Wing II · dark, industrious

The Floor

Below the last leaf the light gives up by degrees, and what remains is a country of umber and rust — soil, litter, root-tangle, and the patient architecture of decay. It is tempting, from above, to call the floor quiet. It is not quiet. It is industrious, in the way of a workshop heard through a wall: a ceaseless small turning-over of leaf and grain, conducted in the dark, by labourers who do not stop for us.

We have kept our longest watches here and come away certain of only two things. First, that nothing on the floor is wasted — every fallen thing is claimed, carried, unpicked, and made over, sometimes before it has finished falling. Second, that the work is never done. The galleries we mapped in June are not the galleries there now. The floor is less a place than an occupation, and its inhabitants, catalogued in the plates that follow, are best understood as its shifts.

The catalogue

The dots before each name are its colour signature; those after it, its rarity, read against the scale on rarity below.

The food web
preys onpreys onfearspreys onsheltersfearsfearsshelters Clathrina vigil Driftophaga vigilans Formica textrix Rubra territa Textor absens
The wing's year

Turn the needle (drag it, or focus it: arrow keys move a day, Page Up and Page Down a season) to a season of the Glass Year — the calendar the whole terrarium shares — and the roster names who this wing would find abroad in it. Each creature's own phases are read on its page.

the Radiator Months — the pipes come on below; the air runs dry-warm and the pool gives up an inchthe Lamp's Lengthening — the keepers let the light run longer by small, deniable incrementsthe Great Airing — the lid stands open an hour a day; opinions on the draught differthe Long Damp — the misting at its most liberal; the glass never quite dries, and neither do wethe Small Dry — a lapse in the misting each year, coinciding, we note, with the keeper's holidaythe Settling — after the great cleaning everything re-arranges itself, an inch at a time

In the Settling

Keeping quiet: Rubra territa

Field log
  • 2026-10-19nighta quiet round of the floor: everything where we left it, which we note only because it has not happened in weeks.
  • 2026-10-07noonthe galleries redrawn overnight, every tunnel mouth moved a step from where the last survey had it; the traffic found the new doors without comment.
  • 2026-09-18duskFormica textrix — the long gallery running one-way for the better part of an hour, leaf-fragment after leaf-fragment, toward stores we are not permitted to audit.
  • 2026-09-08duskno creature to report; only the litter a finger's width rearranged since noon, by no one we saw.
  • 2026-08-19nightRubra territa — fed at twice the summer's pace between bolts, and bolted at the glass ticking as it cooled, which we had not thought to count as a hazard before.
  • 2026-08-17nightClathrina vigil — five crossings offered at the root-gap tonight, all five admitted, and she looked, if a gatekeeper can, faintly disappointed.
  • 2026-08-14duskFormica textrix — the evening weaving begun and finished within the hour, nothing left for the dawn shift to inherit, for the first time we can recall.
  • 2026-08-09dawnFormica textrix — the west gallery, mended and remended these past weeks by no one we could catch, saw the column at work on it in full daylight this morning, as if daring us to notice.

The 8 most recent of 25 sightings; the ledger keeps the earlier ones.

Daily choreography
On rarity
  • abundantunderfoot, daily
  • commonseen most visits
  • uncommonworth a note
  • rareworth a plate
  • mythicreported, never twice by the same observer