through which two times breathed. From the lower tunnel the creature's moan no longer came—perhaps it had returned to its pit, beaten or sated. But calm brought no relief. My whole being trembled at the nearness of a truth that would not yet show its face.
The Voice spoke again, softer than ever: *"When you take the next step, there will be no path back."*
I stared at the ascending gallery leading from the basin like a vertical throat, and an icy certainty flooded me. Each rung climbed toward a threshold where reality folded like a badly closed book. Beyond it, the Voice promised meeting or dissolution. I thought of the Pyramid, of Kren, of the millions sleeping beneath its metal walls. I thought of myself, of one name I'd borne and another I wished to claim.
The Voice waited. I breathed, slowly, measuring the tremor in my knees. I touched the still-warm amulet. I understood that no matter how many times the world dies, there will always be a step at the edge of reason where a crack of light can bloom.
And I took that step.