Chapter 338: The Gorge
Two days west of Zone One, the highland broke.
The slope had been climbing in long even steps since the oldest ground. Then the steps ran out. The land opened ahead of them and fell away into the gorge country — old stone cut deep by water that had stopped running a very long time ago. The walls were stratified, layer on layer, the record of every age the ground had passed through. Kai had read this stone before. The second eastern entity lived in it.
He felt it before they started down.
Not the entity directly. The bond. Substrate Memory sat under his other senses the way it always had, quiet until the ground asked something of it. Here the ground asked. The gorge held forty years of geological record in its walls, and the bond read it without being told to — the slow settling of the layers, the old water, the long cold.
