I did spend some more time exploring the area around the underground river, before pulling my tendrils back and exploring the other direction. There, it was more of the same, narrow tunnels that continued on without rhyme or reason. We might be able to find a path there, at least if we invested enough time, but it would be challenging. On the other hand, the river would reach the surface at some point, though it was just as questionable if the path it took to the surface was traversable for us air-loving creatures. It might simply flow through completely submerged tunnels, I simply didn’t know enough about underground rivers to make any sort of educated guess. My un-educated guess was that the river wouldn’t be at its highest at the moment, not without a lot of rain or glacial run-off, which would mean there should be some air throughout the tunnel. But I had no idea if that was accurate.

Dismissing my tendrils, I explained what I had found to the others, trying to get a second opinion. They hadn’t any more knowledge on underground rivers but the idea of not having to crawl a significant portion of the day made them all perk up quite a bit. Especially Sigmir looked outright ecstatic at the idea, understandable given that she had been forced to stay in her Hallow most of the time. Her inability to protect me in this place didn’t thrill her.

“I might be able to receive some guidance. It won’t be anything concrete, nor will we learn the reasons for the guidance, but it might give us some hint.” Olivia spoke up, making me truly curious.

“That sounds vague. What are you thinking about?” I asked, despite knowing that the answer would most likely be some divine mumbo-jumbo.

“The Lady Eleutheria is the patron of Travellers, so there are prayers to ask her guidance regarding the road to take. Though her advice is generally cryptic, it should tell us whether delving deeper into the mountains would be our doom.” she explained, making me nod in acceptance, not understanding.

It was one of those things that just went against everything I knew about magic. How could you determine the future, unless you knew the parties and motivations involved? Answering such a question would mean to observe the complete tunnel-system, take in all parties within, the natural dangers and their likelihood of occurrence and form a model from that, which you then would have to compare to the capabilities of the asking party. While the sheer amount of power needed could be explained away by the fact that a deity did the information gathering, it would also mean that the deity used that amount of effort. Unless the deities in general had some super-multi-tasking ability, it was questionable. At the same time, I wondered if there was a way to essentially perform a distributed denial of service-attack on a specific deity. by instigating their clergy to draw on their powers at the same time. It was a rather humorous idea that made me want to try it at some point.

“It won’t hurt I guess. Please, do your thing.” I told her, stepping back and carefully wrapping myself into my cloak of Twilight, trying to hide the existence of my Mortal Hubris-trait as much as possible. If Eleutheria did peek down on us, there was no need to rub my heretical ways into her face. Not when we were asking for her help.

I did, however, watch closely as Olivia did her thing, not that I was able to see a lot. Some of her spells, I could see the Astral Power, with others, like the one she was casting now, I could only catch the faint scent of Power, unlike anything I had ever experienced otherwise. Divine Power, granted to divine Casters by their deities, something that apparently didn’t follow the normal rules.

Otherwise, the events would make even less sense. Olivia spoke a relatively short, though impassioned, prayer, beseeching Eleutheria to guide us on which path to take before letting her staff, still with the burning top, stand upright in the middle of the cave, between the three possible paths. It made me wonder what we should do if the ritual told us to go back the way we came from, but we’d cross that bridge when we got to it.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

We didn’t have to wait long for Olivia’s prayer to be answered, or she might have managed to perfectly balance her staff for about a minute, as it took that long for the staff to fall over, pointing towards the tunnel leading downwards.

“I’ll go out on a limb and guess that it means we should head down?” I asked, partially amused, particularly annoyed at the divine magic that completely eludes my understanding, while looking like some trick to pick a path at random. The whole thing might as well be random, I had no way of checking, but given that I knew Olivia had divinely granted powers, I would give her the benefit of the doubt.

“It does.” she nodded, before adding a little more, “You’ll need to remember, however, that this doesn’t mean the path is safe. It merely means this path is the best way to reach our destination on the other side of the mountains, when taking into account danger, speed and accessibility.”

That explained about nothing, not without knowing how those factors were determined and weighted against each other. A portal with a ninety-nine percent chance to dismember you, but would take you right to your destination, might be considered “better” than a relatively safe journey around the world, simply due to the distances involved. I still wouldn’t want to chance the portal. Study it, maybe, but not mindlessly use it.

But at the end of the day, Olivia seemed to be happy with the result of her magic, so we should be able to traverse that path. We still didn’t know if the divined path was the one I thought about, only that going down that tunnel would be the best option at this point, so that was what we did.

For once, we could actually move in a formation, with Sigmir leading the way, Olivia right behind her, carrying her staff as a torch, followed by myself, Adra and Rai bringing up the rear.

As we walked I occasionally caught traces of weird, lingering magic, nothing remarkable enough to give me a real impression of the type, just enough to make me wary. Not that the tunnel itself didn’t manage to do so, it was just too artificial to let me calm down, as if someone had taken a massive drill and simply gone through the mountains at an angle.

The smooth ground allowed us to quickly reach the T-section I had found earlier and now we had light and I was able to directly look around, instead of only having two tendrils with limited sight-range.

Looking up, I let out a soft sigh, the ceiling some thirty meters above us, with a few holes higher up in the walls. From the way our steps echoed, I wondered just how large the cavern was, and wanted to know more. For a moment, I considered asking Lenore to take wing, but she instantly rejected the idea, before I even had time to fully articulate the thought. She didn’t fancy the idea of flying in a dark cave without the ability to see in the dark. If I wanted to know, I’d have to climb the wall myself.

Luckily, Sigmir had no problem with giving me a boost and while the others didn’t look too thrilled, they also didn’t reject the need to gather information and accepted that I was the most suitable person, simply due to my size and concealment-magic.

Once I was up on the ridge I had spotted earlier, I could look further and what I saw stunned me, both due to its beauty but also due to the shivers of fear it sent down my spine.

The cavern we were in was outright massive, large enough that I couldn’t make out the ends, despite the fact that there was some weird, bioluminescent lichen growing near some of the tunnels.

And there were many of them, some larger, some smaller than the one we had entered through, leading off into almost every direction imaginable. But that wasn’t all that I saw, I also saw distant movement, countless scurrying things of indeterminable size. Unless I missed my guess, those were the weird rat-things I had spotted before, just instead of individuals that quickly scurried away, coupled with others that kept their distance from us, here, I could see hundreds, maybe thousands of forms, moving in the near darkness.

There was no way I had enough trust in Eleutheria to try going that way. Hopefully, the path to the underground river was the right one, or I would suggest heading back, no matter what some divination said.