Loneth had said that the Inverted Mountain was a stone-lined pit, but in many ways that was like describing the night sky as a number of points of light amidst darkness. It was indeed a pit, wide at the top and ending in a jagged point deep in the ground, but rather than being lined in stones, the pit was a solid sheet of rock, like a mountain literally turned inside out. There were cliffs and slopes, cracks and crevices, with trees rising up and overhanging it all, clinging to the solid walls. Among the trees and other hanging gardens, buildings nestled, their roofs tiled in delicate red and their structures made of what looked like wood. Some of them were flat and long, but others rose up from the grey stone like pagodas, becoming more elaborate as they descended. Near the bottom of the inverted mountain, what looked like five stories were taken up by a single building that circled all the way around the edge, its wooden walls gilded and sparkling as they caught the sun, high in the sky above whenever it peeked out from behind the almost ubiquitous clouds.

The five of us were shown to where we would be staying by our seven escorts – apparently Reff and I warranted extra, due to us... getting lost easily. I was sure that it had nothing to do with the fact that each of us had apparently defeated some of their stronger members, at least at what was supposed to be our levels. Our lodgings turned out to be a single long room with a polished wooden floor with cushions around the edge and what looked to be tatami mats piled in one corner.

“These will be your quarters until such a time as you can be confirmed. We will be outside if you require our guidance.”

The nondescript man in a pale golden robe bowed and stepped out of the door, along with the others, leaving the five of us alone in the sparse – but pretty – room.

Turning to my friends, I held my finger against my lips to let them know not to speak, but they all gave me flat looks and nods, indicating that they were well aware that our ‘guides’ were probably listening in. I gestured for them to take a look out of the windows, and we all scattered throughout the small chamber to check our respective windows.

Opening the inner shutters of my own window, I found a series of wooden bars without glass. I was at the back, and was faced with a small gap, some greenery and a shear stone cliff-face. There did not seem to be anybody watching from the narrow gap so I reached out and tried to dislodge one of the bars as quietly as possible. It did not go well. I was somewhat limited by only having a single fully functional hand, but even so, I was not expecting mere wood to prove much of an impediment.

After several moments of complete failure, I leaned to the side and pressed my foot above the windows, and that time when I began to pull, I was lifted off the ground and so figured I might as well use both legs. Positioning my second foot below the windows, I held my damaged arm as still as possible and began trying to tear the bar out with my entire body. It did not so much as groan, which I found vaguely insulting; an inanimate wooden bar ought to know its place, right?

With a shallow grunt, I climbed down off the wall and looked around at my friends; none of them seemed to have been any more successful at dislodging bars than I had been, though it was also possible that they hadn’t tried. Darina, who was the shortest of us, and thus had the least leverage, was casually looking out of a barred window at the front. Catching their attention, I shrugged and gestured at my own bars and I received a series of nods in turn.

I closed my shutters and heard soft clicks from around the room as the others did the same. We re-gathered and Darina pointed at her eyes and then out the front, holding up her fingers to show that our watchers were indeed stationed at the front of the building, presumably as they thought the bars would keep us in.

As the five of us sat in silence, I tried to think of a solution; Reff or Toria could use their fire and heat control to potentially burn a hole in the wall, but that ran the potential risk of burning the whole place down, which would be noticeable. Fire and smoke also had tendencies to be attention grabbers in places with buildings made from wood. I mentally marked that as ‘Plan B’.

It was possible that we could simply exit via the front door and subdue our watchers – they had assigned two each to Reff and I, but I doubted the seven of them were ready for us if we went all out, but there was always the chance somebody would get away, or send a message, or even just shout loud enough for somebody to hear, which would be just as bad as the fire. That idea got labelled ‘Plan C’, and I moved on.

I was still trying to come up with a ‘Plan A’ when Riffa began to point upwards, which we noticed immediately as we were pretty much just sat in silence in a small circle. I followed her finger and looked at the ceiling; above us was a checkerboard pattern in pale golden and white woods. I looked down at Riffa and held my hands out, twisting my face into a, ‘so?’. If we were unable to break the bars on the windows, I did not think we would have an easier time breaking the wooden tiles above us.

Most of the others seemed to have come to the same conclusion and were looking as confused as I was, but Reff seemed to have a better understanding, as he stood to inspect them. Despite his much superior height, he was not quite tall enough to reach the tiles, and I wondered why they made the building so big, despite the apparent absence of risi in the area. I did not let it bother me for long though, as there were many potential explanations, as the locals were fond of saying: the world is wide, and time is deep.

