The book

The book

Silence. The only thing on his mind was the words that he had read in that book. The imagery, the hand-drawn pictures of creatures he would have never imagine could even exist in the mind of the most deprecated brain. A week had passed since he escaped with that book in hand. He read day and night, every minute, every second he had the possibility to go through another handful of words he did.

For the past few days he heard a voice, he wasn't sure whose voice was it, but it somehow felt familiar. A little's girls voice, she was consistent, unbearably obnoxious, asking one thing, and only one thing ... "Look down," she said over and over and over, sometimes she would laugh at the comment, with a dead voice. When he was paying attention to it, he could feel the breathing of her mouth close to his ear, like a ghost that wouldn't stop whispering to him at night.

- Why...? – The voice asked. The boy was surprised, this was the first time this unknown being had something new to say. – Did you stop reading...? How...? – His eyes started shaking, looking to every corner in the room, but, there was no one there, just him, and four walls.

- Who are you? - The question echoed in his head, giving him a feeling of loneliness. Quietness was the only answer he got.

Loris looked down at the book he grabbed with determination. It was big, too big for him to grab with only one hand, it was hundreds of pages long, and after a whole week of intensive reading, he wasn't even a quarter way through. "Why did they hide this book for so long...? If she was crazy, why wasn't it destroyed?" He opened a random page and started reading.

" Rotting flowers

It's not the first time I get to admire one of the peculiar flowers. They seem to no grow on the higher layers of the Abyss, however, I've seen them in the second layer once, and it was in a cave. They grow from the rotting corpses of animals mostly from smaller animals, they have quite a good smell, kind of like sugar. Jordan wanted to try but I hesitated. The powerful blue color they have, give me the feeling that they may be poisonous.

First observation: We've been camping for days near two dead animals infested with Rotting flowers. They got bigger but not by much, the bodies are plagued with insects, most of them are eating either the goldish nectar coming out of the flowers or the flesh of the animal.

Second observation: A Neritantan ate one of the flowers, and we found him dead hours later near the other bodies, however, the corpse of the Neritantan kept on moving, as if it were alive, I think it's trying to simulate an animal in pain, to catch the attention of predators.

Third observation: In just one night, the body of the Neritantan was completely eaten by the flowers, this time they didn't grow from the corpse... Why?

Fourth and last observation: Insects aren't affected by the flowers, but, Jordan says they maybe carry the seeds after eating the nectar If so, we don't know for sure why the animals sometimes get completely eaten out by the plants."

"The second layer..." Loris starred at his blue whistle. He had been a blue whistle for a good while, although he didn't think of it as something special he was quite proud of his accomplishments as a delver, most of his classmates were still red whistles, others didn't even get the opportunity to be whistles and had to keep on studying normal school subjects like mathematics and such.

Reading through Lilith's book, he realized how much there was to explore in the Abyss, Lilith kept on saying stuff about the first and second layer, even though he saw the first two layers as rather boring places, her work proved otherwise.