Book One – Chapter 16

The few notable insights he had did not start as buckets of brilliant notions ready to be hauled up whenever thirst arose. They started as thick, sediment-heavy water, trapped somewhere far below the surface. Most of these masses of mental mud never made it anywhere. Some, however, managed to ooze through the stone, dragging behind them confused associations and half-formed impressions. They wormed and filtered their way downward, pressed by time, individual experiences, or sheer coincidence.

It was not quick. It was not efficient. It could take days, months, even years. But occasionally, a thought did make it all the way through the dense layers of Nagrak’s mind and into his consciousness — a vast, cavernous expanse, trapped in the centre of it all and mostly hollow, save for a few stalactites of half-formed, crystallised ideas, some memory stalagmites, and countless echoing chambers repeating the same dull refrains of stubbornness and frost. For all the overwhelming mass of rock and mud that dominated his mental terrain, this cavern offered room for thought.

And from time to time, a droplet of insight appeared. After all, all that skipped and pent-up reflection had to go somewhere.

It was the rarest of occurrences. But when such a droplet formed, it was of the purest clarity — something distilled through pressure, time, and maybe just dumb luck. And if it managed to run all the way down one of those mental stalactites without drying out or merging into the calcified crust of all the other half-formed ideas that almost made it, it would finally gather at the very tip, suspended at that impossible point where instinct and reflection just barely touched.

And eventually, it would fall.