by Clayton Wood
The first thing she noticed were the bodies.
There were easily dozens of small corpses a few yards into the cave, most of them birds. Their little bodies lay strewn on the ground in front of her, most having decomposed some time ago. She dropped down to one knee, examining what looked like a freshly dead sparrow. It was intact save for a small hole in its skull. A hole that led to a hollowed-out cranium.
The brain was missing.
Ariana frowned, finding another bird, this one slightly more decomposed. She grabbed a small stone, then used it to roll the corpse over onto its belly, and found a similar hole in its skull. Again, the skull was empty while the rest of the body was essentially intact.
Well that's strange, she thought.
She rose to her feet, stepping over the corpses and continuing forward through the cave. There were far fewer corpses as she went along, the bodies becoming more and more sporadic until there were none at all. The cavern grew narrower, forming a cramped tunnel, the walls only five or so feet apart now. The uneven ceiling drew lower and lower, until it was not even two feet above her head. It felt like the cave was closing in on her, like the earth was getting ready to swallow her whole.
Stop it, she chastised herself. Just get in and get out.
She moved faster, feeling the suit Petra had given her hugging her body tightly, so much so that it was a little uncomfortable. She couldn't help but remember what Petra had said about it...that the uniform had been hers when she was a girl.
Not a girl anymore, she muttered to herself.
She sighed then, quickening her pace. Petra was certainly not a girl anymore, that was for sure. She was a woman, something Ariana would never become. And Ariana hadn't been the only one to notice that; Kyle had clearly noticed too.
He noticed all right, she thought darkly. He couldn't stop noticing.
Ariana felt anger rising within her, and shoved the feeling down, clenching her fists. Then she heard a loud snap, felt something cave in under her left foot. She stopped cold, staring down at the ground. She'd stepped on something whitish-yellow, something round. She lifted her foot up, realizing what it was.
A skull.
She stared at it for a moment, expecting to feel some sort of surprise or revulsion, but felt neither. Just mild curiosity. She stepped back, then knelt down on the cavern floor, peering at the broken dome of the skull. It was, like everything else here, covered in a thick layer of dust, nearly invisible until she'd stepped on it. She scanned the floor around the skull, spotting the spinal column a few feet away, and a half-shattered rib cage. Some sort of rusted tool laid on the ground near the skeleton's hand; Ariana reached for it, picking it up. Dust cascaded down from it as she did so, revealing a rusted mining pick.
They must have been mining Void crystals, she realized. And if they'd been successful before they'd died, there should be crystals still on them. She shifted her weight, using one hand to brush the dust off of the rest of the skeleton. Other than a few pieces of rotted leather – and some metallic earrings with the gemstones curiously missing – there was no trace of Void minerals. Disappointed, she rose to her feet, stepping around the skeleton and continuing forward. She brushed dust from the front of her uniform as she walked deeper into the cave, grimacing at the flatness there. It'd been obvious what Kyle had been staring at back there, in the forest. And in the room where they'd first met Petra. Ariana stared down at her chest, feeling suddenly inadequate.
Damn hussy flaunting her damn...
She quickened her pace, ignoring the steadily narrowing tunnel, the walls now only three feet apart, barely wide enough to accommodate her shoulders. The floor began to dip downward, at first slightly, then more sharply, until it was nearly at a forty-five-degree angle. Her foot slipped on a few pebbles, and she nearly fell back onto her butt. She caught herself, cursing quietly, her voice echoing off of the narrow tunnel.
He stared at her butt too, she thought darkly, continuing forward and downward. She kept her eyes on the ground, avoiding any more loose rocks. Her suit was so tight I bet he could see her pores.
Something moved near her foot, snapping her out of her thoughts. She skid to a stop, bracing her hands against the rocky walls on either side, and peered down at her own feet. She saw something small and white next to her right foot, about as big as a coin. She leaned over to get a better look; it was some sort of insect, she realized. It had a round, segmented body with a tiny head, little antennae waving about in the air. It was entirely white, translucent even, except for its tiny head, which was black. It paid her no mind, crawling past her, back toward the cave entrance. She straightened up, continuing forward, but keeping her eyes on the downward-sloping cavern floor.
She spotted something round ahead, nestled up against the left wall, and made her way to it.
Another skull, she discovered. A human skull. This one was whole, thanks to her not stepping on it. She crouched before it, brushing the dust from the smooth, white surface, then picking it up. It was nearly intact, save for a small hole in its right temple. The edges of the hole were smooth, and it was just big enough to fit her index finger in.
Strange, she thought.
She put the skull back down, then resumed her slow march forward, and was relieved when the floor leveled out, no longer a forty-five-degree slope. Her relief soon evaporated, however; about thirty feet ahead, she saw the narrow tunnel end abruptly. She felt a sudden pang of fear, and if her heart were still beating it would have hammered in her chest. If this was the end of the line, and there were no Void minerals left in this cave...
She briefly entertained running back out of the cave, and using her shard to blow Petra and her two escorts to bits. But mostly Petra.
