When miners sank a new shaft, they sent down a canary. Pockets of poisonous gas lay stagnant in the earth, veins of death running parallel to those of great wealth. Alas, the risk was necessary—the sacrifice of something small, something expendable. One bird was little price to pay for many lives.
The Naryu Canyon excavators didn’t have a canary.
But they did have a Rook.
In the weeks since he had followed in the path of kings and men, the Canyon had been ravaged. Great excavations were underway already on the outer rim, great veins of iron ore that reeked of dissonance like metal. Its inner twists and turns, however—the place of the acid lake and the thick, thick fog, the topside-turning-curving forest with its roots in the sky and its hanging-branches...
That was still unmapped.
And Rook was here to map it! He’d skittered down the canyon wall (his feet were fast and he dodged the rolling boulders which decimated a mining terrace) and along the rocky path (before the boulders wiped it cleanly from the earth, a longslide landslide!) and down to the canyon floor, skip-by-step, kicking a pebble as he went.
He had hoped for a fun day. But the Canyon was wrong, and twisting-turning, and not like he remembered. Had he stepped this-this-way in the fog, or that-that way? Had he gone through this house (this half-buried house) or the other? His map had started out so promising but now it was a mess, a cluster of contradictions that failed to line up no matter how many papers he stacked up on one another.
And now it was dark... and Rook was lost.
In the middle of the Inverted Forest (or what was left of it— so much had fallen in the great earthripple of Titanius’ collapse that a wholly new landscape awaited those who ventured here a second time) Rook sat with his legs dangling, map pages spread out across his lap, frantically trying to make sense of his illogical surroundings.
Which tunnel had he come out of?
He had thirteen tunnels on his map. They crossed and double-crossed and went upside-down and backwards. They transcended two dimensions. And Rook was trapped, and lost, and could not find the way. The sky below him (he was standing upside-down, for gravity did clumsy cartwheels here) was obscured by clouds, so not even the stars could help him navigate a way out.
"Weep..."
Frustrated, Rook opened his hands and let the pages of his useless map flutter away, drifting impossibly towards the sky.
