The Sinkhole and the Deep

Finding it: the fragment

When the Chorus runs from the Hive, it leaves a Chorus Fragment on the floor of its pit, and the fragment still hears the rest of it. Hold it to your ear and turn round. Facing the right way it whispers clearly, and what it says tells you how far. Side on it's faint and broken; facing away there's only static.

The Sinkhole

statichollow:sinkhole, once the Chorus has run

Halloway's Low Field, where a farm's field was pulled down from underneath. It's out in the world like the Hive: a crater thirty-odd yards across, its rim a cliff of torn turf and soil with cracks running out from it into the grass. The field's fences are snapped off at the edge, the barn has tipped over the brink and lies half down the slope, and the cart it was loading lies on its side at the bottom. Veins of hive flesh run down the walls with ribs of chitin sticking out of them. Steam comes up off its floor, and now and then the whole hole breathes out, deep.

The first time someone comes up to it:

The surveyor's camp is on the north rim: E. Calder's notes on a lectern (Subsidence, Halloway's Low Field) and his chest of kit: two lanterns, sixteen torches, two leads, a spyglass, an iron pickaxe, bread, cooked beef and a Surgical Kit. Reaching the Sinkhole earns Warmer.

The burrow

In the bottom of the hole, round a knot of flesh ringed with teeth, is the way the Chorus tore down: a tunnel round as a pipe, lined with hive flesh and ribs of chitin, winding down in six turns like a corkscrew, sixty blocks down from the floor of the hole. Halfway down, on a landing, is the surveyor's last page. At the bottom is a small domed chamber.

The Throat

In the middle of the chamber's floor, three blocks across: the Throat, a ring of hive flesh puckered shut. Stand on it and it feels you ("It feels you standing on it."). It stirs, it opens, and after a couple of seconds it takes you down into the Deep. That earns Down Where It Is Warm.

While it lives: it comes back up

Until the Chorus is dead, the world up top feels it:

• Tremors under you every so often: a low rumble and dust off the roof, without your view shaking.
• The ground gives way near you (natural ground only, never your builds): a pit lined with its flesh, its things climbing out of it. The pit heals over after five minutes.
• Flesh blisters swell up out of the ground: "Something is swelling up out of the ground. Break it before it bursts." If it bursts, its forms come out.
• The Reach, every few nights where you live: three tremors, closer and closer, the ground splits, and one of the Chorus's hands tears up out of it with its things climbing out after it ("IT COMES UP"). Kill it for It Came Up; leave it and after four minutes it sinks back down. See the Chorus.

The Deep

Huge warm caverns under the hills, older than anything over them, with seas of blood in their bottoms and a rock roof over everything. The Bloom's roots hang down through the roofs, gone deeper than anyone ever dug. Ember caps glow like coals on the floors. Ash and spores drift in the air, there's a warm drone and a heartbeat a long way off, and its own music plays. Coming down: "It's warm down here. It's always been warm down here." If you carry the fragment, a moment later it whispers: "home. we are home. come and find us. we are deeper."

The Warm Dark

Where the hive's flesh has grown over the rock: veins of flesh, chitin and bone through the stone, springs of blood, nerve stalks, pustules and ember caps, red spores in the air.

The Root Hollows

Where the Bloom's roots come down: great Bloom Roots up from the floor and down from the roof, and pale Root Tendrils hanging everywhere, their ends glowing. Fewer ember caps. The Listeners nest here.

The Old Halls

The pale worked stone of whoever was down here first: old stone through the rock, bones, skulls, candles, a few ember caps, and ash in the air.

The Gullet

Where you come out: a domed chamber of hive flesh shut in the rock, near the middle of the Deep and up near its roof, lit by nerve stalks round its wall and ember caps on its floor. A Throat is set in its floor: stand on it to go back up to the Sinkhole's chamber. Three tunnels run out of the Gullet and down through the rock until they come out into the caverns.

Low Marrow

About a hundred blocks from the Gullet: a hamlet the ground opened under one night, pulled down whole into a cavern of its own. Five cottages lie where they came to rest, tipped over and half sunk in a lake that isn't water any more, full of it inside. In the middle of the lake its church stands upended, its bell still in its tower. The Bloom's roots hang through the cavern's roof and ember caps burn on what dry ground there is. Two Listeners are still there.

Nobody's left. The reeve wrote down why (Low Marrow, T. Ashby, on the lectern in his cottage), and so did the priest (the last sermon, Rev. J. Fairley). Both are on the lore page. The reeve's last page:

The way-stones

The old ones' road-markers: squat columns with a spiral cut in each like an ear and an ember cap burning on top. They stand every thirty-odd blocks from the Gullet to the Old Halls. Follow them.

The Old Halls

About 230 blocks from the Gullet, the far end of the way-stones: the older ones' hall, cut out of the rock before anything walked up top. A passage leads straight in to its door. Inside is a long nave of their pale stone, fifty-odd blocks long under a stepped vault, two rows of pillars carved with their spirals, ember caps along the walls and root tendrils hanging down through the vault.

Two alcoves hold what they cut in the wall (on lecterns), and the third holds their things. At the far end is a dais, two steps up, with candles on it and a seat at the back. On the seat is the Deaf King, where he's sat ever since the singing came down. He can't hear you and can't see you. He feels the floor.

Killing him earns Stand Still, and he leaves the King's Ear-Stones. Carry them into the Warm Heart and the Chorus's song can't get into you.

The Listeners' nests

In the Root Hollows, one to each stretch of the Deep: a hollow where the Listeners (see the Deaf King) take what they take. Bones, the clothes of the people they were, a barrel of their things, and a low wall of bone round it. The Listeners hunt the Chorus's forms just as they hunt you.

The Warm Heart

Where the Chorus went to ground, about 420 blocks out from the Gullet, the way the fragment points. It's a great round chamber in the rock, some seventy-five blocks across. Its floor is hive flesh running down on every side to a lake of blood, with a vault of chitin ribs over it. Four stalks of chitin stand round the lake with its nerve nodes on them, where they were round its pit, and there are three ways in.

Come down into it and the Chorus rises: "Up out of the blood it comes - whole again, and every voice in it singing." When it's down to two thirds of its health, the walls crack open ("The walls crack open. Something's coming through them: the older ones. They've heard it.") and the Listeners pour in. At a third it tears itself up out of its lake. See the Chorus.

When it dies: "Far below, the singing stops. It doesn't start again." Everything of its in the chamber falls apart, the world above stops feeling it, and it leaves the Last Voice (advancement The Last Voice). That leads on to Chapter Six.

Its blocks

All of them have HD textures and LabPBR maps.