They'll kill Kyle, she reminded herself. And as much as she disliked the woman, Petra had been reasonable...had given Ariana a chance. It wasn't the woman's fault that she looked the way she did, although she could at least try to cover herself up a bit.
Ariana slowed as she came to the end of the cave, and stared at the rocky wall in front of her, feeling her heart sink. This was it...the cave went no further. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the floor and walls for the slightest hint of a white stone, then spotted something on the floor to her right. Her spirit soared for a split second, until she realized that it wasn't a Void crystal. It was another one of those white beetle-like insects crawling on the floor.
Damn it, she swore silently. The insect crawled away from her, toward the rightmost wall.
Then in vanished.
Ariana blinked, then dropped to her knees, peering at the cavern floor where the insect had been. She realized that her vision had faded a little, the cavern darker than it had been only a few minutes ago. No light could possibly get this far in to the cave, she knew. It was only due to the remarkable magic of her shard that she could see anything at all. She placed her hands on the floor, tracing her fingers over the path the beetle had taken...and felt her fingers slip off into nothingness.
Huh.
She pulled her hand back, then put it out again, feeling the same, sudden drop-off. She paused, then put her whole arm through, and realized that there was a hole in the side of the floor, where it met the wall. A good-sized hole at that. It was probably large enough for her to fit through.
She felt a glimmer of hope.
Ariana withdrew her arm, then turned around, facing away from the hole and dropping onto her belly on the cool stone floor. She slid backward, her legs slipping through the hole, then her hips. She got stuck there, and wiggled a bit, feeling stone scraping her buttocks. Then she pushed, and her hips popped through. She felt her legs dangle in space below, and swung them forward, her feet striking something hard – a rock wall. She swung one leg backward, and struck another wall behind her, maybe three feet from the first.
It's a chasm, she realized. Maybe if I can brace myself...
She slid down through the hole, all the way up to her shoulders, where she got stuck again. She paused, scis
soring her legs, bracing one foot on the front wall below, the other on the back wall. Then she relaxed her shoulders, putting her arms up over her head and sliding her shoulders through the hole. She slipped through, using her hands and her feet stop herself from falling, her head passing through the hole. She hung there for a moment, staring down into the darkness. The walls sandwiching her extending downward as far as she could see, the gap between them a nearly straight vertical drop. If she braced her feet against the wall in front of her, and her hands and back on the rear wall...
She tried it, letting go of the lip of the hole with one hand, then the other. Her heart leaped into her throat as she dropped a foot or two, her feet slipping on the wall in front of her. Panicking, she pushed outward hard with her legs, pressing her back against the rear wall.
Her fall slowed, then stopped.
She hung there for a long moment, suspended between the two walls, staring downward. She had no idea how far down this chasm went; if she'd fallen too far, she'd have been in deep trouble. Her body could recover from any injury, but if her uniform tore, she'd bleed magic quickly...and that would be that.
She took a deep breath in, then slid one foot down, then the other, inching down the gap between the walls. This time, her boots held true, and she didn't slip as she descended further into the darkness. She noticed a faint sound in the distance, coming from below; it sounded like running water. Maybe there was an underground stream or pool below her. Her hand brushed up against something, and she froze; there, crawling on the wall before her, was another one of those white, translucent bugs. In fact, there were several of them. A few were crawling up the wall, while one was climbing down, a small black twig in its mouth.
She continued downward, being careful not to squish the bugs with her hands or feet as she went. She glanced upward, and realized she could no longer see the hole she'd come through. It was impossible to be sure of how far she'd traveled, but she guessed it might be fifty feet or so. The farther down she went, the more bugs she saw crawling up and down the walls. Thankfully they skittered out of the way of her hands and feet as she descended, otherwise she wouldn't have been able to avoid killing them. Picking up a human skull was one thing, but squishing bugs was gross.
Wait, Ariana thought. How can these bugs be alive?
She stared at one of the insects, watching it carrying another small black twig down the wall before her. How could it live in this cave when everything else died? She thought back to the corpses littering the entrance to the cavern, and remembered what Petra had said. Anything that dared to venture into the cave would go mad, then seize, and die. Except, apparently, these bugs. And herself, of course.
Strange.
She tore her gaze away from the dozen or so bugs, glancing downward. To her surprise, she thought she could see something far below, a hint of a rocky floor.
Is it...?
She moved down, faster now, more confident in her ability to scale the narrow chasm. Yes, there was definitely rock below...about twenty feet down. She felt a burst of excitement, and had to force herself to maintain her methodical pace, being careful not to slip. She descended toward the floor, until her feet were only a few feet above it. Then she pulled her arms and legs in, falling the last few feet to the floor below...and stepping on a whole lot of bugs as she did so.
“Ew, gross,” she whispered to herself, wrinkling her nose. She grimaced, lifting one foot up, seeing a mass of flattened white bugs there, their legs still squirming madly. She felt a wave of nausea come over her, and she scraped the soles of her boots against a bare section of wall one at a time, until they were reasonably clean. Then she looked about, getting her bearings.
