Hand in hand, Ninmah and Sparrow warped to the very back of Immanu where a giant cave was hollowed out in the largest blackrock mountain in the region.

  As Ninmah stopped for a second to greet a few older children warping in and out of the cavern—most still younger-looking than her—Sparrow beheld the mouth of the Barrows, a gaping maw in the ice-clad rock that stared back at him. Chilly drafts billowed out from the cavern, but even just at the entrance he could see the walls were lined with raw glowing crystals, the ceiling was dripping with frozen rainbow icicles. It wasn’t going to be dark inside at all.

  Ninmah said, snatching his hand and shooting him a nod as she did.

  A great weight pressured upon his shoulders the moment he stepped off the village’s snow and onto hard crystal ground that crunched beneath his boots. The cavern was crystal, uneven, jagged and rugged and just ever so slightly inclined downwards. It really was like descending into the nest of a giant insect, or through the hollowed carcass of one judging by the strange circular ridge marks running around the walls—he’d not been in the carcass of one of those giant titan beetles in the far northeast before, but the webbings of glowing vines and glass-like leaves and fleshy bluish pear-like fruits growing on the walls were like he knew from the Attini Empire.

  Once again, he was reminded that Immanu was only very in empire territory.

  It certainly looked like it. Alabaster stalagmites stood bright and eerie as they travelled deeper into the cavern. Footsteps echoed all around as children passed by in groups every once in a while, hauling heavy baskets full of radishes and cabbages and all sorts of vegetables he'd never thought could be grown in the snow. The more children they passed and the more Ninmah greeted each of them with head rubs and a handful of snack worms, the more Sparrow felt he knew where he was being taken—the ingredients for the simple stew he'd been eating the past two weeks had to come from , after all.

  In the end, it took fifteen minutes to walk down from the entrance to the single largest cavern he'd ever seen.

  He stared. He breathed. The air in the cavern was fresh but chilly, clouds of crystal dust glimmering and fluttering everywhere, the walls slick with patches of luminescent flowers. He couldn't immediately tell where the gusts of wind were coming from, but if he had to hazard a guess, they were from the chasm separating the cavern in two in front of them—a twenty-metre-long chasm, not nearly as massive as Death Rope Passing, but more than eerie enough to make up for its smaller size.

  Peering over the edge, he quickly came to the conclusion that if there a bottom, it wasn't going to be a survivable fall. The luminescent flowers didn't grow on the walls ten metres down; it was an abyss that sucked out all light, a dark warning sign to those looking to cross the chasm without the proper resolve… and for that matter there no bridges leading across the chasm. No ropes to balance on, no narrow rock formations protruding out the walls. Without warping, the only way he could think of getting across to the other side was if he swung using the giant icicles on the ceiling or crawled using the webbings of flowers on the walls.

  Neither icicles nor flowers looked nearly sturdy enough to withstand his weight, and he figured the point wasn't to cross the chasm, anyways.

  This was as far as humans could go.

  Ninmah pointed forward, but his eyes were already there, watching ‘them’ slither through the fields of tall crystal weeds on the other side of the chasm.

  If the cavern on this side still belonged to Immanu and humanity, the cavern over there belonged to the giant white worms. They were… eyeless. Pale like snow. Thread-like beasts each the length of a century-old pine and thick like one, their skin hardened with chitin plates and their heads fitted with crowns of pure alabaster teeth. Even from across the chasm he could tell there were of them patrolling the fields, even more hiding in the crystal weeds, their every squirm and wriggle making the weeds sway and clink like chimes in the morning wind—giant bugs whatsoever.

  For a split second, he thought they might be part of the Swarm, but it was just as immediately apparent that they were about as far removed from ‘bugs’ as they could be.

  As Ninmah greeted and hugged a few children coming and going from the edge of the chasm—all of them touting big baskets in their arms—he resisted the urge to pull out his rifle and chamber a bullet he knew he didn't have. His throat was tight. His shoulders were tense. His training taught him to be wary of any giant bugs, and while he was they weren't bugs, the worms he knew in the Attini Empire were critters to be crushed underfoot. They were grubs for the poor, or mashed to paste as medicinal ingredients for the sick.

  Worms weren't to be giant.

  Ninmah said, pushing down the barrel of his rifle as he drew it from his back.

  He felt he just heard something outrageous with the ‘sibling’ comment, but the fact that she had to clarify they wouldn't try to visit him meant they .

  She didn’t mention , and maybe he didn’t want to know.

