MIKAELA
The mountain swallows us again.
Our little crew moves single-file through the tightest stretches, baskets and tools bumping the walls, breath fogging in the cool air. Behind us, the echoes of the clan’s bustle fade, replaced by dripping rock and the soft scrape of feet.
Sarven leads, glow turned low so it doesn’t blind anyone in the dark, but bright enough to paint his shoulders in dim gold ahead of me. I’m close behind, Erika at my back, then Rok, Tharn, Vorn, Keth, and the others stretching out into the tunnel.
No one talks much.
Work hums ahead of us like a pressure front. So does the memory of what waits at the end of this walk.
The first hint is the humidity.
The air temperature rises another few degrees, the damp, rotting heat of the bloom pressing against us.
My stride stutters.
The tunnel opens suddenly, and we spill out onto the ledge that rims the heart-cavern.
The pool lies below us, dark and glassy, steaming in the humidity. The leaping column of light from the shaft above looks almost exactly as it did before.
My body remembers faster than my mind. That instance of weightlessness as my foot slipped, the impact, the suffocating heat of the surface slime, then the shock of the freezing deep.
For a second, the cavern doubles.
I stop dead at the edge of the drop.
My fingers curl into fists. My heart jackhammers against my ribs so hard it hurts. I am standing solidly on rock, and my stupid brain is screaming, ‘Don’t fall again’.
The spike of panic blasts through the mindspace before I can stop it.
Sarven’s glow flares.
He’s at my side almost before I finish gasping, one big hand warm and solid between my shoulder blades, the other lightly catching my forearm as if any second I’ll bolt or tumble.
“Alive, little dra-kir,” his voice says in my mind. “You are here. Rock under your feet. Here with me.”
I swallow hard and taste minerals and phantom water.
“I’m okay,” I say, half to him, half to the part of me that clearly needs an update memo.
He doesn’t move his hand.
“You do not have to go closer,” he offers quietly, the thought like a door he’s willing to open if I want to bolt. “I can do the work. You stay on the ledge. Watch.”
The idea tempts for one hot, weak second.
But that’s not why I came.
If I leave this cavern as only the place I almost died, it’s going to own a piece of me forever. Every time someone mentions the spring, my body will do this stupid adrenaline trick. Every time I see a pool, I’ll see the wrong one.
I hate that idea more than I hate being scared right now.
Slowly, I make myself uncurl my fists.
Sarven watches me, the question hanging between us.
I step forward.
