The Windrider rocked as it drifted into the sea caves, moonlight sputtering out as the currents plunged the vessel into darkness. Yarik took down the sails as Tarka ran from side to side, poking at clams and mussels that had attached themselves to the walls. The craggy rocks opened up in a triangular portal, pulling the ship inward.

Tarka sprinted to the other side of the ship, reaching a claw out and pulling at a mussel that seemed to shine with a faint green light. Beneath it, a rune in the shape of a stick with two branches slanting down to the right glowed, suddenly turning red. Tarka prodded it curiously before his attention was pulled elsewhere: scratches and figures on the ceiling of the cavern. He dropped the mussel to look, falling back into the water with a splash.

“Tarka, help me light this!” Yarik called out from the other edge of the ship.

Tarka ran back across the deck. Yarik was holding out a torch over the side of the boat, a cloth wrapped around the stick and doused in a stinky liquid. Tarka’s tail wagged, and he opened his jaws, clenching his chest and trying to summon fire.

“Careful and controlled,” Yarik warned him, holding the torch a little further away from the boat.

Tarka flicked his snout and shot out a tiny blast of flame. It caught ahold of the torch, lighting up the end. The darkness was cast back, revealing the sea caves: a dark water-filled tunnel, just wide enough for the Windrider to pass through. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, swallowing up the torchlight.

“Good job,” Yarik said, using a foot to push away a sloshing bucket of water at his feet. “You’re getting better.”

“Soon enough, I’ll be better at lighting fires than Alika!” Tarka purred.

Yarik nodded. “Just so long as it’s not on my boat.”

The human lifted up the torch, casting light across the cave’s ceiling. Tarka gasped in amazement: black drawings covered it like a mural. Figures of humans and dragons danced across the surface, still, frozen within their stories.

“They’re like the ones that Alika and I would make during the Long Night!” Tarka exclaimed, getting an idea. He crept into the cabin, rummaging through Yarik’s drawers and pulling out a piece of charcoal.

Carrying the charcoal in his jaws, Tarka shimmied up the forward mast. Digging his paws into it, he perched on the mast, twisting his head and adding lines to the mural, long and twisted.

Tarka’s eyes scanned the figures on the ceiling as he created his own. Simple drawings together created beautiful scenes. The rocks around the edge of the roof had been transformed into mountains, forming an upside-down Valley in the caves. Vivid greens had been painted into trees, and the colors of the sunset were painted into flowers. Oddly shaped dragons wandered around the Valley claw-in-hand with winged humans.

The piece of charcoal dragged along the ceiling in a jagged line, splitting the scene in two. Tarka shifted the charcoal left and right, dragons and humans placed on either side of it. It passed across a circle that had been split into eight pieces, cutting one off.

Tarka felt sad seeing the drawings, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He felt grief bubble up in his stomach, though he wasn’t sure for who or what the grief was for.

Tarka burped, tasting an oily flavor. Nevermind. It was just fish.

The charcoal fell from his mouth and clattered to the ground. His snout rubbed the stone above him, and he pulled it away.

“During high tide, we would’ve had to take down the mast,” Yarik commented.

Tarka cocked his head, his ears raising. The rock ceiling was unnervingly close to the mast. What if the water rose, or the ceiling dropped lower?

“Don’t worry,” Yarik assured Tarka. “The ceiling doesn’t get any shallower, and I kept an eye out — the tides are going down.”

Yarik pointed his finger at the rock wall. Two parallel black lines had been painted across the caverns where he pointed, one of them occasionally hidden behind the figures of upside-down mountains.

“The lower line there is where the water gets up to during peak tide,” Yarik explained.

Tarka’s gaze wandered along the two lines. As they slowly drifted along the tunnel, the two lines met, forming what looked like the head of a giant serpentine dragon. A prominent horn rose up from the tip of her snout, and she carried the end of her tail in her jaws, which went on to become the two parallel lines once more. For a moment, Tarka wondered if that was supposed to be the Dreamer, before noticing that her eyes were wide open.

“What’s peak tide?” Tarka asked.

“When the Twins are aligned, the water rises and almost fills up the entire cave, and boats can’t fit through,” Yarik replied.

“That sounds cool!” Tarka said. “I wanna see peak tide!”

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“You already have, but it’s not too impressive out on the open ocean. It doesn’t look much different there, no matter how high the water is.” Yarik chuckled. “One day, you should see the tides of Lina — they only have one moon, but it’s so great that ruins of entire cities are revealed when the tides are low. There’s not much land to begin with, and you can never trust that land which there is!” He shook his head. “Ah, it would’ve been a wonderful place to see again.”

“You should come with me!” Tarka suggested.

Yarik shook his head and turned back to the water. The torchlight flickered. “No, no. I have my granddaughter to see.”

“She can come with us!” Tarka continued. “What’s she like? Does she have fur?”

