.
I looked around the campfire. Seven people here had been with me below Cara Ita, in the northernmost reaches of Ilim Below, so they seemed to be receptive. Three had not. Two of those three were currently skeptical of what I was telling them.
The third, Lady Dilorè, was looking at the other two with open disdain. “Are you two questioning Her Highness’s words?”
A wild ally appears…
Allia simply stated, “I’m merely asking her to back up her claim, My Lady. We all just heard a sage saying that it’s impossible.”
Talene frowned. “Spaces large enough for cities are impossible. I never said there couldn’t be a cavern to our west. But even if the space under Lisrau is a tenth of the size that the miners have been exaggerating it to be, it is still a one in a million wonder. That there would be two such spaces that large really begs credibility. It seems unlikely enough to call impossible.”
Ryuu said, “Everything is impossible, until somebody does it. In my old world, it was impossible to fly to the Moon, until we did it.”
It was everything I could do to keep my jaw from dropping. Ryuu was backing me up?
And of course, Talene knew he was telling the truth about going to the Moon. She had been a little girl on Earth when it happened. She frowned his direction, but didn’t dispute his words.
“And we already know there’s at least one more place like that. In Hamagaar,” Brigitte declared. “We’ve been there and seen it.”
“Aye, I nearly dropped dead of surprise the first time I saw it,” Graham added. “It had clouds. Clouds inside a cave. I’ve never imagined such a thing.”
Talene frowned. “You mean fog.”
“No,” I corrected. “He means clouds. The space under Cara Ita is big enough to have its own weather. Clouds can form under the ceiling and rain can even condense.”
“We actually encountered that,” Arken nodded. “It was more of a mist than a hard rain, but it was actual precipitation.”
Talene was looking from one of them to another, with an expression as if she was half-expecting them to confess that they were pulling her leg. But everyone was perfectly serious, since they were telling her the honest truth.
“Lady was able to fly around inside of it,” Bruna told her. “She could go way up in the air and not hit the ceiling.”
Ceria, Melione and Brigitte all nodded in confirmation.
What the heck? I had been worried for nothing? Everyone who had been together with me in Hamagaar was backing me up. Only Allia and Talene had shown skepticism, and Talene was now visibly buckling. Allia was watching her reaction along with us, but keeping her thoughts to herself.
Finally, Talene said, “When we are finished here, I would like very much to travel there and see it. Would you all bring me?”
It was currently in the middle of a war zone, although I had no idea what the state of war currently was. Probably not good, thanks to certain mutinous lords back home. But it wasn’t necessary to point that out. There was a closer location I could show her.
I stated, “You don’t need to go to Hamagaar. We’ll be seeing an even larger space, if we have to pass through the one underneath our feet to reach the one that Princess Amelia is in.”
“Again,” Allia stated, “I should like to know how you know this, My Lady.”
I stated, staring my cousin in the eye rather than facing Allia, “It’s knowledge from my great grandmother.”
Dilorè looked puzzled for a moment, then comprehension dawned. “As in my great great great grandmother, correct?”
Thankfully, she had understood me. That was Senhion’s relationship to Dilorè.
“Correct,” I nodded. “Toward the end of her life, she lived in such a place, and raised my grandfather there.”
Talene tipped her head. I could see her visibly trying to not be skeptical, to give me the benefit of the doubt. “And you somehow have access to this knowledge?”
When I don’t? was the unspoken remainder of that sentence. Talene was a fairling and a sage, after all.
Uncle Manlon hadn’t shown up with his two disciples at the Fairy Queen’s bath that night until after we were finished discussing my other identities. She hadn’t been present to hear about my previous life on Huade.
Dilorè came to bat for me again. “Her Highness has a particular reason to be the only one having that knowledge, Your Wisdom. I believe everything she is saying.”
Talene was slightly taken aback, but she asked, “You believe that there’s a network of giant caves all throughout the Dragonsbacks?”
“I believe her,” she repeated.
“Why has nobody else discovered this, in all this time?” the sage demanded.
“Because the regular entrances are heavily defended by special barriers,” I stated, “And most of those entrances are probably blocked by now anyway. When I went to check on Rufin, I was really there to see if the entrance that used to be in that valley still existed.”
Her eyebrows rose, “And?”
“It’s under forty paces of sediment,” I answered. “It’s been ten thousand years, after all.”
“You speak as if you have detailed knowledge of these caverns and entrances. How could you know that specific valley had an entrance?”
“Because she recognized it, having been there before,” Dilorè stated. “Ten thousand years ago.”
Dead silence. I stared at Dilorè, a little perturbed, since I had been trying to figure out some way to explain my knowledge without saying that. Now, here she was, forcing the issue.
She stared back, clearly aware I was upset with her but undaunted. She declared, “You have to tell them, Your Highness. You’ve already said too much, anyhow. There’s no other way for you to explain such detailed knowledge.”