The two vertical walls extended all the way to the floor on either side, with a third sheer wall in front of her. She turned about, and saw another wall, making an enclosed rectangle. Nearly enclosed; there was a slight gap between the forth wall and the floor, over a foot high. She noticed more white bugs crawling through that gap. Maybe if she flattened herself on the ground, she could crawl under it.
Ariana tried it, lowering herself slowly onto her belly, waiting for the bugs to sense her and get out of the way before resting her body on the cool stone. She peered under the gap, and saw that it was a tunnel only a few feet long, leading to a much larger chamber beyond. She pulled herself forward, using her knees and elbows to crawl under the gap, and barely fit through, her head and buttocks scraping against the stone above. She took a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that Petra would never have been able to fit through the gap, given her ridiculous proportions.
Ariana crawled out from under the ledge, then got to her feet. Then her jaw dropped.
Before her was a massive underground cavern – nearly as large as the Arena stadium had been – with black walls climbing over a hundred feet in the air to the craggy ceiling above. To her surprise, she saw a shaft of light shining through a carriage-sized hole in the center of the ceiling, a hole through which a steady stream of water cascaded down in a glittering waterfall to the cavern floor below. The waterfall fed a subterranean lake in the center of the cavern, which was surrounded by a wide perimeter of what appeared to be black stone.
She stepped forward, careful to avoid stepping on any more bugs. That grew increasingly difficult, seeing as how the cavern floor here was practically swarming with them. They scurried around her feet, hundreds of them. She held back a wave of disgust, steeling herself against her natural aversion to the things; she had a mission to complete, and Kyle's life was at stake.
She continued forward carefully, peering at the very edges of the pond, where the water met the surrounding rock. There were more white things there, lots of them, densely clustered at the water's edge. At first Ariana thought they were more bugs, but she soon realized that they weren't moving. She got closer, and discovered that they were clusters of translucent white bubbles sticking to the rocks like barnacles, each the size of a marble. As she drew closer, she realized that there were long, black, stringy things protruding from each of the bubbles. She walked up to a cluster of these at the edge of the pool, and crouched down, getting a closer look. They looked like thin vines growing from the bubbles, their short roots encased in the spheres. She traced the vines across the floor, and realized they were fanning out from the edge of the pool, extending all the way to the rocky walls of the chamber. In fact, the entire floor – and walls – were completely covered with the vines, so thick with them that no rock was visible beneath them. The vines continued upward along those walls, all the way up to the hole in the ceiling over a hundred feet up.
She lowered her gaze, staring at the white bubbles where the roots lay encased. There were bugs crawling all over them; some of the bugs had little pieces of the vines in their mouths. She followed one of these bugs with her eyes, tracking it as it crawled over the white bubbles along the edge of the deep pool of water. It stopped before a long, slime-covered tubular structure that extended up from the depths of the pool, a white, translucent hose with wart-like bumps encasing it. As Ariana watched, the hose pulsed, and a few of the warts expanded, blowing up like little balloons. These slipped off the surface of the tube, landing on top of the other bubbles sticking to the rocks below.
Gross, she thought.
The beetle she'd been following crawled right up to the end of the tube, and dropped the little fragment of vine onto a series of long hairs that extended out from the mouth of the thing. Ariana noticed that there were many other little bits of vine on these hairs, as well as what looked like little pieces of bone, and a feather. Suddenly the hairs pulled in, retracting into the mouth of the tube, and the tube spasmed. Then the hairs slowly came out again...but now they were clean.
They're feeding it, she realized.
She crept closer to the edge of the pool, being careful not to step on any of the bugs swarming below here, or the white bubbles. Then she crouched again, tracing the squirming tube down below the surface of the water. It was long – incredibly
long, she realized, extending all the way down to the center of the pond. She stood, trying to see where it ended. Then she froze, her eyes widening. There, at the very bottom of the pond, was...something. Something big.
She took a step back.
It was a bug...a massive bug lying in the center of the pond, at the bottom some thirty feet below the surface. It looked similar to the little bugs on the surface, with smooth, translucent white skin. But it was many, many times bigger, easily fifty feet long, with long segmented legs that clung to the rocky bottom. Long tubular appendages fanned outward from the sides of its body, six on a side, draping across the pond floor until they emerged at the shore, just like the one Ariana had been watching. And all of those appendages were being fed by the little bugs, spasming as they swallowed the offerings whole.
She stared at that massive body, seeing little holes above the base of each appendage. As she watched, a cloud of fine white particles shot out of each of them into the water, slowly settling to the bottom. The massive creature was surrounded in a bed of the white particles, a layer of white sandy material a few feet deep.
Ariana's eyes traveled back to the edge of the pond, catching something twinkling on the dark gray rock a few inches below the water there. She paused, then walked forward toward it, stepping around the white bubbles – and staying far clear of the tube. She stopped a few inches before the water's edge, crouching down low and peering at the twinkling object she'd seen. It was a crystal, growing outward from the rock around it.