  Reluctantly, he lowered his rifle and slipped it over his back. Ninmah, then, was quick to pick up two weed-woven baskets from the simple rows of shelves the Worm Mages had evidently carried all the way from outside—there were dozens of baskets filled with small quartz crystals just sitting by the walls leading into the cavern—and she wasted no time shoving one into his hands, gesturing for him to follow her closer to the edge.

  Skipping down the slight inclined slope, Ninmah stopped right before she could slip off the edge and held out an arm to stop him from slipping, too. She knelt and raised a finger to command his attention—then she stabbed it forward like a knife, drawing a person-sized circle that opened into a wormhole the moment she stood back up.

  A rush of cold wind blasted into his face as the circle connected to the crystal weed fields on the other side of the chasm.

  Ninmah whispered, glancing at him with a wink as the wormhole opened completely—and then he flinched, his teeth gnashing together as he came face to face with a ten-metre-class worm on the other side of the chasm.

  It was bigger up close. The metal plates on its body were marked with rings to separate each segment, and the worm immediately lifted half its body off the ground, ‘standing’ upright as it stared at them through the wormhole with its pearly crown of teeth. It had exactly four of those giant teeth curving inwards like a drill, standing guard before rows of rows of smaller pebble-like teeth he could see peeking out from inside its mouth, and the way the entire length of its body seemed to be constantly vibrating and shimmering and warping the very air around it… reminded him very much of the Worm Mages themselves.

  He felt he just now realised the ‘how’ in how they could possibly cross over to this side of the chasm.

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  Maybe they could warp and open wormholes and do everything the Worm Mages could as well.

  And, while he was still struggling to unclench his muscles, Ninmah picked up a palm-sized quartz from her basket and leaned forward, holding it slowly out at the worm.

  The worm squirmed and wriggled its head around a little, looking back and forth between him and Ninmah. He felt its jittery movements meant it didn’t trust him specifically—he an outsider, after all, though he had no idea if they were intelligent enough to remember faces—but when Ninmah started humming a soft song in her own voice, it snapped its head over with its four giant teeth pried apart.

  Wreathed in milky-white, cryogenic mist, the worm started humming ; it matched Ninmah’s volume, it matched her intonation, it matched her subtle head swaying movements as she waved the quartz in her hand around. Sparrow took a small step back out of caution, but stepped back in with his hands gripped around his rifle as the worm suddenly lunged forward—

  And it plucked the quartz out of Ninmah’s hand with its crown of teeth, tossing it into the air before jumping to swallow it, devouring its snack with an awful .

  Ninmah clapped her hands cheerily and offered it another quartz from her basket, all the while kicking Sparrow’s shin and clicking her tongue at the weeds in front of them.

  she whispered, motioning for him to pluck the weeds with her free hand.

  As he gingerly did as he was asked, kneeling and yanking melons and cabbages and all sorts of impossible snow vegetables from the soil beneath the happily snacking worm, he felt it wasn’t far-fetched of a mutualistic relationship. He wasn’t too knowledgeable about it, but he vaguely knew the Attini Empire harvested most of their food from the great fungi forests; workers with designated Harvester Ant Classes would grow fungus within their bodies and routinely spread them around the forest, ensuring the forest is always nurtured and protected to feed the rest of the Empire.

  Here, the worms get to chew on quartz crystals, and the Worm Mages get to harvest vegetables for their daily meals.

  … It was still a bit of a stretch. There giant bugs employed within empire territory, but they were mostly captured giant ants tamed by the legendary Tamera from the east, used as simple caravan-pulling beasts or as giant war mounts. There were certainly no giant ants crawling freely around the great fungi forests helping with fungi harvesting.

  He couldn’t stop himself from stealing glances up at the worm every once in a while, but Ninmah was whispering at him to hurry—she was running out of quartz crystals to feed it—so he quickly filled the rest of his giant basket with as many vegetables as he could fit in it before nodding back at her. The moment she emptied her basket and feigned tossing a quartz up into the air, she snapped her fingers and closed the wormhole with a soft , separating both worlds in an instant.

  On the far opposite end of the chasm, Sparrow spotted the worm she’d been feeding staring at them sullenly, and for some inexplicable reason, he thought it looked rather… ‘sad’.

  A giant monster it may be, he found himself wanting to pet it.

  Ninmah cupped her hands around her eyes and mouthed a single word: ‘to-mor-row’. He wondered briefly why she didn’t just use her warping voice and talk with it directly, but as another pair of children slid down to the edge next to them and opened another wormhole, he realised this really just another daily chore for them—one of them would randomly pick a worm to feed, and the other would busy themselves harvesting the crops. Maybe Ninmah didn’t want to disturb the other children by using her voice?

