Lilith stepped through Morris’s yawning stone gate, like walking into a cliff’s mouth.

Before she entered, she crouched by the grotto. She wiped thick moss from the rocks, and old bricks showed like bones under rotten cloth.

She tapped a brick. Freed of its green coat, it showed a mottled face. Dark watermarks mapped like ghost rivers, telling what this tunnel once did.

This looked like a sewer outfall, a river’s throat sealed in stone.

Lilith backed off, returned to the cave mouth, and lifted her gaze. The surrounding rock ringed her like a broken well.

Time had gnawed the shell. It had collapsed, lost its smooth ring. Still, she gathered scattered stones like puzzle pieces and sketched a rough circle.

The thought of squeezing into Morris through a sewer sank her mood like a stone into black water.

Morris was Spuiset’s capital, a crown of a vast realm. Crawling in through its drains felt like trading a pilgrimage for an indignity.

She sighed. She drew the Astrolabe from her back and swept it lightly, like brushing dust from night.

Pale-blue starlight climbed its sapphire head and gathered into a single bright star. It lit the tunnel like dawn in a bottle. She walked deeper.

The sewer ran longer than she feared. Twenty minutes of footsteps drummed by, and no exit opened, only the echo of her pace.

At her current speed, a normal drain was something the Little White Dragon could snake through in a blink, not a maze that kept her wandering.

She did find manholes that linked the surface—ceilings to Morris’s folk, more like vents. Every lid was sealed like amber, glued shut unless she shattered them.

She was, strictly speaking, right above Morris. Random wrecking could crush what lay below. They called Morris a dead city, yet she felt life like embers under ash. She wouldn’t risk it.

So she kept to the tunnel’s gut. Decades without a word, sure, but they had to leave some artery to the outside. Or had the Vampires ditched vents and carved a new road?

The Little White Dragon let her thoughts wander for another half hour. Once she invoked the Void Command Seat, she could sweep the sewers in under an hour—if she didn’t get lost.

She didn’t, chalking frequent marks like breadcrumbs along a maze wall. Bad news, she had covered two-thirds already, and still no way down.

Irritation prickled like sand. She paused, chose a patch of stone less chewed by years, and sat. She opened the pouch on her left arm, pulled a ration bar, and drank.

Since leaving the Dragon Territory, her meal schedule had shattered like brittle ice. Dragons didn’t need frequent food; one feast could tide them half a moon.

Her appetite ran small for her kind, so a little food stretched far. On the road, that thrift floated her like driftwood.

Still, the Little White Dragon craved steaming meat over tidy bricks. A dragon’s body loved flesh, not starch. These biscuits offered no fire. It felt like chewing bark from her human days.

Hunger throbbed like an empty drum. She wanted meat.

Eyes pricking, Lilith bit the ration. If she’d known, she wouldn’t have tossed jerky for its stink. Even one string of meat beat this dry chalk.

She downed the rest in a few quick bites. She stood, flicked dust from her coat’s hem, and vowed to find a way out now. If she didn’t get topside and buy food, she’d go feral.

Fueled by hunger, she set off again. The white-haired girl lifted the Astrolabe, its star guiding her as she hopped to each would-be manhole.

When one refused to budge, she crawled out sooty like a chimney sweep and dragged herself to the next branch.

It felt less like a journey and more like a plumber’s shift, patching a city’s buried veins.

Pretty-girl Mario, let’s-a go!

“This should be the last one,” she said, her breath misting like cave fog.

Twenty minutes later, Lilith reached the sewer’s end. She bowed her head over the final cover. Pale light seeped through its cracks like milk. To her, it beat every vista.

At last—true light, not the star she carried.

Joy surged like a spring flood. She sprang onto the lid. After 2,300 years, the sewers held no stink, and even the moss grew thin, yet her bones still flinched from these tangled pipes.

The White Dragon girl landed hard on the old metal, forgetting how brittle it might be after so long.

Krrak. Her body went light. The ground vanished under her feet. A wash of brightness rushed up. Then nothing, except the cold bloom of free fall.

Lilith stared, eyes wide, at a city expanding toward her like a blooming map. The white-haired girl blinked, her thoughts sprinting to catch the moment.

She, Lilith, was in free fall, like a leaf cut loose.

Below waited ground that looked as unforgiving as iron.

Two seconds—two grains in an hourglass—and she’d meet it hard.

Face-first, like a meteor with bad aim.

“Aaaaaaahhhhh!”

Dead-still Morris woke to a razor-sharp scream, a blade of sound across a frozen lake.