.
The cavern floor, all the way to its end, a mile and some fraction in the distance, was completely awash.
With the Dark mana as thin as it was, my Cloak was becoming difficult to maintain. I dropped it as I turned and flew into the diagonal extension. Ahead, I saw more water. Nearly a mile and a half later, reaching the hairpin turn where the diagonal and the curving tunnel met, I was still over water. I made the hairpin turn into the curving tunnel and flew east until I reached the main tunnel again, then turned and flew back north. All the way, a subterranean lake covered the cavern floor.
The shoreline varied. Sometimes narrow strips of land divided the wall from the water, creating a home for a tiny forest or sometimes only a few shrubs. The rest of the time, water lapped against the walls themselves.
At one point, I saw two troglodytes straddling a crude dugout canoe. One was paddling, the other was wielding a spear. It looked like they were spearfishing. I also spotted places where water-dwelling monsters had built their lairs, such a mud mound visible below the surface that probably covered the den of a small lake serpent.
I returned to the point where the water began, descended and landed. While I stood staring at the water, Brigitte had to hit my shoulder, to remind me to let her down. Being jarred like that helped me remember to drop my wings as well.
Still frowning as she separated from me, she looked around, first at the nearby beach, then at the open ground to our north. She turned and began walking toward the nearby forest edge while declaring, “It’s too open here. I’ll find a spot for us to rest.”
“Hang on!” I told her, catching up and snagging her arm. “Let me use my senses…”
She looked a little disgusted with me. “I don’t need you to scout for me, My Lady.”
“Ah…” I blinked. Brigitte’s natural perceptions as a hunter were every bit as good as a [Detect Presence] spell. Plus, she brought a large dose of forest craft to the job. As she said, she didn’t need my help.
Coloring, I apologized. “Sorry. I’m… not thinking straight right now.”
“What the heck is wrong with you, anyway?” she asked, resuming her course.
“It’s a little hard to explain,” I admitted. “It seems like a lot more has changed down here since my previous life than I realized. It’s really throwing me off. I’m really only now coming to understand that.”
When we had been still in the entrance tunnel, approaching the caverns, my fairy sense had been able to detect the main cavern ahead, so I had adjusted to the fact that it had been in the wrong location before reaching the exit. But since entering the cavern, I had been moving at flying speeds, too fast for my mind to adjust, and that made a big difference.
Brigitte looked perplexed by my words. Her ears were twitching, too. Perhaps she felt that what I said wasn’t enough to explain my behavior. I realized it probably wasn’t.
She pursed her lips, then said, “So, from the way you around flew in a circle at the end, I suppose this isn’t the spot where you originally planned to land.”
“It’s close, but this isn’t it,” I admitted as we reached the trees.
“Have a seat here, My Lady,” she bade me, pointing to a grassy spot next to a tree. “I’ll scout around a bit.”
The dire look in her eye was a warning, This part is my job. Leave it to me.
I nodded and crouched down to check the ground as she vanished into the trees. Seemed like a good spot, so I doffed my pack and took a seat as directed.
It gave me an opportunity to test whether the Dark mana here was thick enough to use my vampire sense. The constant glow from luminous plant varieties created a low-light condition, neither day nor night. It left the Light and Dark mana in the environment thin, but they were both present. The only question was, was it thick enough of the sense?
The answer was clear very shortly after I closed my eyes and began sending my awareness out. That answer was, “‘Yes’ and ‘No’.”
I could use the sense far better than in the daytime, but only out to about the same distance as I could use fairy sense. The multiple mile range was a no-go. The Darkness was just too thin. Still, I could pick up on animals in the forest better with vampire sense, and on mana better with fairy sense, so switching between the two had its advantages.
I couldn’t detect Brigitte, but she was certain to be using one of her stealth skills or the racial skill [Prowl]. With my vampire sense so weakened by the thin mana, it wasn’t surprising she could hide from me. I switched to fairy sense and, sure enough, I could faintly see the Dark mana signature of her stealth method as she worked her way through the forest.
I could sense only one genuine threat nearby, an alraune waiting patiently for prey. She would be unlikely to find the sapient mortal prey that was her preferred food, which explained why she was so small. She probably got by on the forest animals and occasional fellow monsters passing by.
Brigitte wouldn’t fall prey to her, probably, but if she did, I would have more than enough time to go rescue her.