  Regardless, she looked giddy enough for the two of them as she took his basket from his hands and set it aside by the shelves. He didn’t know how many meals she could whip up with that one basket, and she probably didn’t know, either. That was why she picked up a second basket full of quartz crystals and skipped back over to him, placing it between his legs.

  she whispered excitedly, grabbing his hand and making him extend his index finger.

  He stood in silence for a moment as Ninmah backed off a single step, giving him space to breathe, to relax—but nothing had really changed since he saw her open a wormhole to connect two worlds together. He hadn’t been taught anything. He still didn’t know the ‘In-Between’ feeling he needed to make light bleed out from under his nails.

  … Did he?

  He tuned out the rest of his environment and zeroed in on Ninmah: through the slight wiggle of her body, through the fiddling of her hands, he saw the easily excitable young girl who hid under the cool and dependable village chief she clearly wanted him to see her as. She clearly hoped he’d had some sort of mental breakthrough seeing her feed a worm, which meant if he couldn’t make a wormhole now, he’d probably be seeing ‘disappointment’ on her face soon enough.

  And then he had a curious thought.

  An interesting idea.

  He remembered what Ninmah had said before he controlled his warping for the first time.

  He raised his finger, pointed it straight forward at the opposite end of the chasm, and imagined ‘one’ wormhole; not two that he had to draw both the opening and exit to. He couldn’t possibly draw the exit wormhole without already being at the exit, after all, and from his point of view, both the opening and the exit were one and the same—it was only when he looked at Ninmah that he two wormholes, but to her, she could see one wormhole hovering in front of her.

  One cut in reality to connect two worlds.

  One ‘In-Between’ to connect two worlds.

  So he exhaled coolly as he closed his eyes, imagining his nail not an unfamiliar painter’s brush, but the sharp tip of a bayonet he was beyond familiar with—and then he imagined through space, twirling his wrist a full circle with a snap to carve open a wormhole the size of his fist.

  By the time his wormhole opened, a giant worm was already waiting on the opposite side.

  For about a good minute, all he did was stare, and all the giant worm did was stare back.

  Then his wormhole winked out of existence.

  His knees buckled and he dropped like a sack of vegetables before he even knew it, blood dripping out from under his nail where he’d felt a tangible resistance stopping him from making the cut. Opening wormholes that lasted only half a second whenever he warped was easy enough, but wormholes open was a whole other monster of an obstacle altogether. He needed more bioarcanic essence. More practice.

  But right now, all he had to do was lay there on the ground and breathe.

  ‘Satisfied’.

  Ninmah teased, kneeling next to him and leaning over his head, a few strands of her hair just barely tickling the tip of his nose.

  He didn’t try to speak. He didn’t try to change his expression. He simply scoffed and slapped a hand over his forehead, trying to whack the throbbing ache away, and suddenly she shoved a fresh soil-pulled melon into his mouth; the fruit was with sweetness like he’d never tasted before.

  she asked, bobbing her head up and down as though she already knew what his answer was going to be.

  He didn’t respond.

  He couldn’t speak, he didn’t know how to write, and he most certainly wasn’t a good artist, but while she fixed him with that glittering, brilliant gaze, bare hands clasped over his chest… he wondered if it might be okay to at least communicate with her through drawings and symbols. After all, it wasn’t against the laws of the Attini Empire for a grunt soldier to communicate to their superiors when explicitly asked to; it should be acceptable if he kept his methods of communication to gestures and simple drawings.

  So, while he chewed on the melon Ninmah was having so much fun feeding him, he unscrewed the bayonet from his rifle and started carving the crystal ground next to him.

  And judging by Ninmah’s knowing look, he felt she understood his message.

  she said, clapping her hands as her eyes twinkled with amusement.

  It was his designation as a Bullet Ant Soldier, not his name—he’d forgotten his name the moment he stepped foot in the Attini Empire as an orphan—but he nodded regardlessly, thinking Ninmah was already incredible enough to have gotten his designation right with his first shoddy drawing of a bird.

  There was no need to correct her when she was already looking so ‘happy’.

  She stuck her hand out at an odd angle, trying to get him to shake it.

  He stared at her hand for a while.

  Pondering.

  Hesitating.

  Before shaking her hand and thinking he really, didn't have to think about it too hard.

  The Worm Mages were rather simple in that regard, after all.