The sun nestled on the tree line when I/we saw a sliver of bright magic. If we had been in my human form we might have missed it, but in Beast sight, the magic was a coruscating, scintillating prism of power. We had trotted many miles and ended up over a narrow, very deep crevice.
You sure about this?I asked my Beast, staring down into the rock-strewn, tree-clogged dark rent. It looked as if the earth had cracked open eons ago, and a mad, dark fae had taken over. Snow clung to the rock faces for the first twenty feet down; then it stopped, where the temps changed. There, the snow down the sides of the cliffs had melted, refreezing in a glistening crystalline shell. And below that, the stone faces had held the temps above freezing. Bracken grew from cracks in the rock face. Moss draped the stones, swathed the trunks of trees that clung to the smallest fracture, and carpeted every inch of exposed stone and earth as the rocks fell away into theearth. At the bottom was green, green, green, every shade of green life. Moist air, a mist like a thin fog, rose in the chasm, wet and warmer, to freeze on the glistening surfaces or hit the cold and drip back as rain. The chasm had its own microclimate, an amazing little place in the deeps, and I wanted to explore.
Beast can leap there and there and there.She looked from place to place as she thought at me.Then stop. Pick places to leap after.
Yeah. You can’t see the bottom,I reminded her.And you need to be back up before nightfall. Climbing this wall of rock after dark will be impossible. Dangerous. The “you fall, we die” kinda dangerous.
Beast doesnotfall. See magics at bottom.
Uh-huh. I hate when you do this.
Beast chuffed and leaped. The forest floor seemed to push back against our back paws. Air swept up under and around us. Beast’s tail whipped and snapped. Beast pushed off on a root that angled away from the wall, letting the three-inch-thick wood carry her weight long enough to change trajectory. A rock ledge, almost an inch wide, offered a second toe-pad hold. A narrow tree trunk, growing at an angle, was the third. But Beast didn’t stop. She caught all her weight on her front paws, twisted, and thrust off it. Down and down again. A controlled fall that had me fighting to keep from screaming.
Beast was still chuffing.Fun. Fun. Many more than five fun!
Holy crap. Crapcrapcrap.
We dropped down and down and leaped ahead a dozen times, gaining as much as twenty feet forward with each leap. Down a crevice that had to be five hundred feet straight down. The ravine narrowed and then widened, and finally Beast stopped, her four paws smashing down, gripping a fallen tree, her weight slamming down behind. Still. Unmoving except for her breath. Twin billows in the darkness that was the artificial night.
Ahead, the ravine opened into a wider place, dark and snow sprinkled, with colossal ancient trees like out of a fairy tale. It was like a miniature old-growth forest, anoval of maybe three acres, deep with bracken and jagged fallen limbs and one ancient fir that had fallen and lay rotting. The air was warmer here, heavy with mist, a primordial place. It smelled of water, water on the trees, on the ground, hanging in the air, dripping, yet I had a feeling that rain seldom fell here. It was too isolated, cliff walls rising on every side. Water dripped, a constant patter. In the distance, an owl hooted, a plaintive sound. Magic glistened and danced on the steamy, still air.
Beast leaped and leaped from branch to branch, landing carefully on the mossy, wet bark. We were fifty feet from the forest floor and it was too dark to tell what was buried beneath the leaves and the rotting detritus of... centuries? The magic grew closer.
The tree branch beneath Beast’s claws changed, suddenly distinctly dissimilar.What?I thought.
Tree is not winter dead, not sleeping. Tree is true-dead. Air smells sick.
I took a sniff. And caught a whiff of sulfur.Brimstone? Be careful!
Is not same smell as Evangelina’s demon. Is different.
Crap. Be careful!
Beast is always careful.
So says the puma who just dropped several hundred feet into a crevasse.
She trotted along one limb, dropped to another, and peered around the trunk of the dead tree. Beneath us was a small blue pool of steaming water. Deep in the center of the pool was a rent, like a black crack in the skin of the earth, pointed on two ends, wider in the middle. In the center of the pool it looked strangely, menacingly, like a snake’s vertical pupil in a blue iris. It was a hot spring with a deep opening into the earth.
Steam rose from the hot spring in globes of mist that coated the trees and then fell in drops. The water bubbled, a delicious warmth if not for the faint stink of sulfur. Chemicals that were killing the trees all around.
The spring was heated and magical, and though it was beautiful, it was deadly. The hot spring was clearly part of the geology that created the microclimate, but theminerals in the water—maybe the water itself—had changed recently.
The trees were freshly dead, not rotted. The heated pool had left only a narrow ring of minerals around the edges instead of the thick crust I’d have expected. There was power in the spring, visible in Beast’s sight, power glowing through the water. Magic ascended with the hot spring, a rosy, vibrant energy visible in Beast-vision. This was... this was a magic heated pool.
In the deep iris of the pool something bright flashed by. Something with fins.
Or wings.
It flashed by again.
Arcenciel. That’s an arcenciel,I thought.Oh crap. This place...I looked around, remembering Molly’s explanation of liminal lines and ley lines.This is one of those rare places where multiple ley lines and maybe a liminal line cross over. This is a liminal opening. A rift. Holy crap. I found a rift.
Light blasted from the pupil.
Blinding.
Fast as the light, Beast whipped her body. Leaped. Flew back behind the tree trunk. At least twenty feet, into cover.
