Tundra

The sky was littered with stars like handfuls of diamonds and cold jewels, only it was not the sky. It was the high, domed ceiling of the cavern that twinkled, winking with icicles set into the slow melt. Eiron was unusually alert. He kept glancing up, as though he expected to see the real heavens shining through, but we were far too deep underground for there to be any chance of us stumbling across a portal. At this depth, any skylight would be a black, pitiless tunnel. Hackley had lit a rune, and was conscientiously making notes about everything we passed when we came up across something like a stack of bricks, curiously symmetrically arranged. Aais stooped down automatically, depositing a handful of food –seaweed bread from Eiron’s supplies– on the shrine while Hackly sketched it.

‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him.

‘This is the shrine of the miner’s grandfather,’ he said reverently, carefully arranging his offering. ‘We need all the allies we can get right now.’

We continued on, ducking past the assemblage of bricks and into the damper caverns which carried trickles of seawater like the fossilised arteries of the cave system. Where the flow of water was nourished by recent floods, coral grew in the waist-deep water, pale red with white flecks like sedimentary dust.

‘Red and white,’ Aais declared. ‘That means danger.’

As he spoke, the surface of the water began to boil, and ropes sprang out of depths, coiling their black lengths around the fish-man and dragging him to his knees. Eiron hacked at them, and several of the eels fell back, slithering back into the makeshift river like chains attached to so many anchors. The rest remained tangled, knotting their bodies tighter and hissing venomously as they writhed closer to Hackley, who sent a feeble incantation in their direction. My own shield charm blew them back, sending ripples of shock throughout the cavern, which began to rumble and shed a shower of pebbles.

‘Come on,’ I encouraged the others ‘Before this place collapses.’

‘Well, at least we know some of the language now,’ Eiron grumbled.

‘I wonder–’ I muttered to myself.

‘Yes?’ Hackley answered me, still shivering where the eels had crawled over her exposed forearms and torn holes in her robe, now less black than a dusty shade of a muddy twilight.

‘Who do you suppose that message was intended for?’ I asked, contemplating something sinister. ‘Them or us?’

Eiron shrugged massively. ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

The water only increased in depth until we were swimming through tunnels flushed with the tide and all the things it carried– traps of Medusa like seaweed, schools of fish and drifting jellyfish.

Thankfully, we encountered no more eels.