More than half an hour later.
[Tom Pie] drove the thick, rigid broken bone he had been using for support deep into a crack in the weathered rock. Bracing his core, he flipped like a tattered kite onto the summit of the final steep bone ridge.
The wind howled, yet what struck his face was a stench of rot so thick it could instantly suffocate a living person.
The Black Pool lay beneath his feet.
It was a stretch of viscous, stagnant water deep within a ravine beneath the cliffs. Lead-gray clouds of lethal poison churned over its surface like a burial shroud. Whenever the undercurrents tore a gap through the fog, grayish-white bubbles the size of millstones could be seen slowly rising from the bottom and bursting.
Their muffled pops sounded like an invisible subterranean troll crouching in the mire, chewing fresh marrow.
[Tom Pie] instinctively touched the hideous Corrosion Marks behind his ear, which were faintly burning.
The last time he had fallen in here, he had been a clueless newbie. He had plunged in headfirst and swallowed half a bellyful of gut-rotting water, then fought for his life to crawl out of the mud, barely escaping alive.
Only now, looking down from above, did he realize with horror that the muddy opening through which he had escaped death was nothing more than an insignificant little drainage ditch in this immense land of death.
At the very center of the Black Pool, countless overlapping ribs and skulls, enormous and gleaming darkly, plunged deep into the water. Their interlocking masses formed a towering bone altar, with layer upon layer of bone slabs extending all the way to shore!
The dead spring water, thick as ink, slowly branched through biochemical grooves carved into the slabs, continually irrigating and soaking the