Kartuiin
“You’re moping.”
“I’m not moping.”
Tegan Dargan-Cannele rolled her eyes, levering herself off the doorframe and moving toward her husband, who drifted aimlessly, rearranging papers in his small office on Kartuiin. “You’re moving papers back and forth that didn’t need moving in the first place. What’s chewing on you, Alek?”
Descending into the ancient mines, the surface world faded from existence so quickly it was like falling from the waking world into the realm of dreams. In the deepening black, the air took on a chill and all sound ceased, save that of his own breathing. It was an eternal darkness, where the planet slept and only rarely stirred, paying no mind to what went on outside. The darkness, the silence, the cool air that had hung unmoving for indeterminate years until stirred by his migration, wrapped around him, settling upon him and soaking in to his skin, sinking deeper and deeper until it was in his blood and bones.Climbing down, down, into the endless night where no star’s light ever pierced, meandering through a combination of natural caverns and manmade corridors carved into the rock millennia ago, he descended, following the signs written in the light of cultivated luminous lichen until he reached the deep darkness of the bridge.
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