The half of my mind I'd rather tossed to the whales came spluttering back to my consciousness.

I pulled away from the webweaver, who had taken to my mana's attention with a kind of fanatical clarity I… was a mite concerned about, really, and shifted over to where it was calling—threading through the Alómbra Mountains, deep in the twisting paths and all the madness there. Nicau, holding the shadowthief rat and looking rather put-upon, and my mana, paused in grinding through the stone.

Because through the stone was something else.

Fucking fantastic. A fitting distraction. I hadn't even had invaders to hold my attention—the last two groups had been large, enough of them I'd felt a stir of actual focus instead of letting my creatures handle themselves, but they'd both behaved oddly. Hardly poking their head into the Fungal Gardens, gathering a few creatures, before retreating. They didn't even get their blades dirty.

Useless humans. I needed their mana. And they'd been very rude to deprive me of it, considering what I had to my core wasn't much, with how much was going into carving this path to Calarata. But I had a steady ten points to spare. There were plenty of other things to be doing—namely with whatever the fuck was going on with Kriya, her mana trembling through a new influx and my tertiary connection to her humming with pride—but I rather felt the use was worth it.

New schemas. Gods, how I loved them.

Stand back, I murmured. Nicau nearly tripped over himself in his effort to move further back into the tunnel, clutching the shadowthief rat to his shoulder. My mana swirled around the stone, the jagged prongs of white-ivory gleaming through the rock; I brushed against the surface and then pushed in.

I was far below where the sarco crocodile had been and the distant memories of tropical jungles were gone; what met my core was cool stone and deep blackness, identical to what I had now, the marinating depths of old mountains. Mana pulsed through the bones, through what had been calcified in its tomb, and pushed marrow to move again—plucked memories and ideals and shapes from the rock—found the identity within the corpse–

Click.

Cavern-Mouth (Exotic)

The end of all things is patience. It has entirely adapted to the life of ambush; it will spend eons digging caves large enough for its enormous body, fitting itself inside. When it opens its mouth, it appears as if a normal cave—but where prey think to find a haven, they instead find a stomach.