.
After a moment to steel myself, I fortified my body, nose-dived and dropped my wings.
It would probably have been better if I’d had more than the smattering of experience in Grandmother’s pond. Especially since, at that time, I had been still an absolute beginner at [Naiad’s Breath] (the name my grandmother gave to the skill of underwater breathing.) My momentum from the dive propelled me a couple paces down, but once I was on my own, it took a while for me to make it down to where Diurhimath’s ‘proxy’ was patiently waiting.
Some of it was me successfully pulling on the mana in the water ahead of me and shoving it behind me, using my mana manipulation to accomplish what swim fins or a propellor might do. But I will have to admit, more of it was just due to the weight of Durandal and the rest of what I was carrying.
The water turned pitch black in no time as I descended, but that was a good thing, as it meant my vampire sight became stronger. I soon made the proxy out, at the bottom of a shallow depression in front of a gaping maw in the wall. The depression was about two paces deeper than the landscape around, but at least ten paces wide, at the bottom of shallow slopes, so it was in no danger of caving in at the moment.
The proxy had seemed to be made of air before, but it was now a faintly visible body made of water. I realized that the reality was, it was completely permeable, passing through the media in which it traveled without displacing any matter.
It was, however, perceptible to the wildlife. A school of tiny perch was frightened into reversing course upon coming into its proximity. They dashed away as vigorously as if a pike had just appeared.
Once I came close, it turned and swam into the dark cavity. Deciding that vampire sight wasn’t showing me enough, I began using vampire sense as well, sending out a diffuse field of Dark mana to seize the volume around me. I can only do so for perhaps a ten pace radius when moving, but it was enough. To my relief, the maw was indeed merely the mouth of a tunnel about twelve paces wide. I could sense nothing but solid rock beyond the tunnel walls, and nothing lurking in the tunnel.
As I swam in, I found my forward progress nowhere as good as my downward progress had been. Part of it was the fact that my equipment weight was no longer working in my favor. But part of it was a water current running in the opposite direction. I finally gave in and added a swim kick for a bit more thrust.
I noted that the floor still had a shallow coating of silt. Whatever was keeping the tunnel and the depression at its mouth clear wasn’t able to remove the bottom ten inches or so. It wasn’t a dead landscape below me, though. Mana-loving plants waved gently in the current, sheltering crustaceans and small forage fish.
The original floor could still be found by my vampire sense, buried beneath that silt. I could detect broad lanes on each side and a four-pace-wide sunken lane in the middle, about thirty inches lower.
At first, I perceived it as a skinny street with ridiculously wide sidewalks, then recognized it from Senhion’s memories. This was the stream that used to flow out of the cavern ahead into the one I had just left, and the higher lanes were once grassy streamside parkways. I wondered if anything remained of the walking bridges that had occasionally passed from one side to the other.
The parkways on each side were sloped surfaces that would ascend thirty paces– a hundred fifty feet in American terms– up to the level of the cavern ahead. The waterway in the middle was stair-stepped, with little waterfalls every twenty paces or so. In Senhion’s memory, each waterfall had been a little weir holding back a placid pool deep enough for fish and waterfowl. I imagined the dams had worn away long ago.
By the time I finally began to make better progress as I grew accustomed to this method of swimming, at roughly twenty five paces, we reached a crossing tunnel. I felt a faint disappointment at seeing almost no trace of the graceful bridge that should have been there. I could sense where its footings had been, as holes in the rock filled with muck, but that was all.
The proxy turned right, into the crossing tunnel, and after another five paces, for a total of the promised thirty, we entered a square space with an extremely high ceiling. There, we began ascending.
This is where it got a little tough for me, thanks to the weight of my equipment. It had helped me to dive, and it was trying to do so again, in spite of my desire to go the opposite direction. But I overcame it as my body seemed to finally get the hang of the swimming technique. It was like that moment when the lawnmower engine which has been sputtering finally catches.
A staircase circled me as I ascended. I actually didn’t recognize them as stairs at first. They had been solid rock projections from the walls with solid ‘bannisters’ of the same material, but debris precipitating out of the water had long since filled them to the top of the bannisters and converted them into sloping surfaces. But, I could detect under the muck the much denser material of the stairs and bannisters that Gaia had fashioned. Fourteen thousand years after she built them, they were still there.
Except, they were somewhat tilted. What had constituted up at that time for the staircases and the vertical space itself now tilted in Pisa-like fashion perceptibly southward.
The proxy passed through the surface into the air. I was rising slowly enough that I wondered if I could do the same. If not, I would need to go to one of the staircases and pull myself out of the water.
But something, either instinct or half-remembered knowledge from Senhion, told me a way to do it, and I decided to give it a try. As my head broke the surface, I manifested my wings in the highest raised position, and brought them down while pouring a surge of Wind mana into them for lift.
