Whisperwing's Riddle

The air in the Underworld, a perpetual twilight that clung to Luna like damp moss, had begun to feel less like a suffocating blanket and more like a familiar, albeit unsettling, skin. She’d navigated the treacherous paths, her small boots finding purchase on crumbling stone, her eyes, once wide with terror, now scanned the shadows with a practiced wariness. Xylo, her reluctant guide, a creature of sharp angles and even sharper pronouncements, stalked a few paces ahead, his silence a heavy counterpoint to the skittering, unseen things that rustled in the periphery.

“Are we there yet?” Luna’s voice, though still a child’s, carried a new resilience, a hard-won edge. She’d asked it a hundred times since they’d left the River of Lost Souls, each iteration less hopeful, more a desperate plea for an end to the endless trek.

Xylo didn’t even turn. His gaze, fixed on some point beyond the jagged peaks that clawed at the bruised sky, remained unwavering. “There is no ‘there,’ child. Only ‘here,’ and ‘further here.’”