Day 21: Descending through the foothills in The Green bound for Maddie’s Landing, Whitechapel watches as the sky is torn open and an armed merchant, the WHS Manticore, is ripped from the aether plummeting into the mountainside. Crackling from the same rift, a bolt of aetheric energy strikes the ground not far from where he sits his rented mule. Investigating, he comes upon the Viscount Never, Byron Havelock Hotspur Lovelace, lying face down on the scorched earth. Reviving the stricken aristocrat, the pair are drawn to the column of black smoke from the crash. When they arrive, they find burning wreckage strewn across mountainside. Whitechapel discovers the ship’s Warding Chamber, miraculously intact, and Never sets to work. When the emergency bypass opens the chamber, Xender Nai pitches out collapsing. Not a moment later, a band of howlers attacks. Most of the primitive gnolls are killed, but two crawl away badly wounded. Resting until the second light, Never and Nai search through the wreckage and find two medium power cores intact. The navigator is well aware that the Manticore’s spirit engine still lives.

Day 22: As the first light approaches, Nai watches in horror as the aft section of the Manticore plummets into a sinkhole as part of the mountainside collapses. With the spirit engine now submerged in the flooded depths of the sinkhole, Whitechapel leads them into The Green and they reach Maddie’s Landing near the end of the second dark.