Leap.

Leaps always entail an ungodly amount of falling, which often occurs over very long, very vertical distances; I thought I'd go mad from the wind’s whistle by the time I hit the ground. It melted under me initially, as ground always does when encountering only half-materialized objects. I found myself half-buried in granite rubble up to my waist, and immediately began squirming beneath the dim light of that miserable little half-world. I had freed myself up to the hip when I was inclined to look upwards and saw him.

Jakell loved Leaping; he savored the sensation from the first gut-wrenching, jarring ascent into the Pathway, all the way to the same giving of the ground that I had just experienced. Instead of sinking gracelessly into the mess, he rode the ripples from the pressure upwards out of the small crater. He slapped his feet down onto the grey soil and bent low, grinning in my face. I silently gawked into his russet-red eyes; never before had I met such a sociable creature with such little regard for personal space. A moment later, I realized he was extending his hand, and clambered for the opportunity of assistance. The fabric of his torn glove was soft, familiar, against my palm.
“Did you see the dark patches on the way down? We’ve got a quarter-world here, maybe less; remarkable, isn’t it? Still in balance, but most likely incapable of sustaining any form of life.” He grinned back at me and tilted his head. “Or not. Beetle.” His long, spindly fingertips were suddenly to the left of my ear, removing another offender of privacy I had not realized was present. He held it up to the light and started babbling again; as he spoke, I removed my last grounded foot and glanced about.
The landscape was bleak, sun-visibility dim; the world was bathed in grey, clad in lifeless shades from the sky to where it met with the equally colorless earth far to the north. A found my spyglass and gazed through it; a particularly angular, ugly lump in that northern skyline looked promising. I was suddenly staring at something metallic and deep-blue; as I squinted, it wiggled.
“Sill-sheiff, Jakell! Just put it down and get to work!” I hollered in the beetle’s direction. Its possessor was distinctly unaffected, choosing instead to grin like a fool and pocket the specimen happily.
“Found the city?” He asked. Now finished with his gloating, he seized my spyglass and pointed it in the angular lump’s direction.
“You’ve already seen it?”
“What were you doing during descent?” He asked without lowering the spyglass. Jakell never really expected answers, and mine involved confessions to screaming, flailing, and near-vomiting. I took back the spyglass and shrugged.
“Alright, then.” He knelt, and unfastened his pack. “You’re to head there- take these.” He tossed a bundle up towards me so haphazardly that it almost escaped my fingertips.
“What’s this?”
“Some of those nifty little ancestor bones and thread.”
“Aren’t ancestral bones fragile, Jak?”
“Yeah. Why, what are you planning on doing to them?”
I slipped the bundle into my pack with my spyglass.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be around; they really only had me ride in with you so you wouldn’t hurt yourself.” My outrage met another blissful smile on his face.
“What??”
“Remember, Lauriel; record and rescue. We’re not equipped to mend just yet.” He sighed, and scratched at the tattoos that pooled at the crown of his forehead and stretched up across the top of his skull, beneath his hairline. “I’m leaving. This world makes me itchy.”
“Jakell, what did they say?!” I tried not to shriek. Unfortunately, Jakell was just as adept at answering my questions as he was at expecting answers to his own. He turned and strode away, waving majestically. I sighed, shouldered my pack, and turned northward. The lump beckoned.