After a bit, I recognized she was right. I turned back to Talene. “We’ve discussed reincarnation before. I know that you are aware of people remembering past lives.”
Yourself, for example.
She nodded, then stated what I had just dodged revealing about her. “Of course. I’m one of them, as you know. Master has determined that I have at least five previous lives, although I can only remember my last life.”
“I was like that too, until recently,” I told her. “I could only remember one previous life. But during my duel with Mára, things happened that caused several other lives to come back to me.”
“Ten thousand years worth of lives?” she asked.
“Fifteen thousand,” I corrected. “I was five thousand years old, the first time I died, ten thousand years ago. It was in a personal cave connected to one of those caverns. If anything is left of my old body, it should still be there. I left orders to seal the cave and make it my tomb.”
I stood, breathed in, let it out, prepared myself, and then turned to Allia and gave her a curtsey. “My Lady, and all those in your company, allow me to reintroduce myself. Although, because I can’t remember most of the details and have only fragmentary memories, it would be better to continue thinking of me as Tiana. My original name was Senhion, Commander of the Third Legion of Stewards of the Tutelary Council of Huade. My species was called, in Mortal languages, the Elders.”
I glanced at Allia’s daughters, then admitted to her, “We were the race which your people remember as the Stregas.”
Ceria’s and Bruna’s eyes were positively shining with rekindled religious fervor. Allia was simply nodding. She asked, “May I ask how you have somehow returned as the same race? I’ve said this before, but the whole ‘Fairy Vampire’ thing is a lie, right? Your strength, your abilities and your appearance are all those of a Strega.”
“It isn’t. Both fairies and vampires–” I glanced at Bruna and smiled, “and amazons, too– are the children of the Elders. This body is a throwback, caused by combining vampire and fairy blood.”
“So, the great grandmother you mentioned…”
“… was me, in my first life. My grandfather in this life is the son she gave birth to.”
I decided not to mention yet that Oranos seemed to have arranged for it to happen somehow. I didn’t know yet if he had manipulated events behind the scenes somehow, or if he told his granddaughter, my mother, what he was doing. If it was the former, I didn’t want her to find out that she had been used by the gods like that.
“The grandfather you are referring to is the Fairy King, isn’t it?” she asked, her eyebrows rising. “You were the Fairy King’s mother?”
There were exclamations from a few of the others who hadn’t made the connection until then.
I nodded. “He is Senhion’s son. But, since the events of that life are dim memories for me, I still think of him as my grandfather.”
The rest, except for Talene, were looking baffled at the direction the conversation had turned. Talene looked honestly intrigued. But it was Arken who spoke up next.
“Does your mother know about this?”
His mind had turned a similar direction, unsurprisingly. He was Mother’s old friend after all.
“My grandfather does. My mother only knows about my latest life, because I haven’t had a chance to speak to her, since I remembered the others. Perhaps Grandfather has told her.”
After another long silence, Allia said, “You said that you can remember where all these caverns are?”
“The memories are vague,” I told her. “It was a very long time ago, My Lady. I need clues to recover the details. Like how I only knew an entrance used to exist in that valley yesterday after I saw it. The landscape has changed a lot over the millennia, so it is difficult to square it with what I can remember.”
“But you do remember that there was more than one cavern in this area.”
I nodded. “That’s right. There is one mighty cavern, directly below us, and several side caverns that are smaller. The largest cavern starts more than forty miles north of us, and ends about a mile south of us. That’s the one the miners in Lisrau tunneled into. There are also several tunnels running through the area, which were highways to other caverns. And several of them run from the level of Ilim Below up through the Giant’s Fortress to reach entrances. Most of the entrances are on the slopes of mountains.”
“Why?”
“So they wouldn’t fill with meltwater, when spring came. Ilim Below was built under the mountains so that the groundwater that came in could run out through the drainage system, but that drainage couldn’t keep up with torrents of water flooding in through the entrances.”
“You speak like this place was built purposefully,” Arken noted.
“It was. Ilim Below and the other underground lands of the world were created as a shelter for the creatures of Huade when a global disaster encased the world in year-round winter. Gaia and her daughters dug it to save them.”
Keeping order in the underground lands had been our first job, when the gods brought us in to help them. Huade was a ball of ice, except for a narrow band around the equator, when we first arrived. Mortal civilization had been born from our interactions with the primitive humans of that time.
I looked at Talene and stated, “That’s the answer to your ‘strength of materials problem’, Your Wisdom. Combining the methods of the monsters that normally create underground parks with her divine strength, she fashioned walls and roofs far stronger than they could, and built an underground world on a scale that gnomes and their kin could only dream of building.”
“And yet miners can tunnel through those walls?” she asked.
“The miners may have hit spots that had weakened or cracked. Everything wears out eventually. Even creations of the gods must yield to time.”
“And so how did the princess end up inside it?” Ryuu asked.
“That, I have no answer for,” I said. “We’ll have to ask her when we reach her. I only know that she’s down there.”