Riffa stood beside her brother, and after emptying sand from a storage-item, proceeded to shape it into a king of step-ladders that vaguely resembled a myriad of arms and legs. It was beautiful, if a little creepy. She proceeded to climb the sand sculpture and gently lift the tiles away to reveal a dark void beyond. She climbed further up the ladder, head disappearing into the darkness above.

Moments later, she stepped down and gestured up again, but squeezing through the tight space, which was just barely wide enough for her at a diagonal. I blinked, curious as to how much space was above the room we were in; it seemed a waste to simple cut off such a seemingly significant amount of room.

Darina, Toria and I scrambled to our feet as Reff went up next, followed by me and then the others. I found myself in a peaked area, sat on a crossbeam that ran above the tiles; they ran the width of the building and all down its length in sequence. I could see as my big friend held a rock in his hand that was glowing a dull, gentle orange, which was added to when Toria climbed up and lit a light on the end of her finger. Above us was the underside of the red tiles every building in the Inverted Mountain seemed to be roofed in and as I watched, Riffa reach up and began to lift them free, turning them sideways and pulling them inside with us to rest on unoccupied sections of wooden beam. The sky outside was still relatively bright, so the giantess did not remove too many, just enough to see the cliff’s edge above us and the leaves of hanging trees.

I was about to start removing more of them to climb out, but Reff caught my hand and shook his head gesturing at the sky and making a waiting motion. I nodded, understanding that he wanted to wait until it was dark.

Riffa gestured for me to move over and I shuffled to the side as she moved back towards the missing tile we had come through and then climbed back down. Bracing myself with my good arm, I looked down to see what she was doing, only to see her covering the alchemical lanterns scattered about the room and then, much to my surprise, putting the tatami mats out and sculpting all of our likenesses in sand upon them, as if sleeping. I had known she could sculpt things other than her puppets – when she, Reff, and Darina had pulled the sand-shark out of its hole to rescue me, she had used her abilities to create a solid platform from which to pull, but I had no idea she could do something like that. Maybe I should have guessed; our abilities seemed to have far more subtlety than I had given them credit for at first, so why would she not be able to sculpt them how she pleased?

Shrugging the thoughts away, I watched as the risi covered each of our copies with blankets and returned to the ladder. Moving aside again, I watched as she climbed back into the smaller space with us, and then leaned down as the sand of the ladder flowed up her arm and into storage. I offered her a double-thumbs-up, which earned me a confused frown, but she quickly appeared to dismiss it and turned to replace the tile.

Which left the five of us sat on wooden beams, waiting for dark and unable to talk. With a shallow sigh, I decided spend the time meditating; if everything went to hell, I wanted to be as close as possible to full power, even if it did not seem likely.

*

***

*

After a couple of hours of sitting on a beam, it was finally dark and to that point, no alarm had been raised. Toria had doused her candle-finger in favour of Reff’s much duller light source and we had removed a section of tiles just large enough for the risi to fit through, which while not a small hole, was hopefully invisible through the coverage provided by the trees.

Darina went first, her skin changing hues to camouflage her as she climbed out of the ceiling space; natural camouflage also not something I was aware the diminutive healer was capable of, but given that I had seen her cover herself in a hard exoskeleton, and also shapeshift her limbs into monstrous, fleshy mouths and tendrils, I was not too surprised.

We gave her a moment to look around, and when there were no cries, shouts or scrambling efforts to come back inside, I followed after, and then the rest of our group. The siblings – and particularly Reff, with the light – came last due to their perfectly white skin being somewhat easier to spot in the night compared to ours. We carefully made out way along the back-side of the roof, careful to stay crouched below the peak until we came to the end. There was another building a dozen feet away and no sign that our guards were paying any attention to the small gap.

Darina went first again, dropping the twenty or so feet to the ground to land with strangely bent legs that absorbed the impact silently before dashing across the dim gap. We hung back, waiting once more with breath held, waiting for shouts, but when none came, I scooted over to the edge and dropped. For the short time I fell, I tapped my Path, covering the distance in less time but gaining barely any momentum, stepping off it as I landed, almost as silently as the healer had been. I moved across the gap, heart hammering in my chest, but again, no alarm was raised.

In short order, we were all crouched behind the other building, everyone’s landings fairly silent, even the massive risi who hand simply hung from the edge and dropped less than half their own height. I had changed out of my destroyed robe and into my black outfit, though doing so had been painful. I was started to feel concern over my arm, as it did not seem to be healing much, if at all, and I once more began to wonder if the Earthen Sky had been deliberate with their medicinal application.

Still, if it was a trap, we had taken out first steps in getting out of it, and we had the rest of the night to search for clues. The problem being that the Inverted Mountain was fairly massive, and finding clues was probably not going to be easy...