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Joe, lying on his back, strums a chord, and then presses an ear flat to the ground and listens for the resonance.
The echo, at first, is so distant it could almost be his imagination, a faint little whisper of earth. More distant than usual, but that makes sense; the season nine world is so much deeper than any of the previous ones, so much bigger, so much more hollow and so much more hungry.
The first echo is the faintest, the G chord almost wavering out before it can reach his ears, but then it hits something, the rounded roof of a deepslate cavern or a tall pillar of andesite, and bounces, ratchets off a rattling xylophone of dripstone, amplifying itself all the while, resonating inside the belly of the world like a drum. He imagines he can feel it shake the dirt underneath him, imagines the ground cracking apart.
The echoes map the vast space, pinging down tunnels and mineshafts and resounding throug caverns. Somewhere below, water drips; somewhere below, wardens moan and shuffle. The deep dark is new to this world as well, and sound moves strangely there, wool and shulk, muffled in places and amplified in others. When the echoes reach the shriekers, they wail.
Though he wonders, doesn’t he, if it really is new. Maybe it was always there, somewhere below the bedrock, and this is just some sort of spread, some sort of escape, some sort of migration. Maybe it’ll move up; maybe it’ll move down. Who’s to say?
But none of that is what he’s really listening for.
Far, far below, the echoes hit the rough surface of bedrock. Most of them fade out.
Most.
But the bedrock is not a perfect seal any more than anything ever is, and, like every time, the echo finds a way through. It slips out into the vast emptiness of the void below, and for a time, Joe doesn’t hear anything at all. He fiddles with the strings for a moment, but resists the urge to pluck them. He needs to listen.
Sound is fast, but it does take time to travel, especially over vast distances like the expanse of the void, and then you have to double it for return time as well, and Joe’s no mathematician, but he likes to think he’s gotten practiced at this particular art over the years.
There, faint, almost inaudible- there’s the echo, distorted by the resonance, by the vastness of the void, a G chord shoved lower and richer than it should rightly be able to go. Joe closes his eyes.
Something down there still, then.
He wonders if it’s season seven or season eight that they’re on top of. The question of whether season eight had been quote-unquote ‘real’ seems to him to be more philosophical than anything, but it’s certainly still an open debate among the hermits. Maybe someday he’ll tell them about this little exercise of his and see if they can finally settle it using sonar or somesuch… but probably not.
He’s pretty sure nobody else knows what he does— well, Cleo, because he tells Cleo everything and she can always tell if he’s trying to keep secrets so he doesn’t bother, and he imagines Xisuma probably does as well, being the one who’s responsible for the updates, but besides them. Maybe a few others have their guesses, but he’d be surprised if any of them had it right.
Who ever really thinks about what lies underneath the void?
Under their current world, somewhere far beneath the blanket of swallowing blackness through which nothing can pass alive, there’s an old world, buried. Engulfed, he has to imagine, by eternal night.
He does wonder if things still move around down there. If things live. His amateur echolocation can’t tell him anything that precise. He wonders.
Under season seven-or-eight, then, there’s season six or seven; under season six is season five, under season four there’s season three, and under season two, buried deep and crushed in dirt and darkness, there’s season one.
He asked Cleo once what she thought of his thesis that the shulk might be a sort of fungus growing up from the rotting, nutrient-rich corpses of past seasons. She’d said, perfectly flat, that suggestions about rotting and nutrient-rich corpses offended her.
He’s about ninety percent sure that there aren’t any former hermits actually trapped down there, because he knows people do leave and come back. Etho had; Bdubs had. Keralis had. None of them, so far as he could tell, had been crushed under thousands of tons of stone in the interrim.
Probably, all that’s down there is a pile of rusty frameworks, the lifeless echoes of once-inhabited worlds. Probably that’s all it is.
Maybe someday he’ll sit down with Hypno and ask him if he remembers that first day on season one, remembers helping tour him around the neat little wooden houses and the janky farms. (Not that they’d been janky at the time, to be fair; that was, what, 1.4?) Ask him if he remembers everybody on that first season who didn’t move with them to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth: Static, Aureylian, Generikb himself.
Ask him if he knows where they are now.
Beneath him, the echoes are finally fading out. The sound keeps bouncing, deeper and deeper into the layered soil and stone and shadow, but it doesn’t have the clarity or the momentum to make its way back to the surface. He’s never been able to hear any further down than the closest layer. What lies beneath that is a pure mystery.
He’s sure the echoes keep going, far beyond his capacity to make them out. Maybe, eventually, some faint strains of sound will shudder all the way down through the sedimented sheets of dead air and earth to whatever’s left of season one, if it’s still down there at all.
Maybe if there is anybody left down there, in the dark and the cold and the dirt, they can hear it.