I had never done such a thing before in this lifetime, yet it worked perfectly, as if I had done it my whole life. I burst through the surface and flew up to where the proxy was waiting for me.
My companion surprised me by speaking in Diur’s voice. “Please follow me for just a short distance further.”
It went over the bannister into the lowest corner landing above water level, which opened into corridors running two different directions. A quick study of the other landings showed similar corridor entrances in every northwest and southeast corner.
The proxy seemed to face me once I landed. It was disorienting to stand there, since the surface was tipped to the south. Diur’s voice came from the entity once more.
“My Lady, I apologize, but I have to modify the plan slightly. The demon lord has arrived. A force is on its way to this end of the cavern, probably to hunt me once again. I have sent your companion after you.”
“What? Just a minute…”
It bore on while ignoring me. As I was fuming, I heard something break the water below us. As Diur continued talking, a very soaked, unconscious Brigitte rose up and floated over the bannister, passed me and entered the corridor, turned horizontal and settled onto the ground on her back. She appeared to be engulfed in something like another proxy.
Meanwhile, Diur’s voice was saying, “I must recall my proxy, as they may notice my connection to it and track you. I will leave an autonomous outrider in its place, to lead you the rest of the way. I will not maintain the connection, to make sure they have nothing to trace to you. I am currently burying your packs near the tree where you left them.”
The second proxy vanished as I went to my knees next to Brigitte. To my alarm, she wasn’t breathing, and she felt very cold.
“You’ve drowned her!” I yelled at the proxy that was speaking.
It droned on, sounding slightly annoyed at me. “I have not drowned her, she is in a [Deep Dive] trance. I have a means to wake her from here, but it would be faster for you to use [Healing] on her, followed by [Restoration] if she doesn’t wake on her own after [Healing].”
I immediately circulated mana and chanted, “[Healing.]” I was horribly anxious and didn’t hold back. I poured it into her.
“Ahhhhh!” Brigitte screamed as she came awake.
I dispelled the [Healing], then summoned more mana and chanted, “[Soothing]”.
He resumed talking.
“You need to climb four more levels and then make your way westward,” it declared. “At this time, I don’t believe they know you two are present. They know about me, of course, but they believe that, in the incident where they almost caught you two, it was me that they nearly caught, as if their silly trap had any chance of catching me. They also seem to think I stole some money, for some reason.”
“My Lady?” Brigitte asked. There was some faint illumination thanks to a few patches of glowing magic lichens or mosses, but it probably wasn’t enough even for her excellent night vision. I was mostly seeing through vampire sight.
“I’m here,” I said, resting my fingertips on her upper arm.
Diur ended with, “The proxy will become an outrider and disconnect from me. Once the outrider has done its job of leading you to the princess, it will vanish.”
“Just a minute!” I yelped. “You plan to fight an archdemon and an archfiend on your own? Diurhimath!”
A chuckle came from the proxy. “I won’t let them face me directly. I’m not quite strong enough for that, yet. I’ll lead them on a merry chase with spiritual magic and blood magic, instead.”
The see-thru visibility illusion vanished and the proxy shrank into a little presence resembling a Wind spirit.
“Diurhimath!” I yelled again, but there was no response. He had cut the connection, I guess. Either that, or he was laughing at us while not answering. I had no way to tell which it was.
After the silence stretched on for a bit, Brigitte asked, “My Lady, where are we?”
“Inside the passage to the other cavern,” I answered, then held up my hand and pulled Light mana from my core, since next to none existed in the vicinity to pull from the environment. “[Fairy Light.]”
A soft glow emanated from a floating soap bubble above my fingers, illuminating the area.
“What happened out there?” I asked.
She shook her head, while wrapping her arms around herself and shivering a bit. “I don’t know. I had just asked him why the princess had stayed with the Berado that long and then suddenly left them, and how she ended up down here. He was about to explain, and then he suddenly shut up and stared back in the direction of that demon base. He shushed me when I tried to ask about it. Then he held his hand out and said ‘sorry about this’. The next thing I knew, I was waking up here feeling like somebody had set me on fire.”
I had discovered while she was speaking that my belt-wallet was full of water. I began unbuckling it.
Feeling bad about that, I told her as I poured the water out, “I apologize about that. I was panicking, because you looked dead.”
“Dead?”
“You weren’t breathing, and your body was really cold. I flooded you with a heavy dose of Healing.”
She nodded, then began shivering worse.
“You have any way to warm us up?” she asked with her voice shaking. Actually, some of the shaking might have been anger. She looked a little pissed. I know I was. But a sopping wet mortal in this cool place would be getting very cold in any case.
I stopped what I was doing (pulling out Durandal and my dagger and laying them out to dry), then held up my hand and cast as small a [Fireball] as I could manage, willing it to hang close by.
“This should help.”
She held out her hands toward it, just like warming them at a fireplace, then looked around.
“So are we really supposed to find our way out through this place?”