With my mind finally settled down a bit, I took stock of my current situation. For some reason, the southern end of the cavern was filled with water. I had no memory of a lake at this end, but I had only a vague map in the first place. Still, I clearly recalled some kind of community having existed at the vertex to my southwest. In fact, it had been a place where Elders and their servants dwelled, rather than a settlement of the mortal refugees. It had not been Senhion’s home, but she visited there often because…
Ah, now I remembered. It was the headquarters for the anti-glaciation task force. When Senhion first came to Huade, she had been part of the work to reverse the sudden runaway ice age that had gripped the planet. It had been a catastrophic event that would be unsurvivable if left unchecked for the higher life forms, reducing life back to single-celled organisms.
During the tenure of the previous planetary supervisors, a runaway magic reaction sucked Fire mana out of the ocean tropics, chilling the globe and locking it in year-round winter. Heaven finally acted and removed the incompetents who had ignored the problem and the carnage it created, installing the current group of twelve supervisors.
After creating the emergency refuges and moving the few survivors into them, even these mighty beings became overwhelmed with the herculean task of repairing the damage to the planet and recovering the biosphere. Facing a host of problems in a rapidly developing situation that would require far faster action than higher-realm immortals were accustomed to taking, they sent their underlings into the Mortal Realm, welding together two of the world’s peculiar biologies together in order to forge non-mortal bodies for them that could host their immortal intellects, so they could work there directly.
Being part of the battle against the planetary disaster in the early years rather than a caretaker of the mortal beings in the subterranean caverns, Senhion had spent her first years on Huade outside, working from a mountain peak in Ilim where she kept a cave abode. But she made regular visits by projection and in physical body to Ilim Below and other subterranean complexes, and this place had been one of her most frequent destinations.
It had definitely not been under water. And the only explanation for how it could be submerged now, when the rest of the cavern wasn’t, was that… the whole cavern had tipped? It was now lower on the south end than elsewhere? But it would have to be tilting an awful lot…
I had already determined that the whole thing was moving somehow, so that had to be the case. My English Lit education didn’t include enough details on plate tectonics to explain it, even with enhancements from Senhion’s knowledge.
But I already knew the floor was fifty paces too high. My location sense wasn’t precise enough that I could say whether this spot was lower by a few paces compared to the place where we entered, but, if I flew the forty miles to the north end of this cavern, perhaps I could tell that it had risen higher on that end. Then the water in the cave would run downhill and pool in the south end, creating this situation.
That would have to serve as my explanation. The north end was rising faster than the south end. I didn’t need to explain the process in more detail, I just needed to figure out how to deal with the results.
I had something else I needed to do, and this was a good opportunity. I touched Lucy’s pouch through the fabric of my blouse.
“Lucy? Can you come out, please?”
I expected the midget faux pixie to appear in front of me and declare, “Out!”
Instead, she appeared, but looked a little skittish, and she didn’t say anything. She just hovered in front of me.
Immediately concerned, I asked, “Are you okay, Lucy?”
She looked around, then asked me, “Demons gone?”
I guessed that the sheer numbers had spooked her back at the camp. Having my fairy sense operating in its normal passive mode, sensing the nearest twenty paces or so, I could assure her, “They’re not here, Lucy. You’re okay. Can you pass a message to my cousin?”
We had already had one ‘conversation’ during the long walk down from the surface. It wasn’t precisely like talking on a phone. We would speak a message, then wait for the two spirits to transfer it and replay it. In a bit, the other person would learn they had a message and would ask to replay it. Imagine communicating by constantly leaving voicemails to each other. It was kind of like that.
I won’t write down the slow conversation here, because it was just a status report. My main goal was to alert her that we had made it past the demons, but they might or might not know they had an intruder.
After all, I didn’t know if they believed that their foot soldiers had seen something real. Their trap had failed to catch anything other than one of the soldiers. And they didn’t know if the intruder was heading in or out. Even if they believed the soldiers, they might be more likely to think that it had been one of their captives escaping, and they would be pursuing them up the entrance tunnel.
When we finished, I knew that the Gado had contacted the Hero’s Party through Melis and were eager to contact the Arelian forces on the other side of the pass. Dilorè would be flying a representative from them over the pass to negotiate assistance, or at the very least beg them to keep control of the base, blocking Berado reinforcements from entering.
Naturally, Talene had already used some sage art to speak with Matthias, to report to the crown about the ‘mine’ and the demons, so the Arelians already considered the Hero’s Party’s job a completed mission. Of course, with an unknown number of demons in occupation of the ‘mine’, representing a clear and present danger to Lisrau and southern Arelia, they would have to respond, but Dilorè had no news yet as to what that response would be.
I had to wonder if we would still be in the middle of it whenever that response happened.
