Echo Rock

"So if Morytha, like the underworld, is just a bunch of old skyscrapers" (imagine that, seeing up just that high, once upon a time, to the sky) "with a bunch of empty space in between, then how are we standing up here right now? Like, why don't the Titans all sink?"

Obviously the answer is something to do with buoyancy and porosity and relative densities of rock and cloud, not to mention the fact that the dead Titans do happen to sink, very prominently, enough so that Rex has taken them down there to the bed and then again up the impossible tower, but then how can the clouds be holding themselves up in an infinite cotton-ball sheet like that?

"Huh?" comes the acknowledgement from Mythra, the taste of a puffing breath coating her confusion. Like, what a dumb question, right? I must not have heard you properly.

Of course, it's true. Pandoria really should know this, if she's going to be the goddess of Genbu (title still pending, of course, it needs work, needs pep, needs pizzazz). Actually, if she already has been, for a running fifteen years.

The Aegis, jogging beside her, would have stopped on a dime if she didn't want Pandy to stop, slowly, too. She lets the paces pace themselves out naturally, then draws back, hands on hips.

Pandy pauses, turns. Mythra turns around herself and locates a nearby mossy chunk of fallen rock to climb on top of.

Sort of theatrical, isn't it? Maybe this was what their last visit to old man Cole in Uraya had been about. Tricks of the trade, for grabbing and keeping people's attention. Fancy stuff like that.

(Obviously, the Zekenator and his trusty quickest purple Blade don't need any lessons in that, thank you!)

Mythra arranges her legs in front of her, one bent to the side and one propped up at the knee. She sighs. She stares up at the sky, as if to imagine those very same improbable clouds that yet linger below the Cliffs.

"The clouds are made of..."

"Ether and human DNA, I know," chirps Pandy, somehow both flatly and as cheerily as can be.

Mythra breaks character to blink at her. "That's..."

"Irrelevant, I know," Pandy replies again, to finish the sentence as neatly as a leftover octomayo sandwich left spoiling in the rucksack.

Tectonics. Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic rocks. The core of the world. The center(s) for the planet's heating and cooling, sprawling and changing.

Weather events, and moon phases, and tides. The speech of the world to the petty little things that dot its outermost layer, unawares or merely unprivy.

None of it makes sense, with the landmasses so separated from the surface. Sure, the Titans themselves have all that, their very own respirocirculatory systems, but who's to say about relative age, when the rocks just bear no relation?

Fair enough that the World Tree should fall down, soon enough, if its roots have to gnarl their impossible way through any more blacktop just to get their fix.

And oh, Mythra just looks so, so sad thinking about it, trying to curl her own fingers into grass and grime but getting nothing at all to cherish.

Pandoria joins her on the rock. Kinda really lonely, in this middle place, perched at the edge of the void. Super quiet, watching the spurious turn of the rest of the world.