Yarik snorted and coughed. “Fur? Just that on her head! But she has the cutest rosy cheeks. And just like her mother, she would cry up a storm and could only be soothed by the rocking of a boat on the waves.”

“Oh, she’s a cub?”

“She was the last time I saw her!” Yarik laughed. “But it’s been quite some time. She might even have a child of her own now! A great-grandfather. I could be a great-grandfather! Can you believe that?”

“Wow,” Tarka replied. “You must be really old.”

“Old for a human, true. But for a dragon, I’d still be young and spry. And for a fox demon — well, my life is just the blink of an eye compared to Snow’s.”

“But if you were a wolf, they’d think you immortal!”

“True enough,” Yarik agreed. “Perhaps I’ll be born a wolf in the next life. That wouldn’t be so bad. I could see myself as a wolf.”

“Me too,” Tarka sighed, letting out smoke. “I miss Hedi. I hope he’s getting lots and lots of prey this winter.”

“I’m sure he is,” Yarik said. “I’m sure he is.”

The rocky passage curved, and the water began to speed up, the Windrider with it. Tarka jumped as the hull of the ship scraped the side of the cavern, falling from the mast and landing on his paws.

Yarik lifted two paddles from the deck of the boat, handing one to the shaken dragon. “It gets rough here.”

Tarka grabbed the paddle in his jaws and stepped over to the boat’s edge. The stone walls rushed past him, threatening to rub off his fur. As the Windrider drifted towards the walls, Tarka stuck out the paddle, bouncing it against the stone. The wood scraped against it, and the Windrider slowly turned.

“Careful!” Yarik said, shoving his paddle in the water. The Windrider twisted around the other way, back toward the center.

The tunnel turned ahead, and Yarik ran across the deck, into the cabin.

“Paddle! Fast!” Yarik shouted.

Tarka put one paw on the paddle, rapidly shoving it in and out of the cold water, splashing up on the deck with each stroke. The Windrider started to turn.

Tarka braced for impact as the cavern wall loomed closer, but Yarik jumped over next to him, throwing a large, squishy cushion over the side, holding onto it with a rope. The Windrider bumped into the wall, the impact lessened by the cushion, but still shaking Tarka from his paws.

“Made it!” Yarik sighed in relief as the ship drifted around the turn, heading into a wider, slower tunnel. “That’s the worst of it.”

Tarka glanced backward at the turn in the tunnel. A plank of rotting wood was strutting out from the surface. Apparently, not every boat that had come past this bend had survived unscathed.

The tunnel opened up, wide enough that Tarka could no longer see the sides of it, though the ceiling still loomed down low. The Windrider slowed as the current became still. As they drifted forward, the tunnel behind faded into darkness.

“Woah,” Tarka said, his voice echoing across the underground lake. “Which way?”

“Forward,” Yarik replied. “The current is slow, but we can trust it to lead us.”

Tarka flicked his snout. The ship moved in silence. In the darkness, the lake could have been as large as a mountain, or just a pond: Tarka had no way of knowing.

“Hey, what’s that?” Tarka asked, pointing his talon starboard. In the distance was a dim flicker of light.

Yarik angrily muttered a human word that Tarka didn’t know, and shoved his torch into the water, dousing the flames. Instantly, the underground lake was in darkness — almost total, except for the distant light, a white splotch on the black.

Tarka couldn’t see, but he could hear Yarik's heart racing in his chest, and smell salty fear on Yarik’s breath.

“What is it?” Tarka whispered.

“The Scribes,” Yarik replied, his voice hushed. “They must have seen us outside the caves.”

“Do you think they saw your torch?” Tarka asked.

The light in the distance got brighter.

“Yes.” Yarik picked up his paddle, and Tarka heard his footsteps as he walked back to the ship’s edge. “Row, Tarka! Row like you never have before!”

Tarka grabbed the paddle and shoved it back down. The sound of splashing water told him he’d hit the right place. His forelegs ached as the Windrider began to move.

The distant light was now a small circle, and Tarka thought he might have seen it attached to a shape on water. He rowed faster, his neck tensing with each stroke. The Windrider was moving, but where to? They were rowing blind.

“Tarka, can you see the exit?” Yarik murmured.

Tarka squinted, staring in front of them into the darkness. Slowly, he began to make out shapes, the light of the Scribes casting shadows on a stone wall. The edge of the lake. He stared, until he found it: a dark blotch on the wall, the exit.

“Mhmm!” Tarka grunted, his neck strained with each stroke of the paddle.

“Then you will be our eyes.”

The light was bright now, bright enough that Tarka could see the outline of the Scribes’ boat: a vessel much smaller than the Windrider with no mast. A lone human figure standing on it, an orb of light in her palm.

The Scribe was close, but they were almost at the lake’s exit. Tarka paddled faster. They were going to make it!

And then the Scribe doused her light, and the lake was cast into absolute darkness.