“George, do you hear that?” Lestra’s voice fluttered like a baby dove’s first foray into a bath.

Water. Skin peeled from George’s lips as he smacked them open. “Finally,” he pulled his words from his parched throat. “Something to drink.”

“No- not just that. All the water here is connected. It all leads back to the main aquifer. Back to Meriford. We’ve nearly made it. We’ve-” Tears began to swell. After brimming to its most hopeful, her smile, the fragile crack which had held out for so long, started to falter.

“We’re close,” George said. She needed a reason. Something to drive her after they made it out of the caverns. “And then we’ll get back at the ones who did this. We’ll beat them.”

Lestra blinked twice and nodded.

The two carried on. For the first time it seemed since they had entered the tunnels, the ground climbed up as they followed the increasingly loud dripping. Not just one drip anymore. Two lifelines pounded against the stone walls. Then three. More until they could see it. From stalactite to stalagmite, bright dots splashed. More, a full trickle sounded ahead. George had by then numbed fully to the ache in his legs. He and Lestra rushed together as a current.

Water burst from a crack in the wall onto a flowing stream. Lestra cupped some of the ushing water in her hands and slurped it up, while George hastily dove his head into the shallow stream. The sediment-laced drink met his mouth like a puff of sand. He spat and hacked as he lifted his head. Lestra laughed.

Tufts of wet dirt marred the tip of his nose, his forehead, and parts of his cheeks. He brushed them off and joined her at the source. He followed her lead and took humble handfuls of the purified liquid. As the fresh, cool liquid met his lips, the lingering taste of sediment washed from his throat, replaced by the taste of water, of cleansing itself.

“This water is coming from the surface,” Lestra said.

George raised an eyebrow, puzzled at how she knew. Could she tell just by drinking it? He understood the flavor of water then better than he ever had before, but it was still water; it still wasn’t very distinct.

Lestra looked up. “We’re much too high for it to have come from the aquifer. And if it was from a separate underground pool, it would be too small to sustain this without replenishment from rain.”

George lowered his brows. He trusted her sense of elevation far more than his own, so he took her at her word. Still, he felt a little dizzy at the idea they were too high. it seemed they had been going down much longer than up, but he supposed their last climb was much steeper than the staggered descents of the tunnels. He shook the feeling off and looked at the crack in the rocks, from which the water was sourced. On that end, it was just that- rocks and a crack. Nowhere to go. Then he looked the other way and followed the flow of the water until his eyes couldn’t, but it kept going, kept open. “That’s good then, right? It means the stream should lead us to where we want to go, rather than away.”

Lestra nodded. “Have you had enough to drink?”

“Yeah,” George said before taking one last splash for good measure. “Yes.”

They walked alongside the stream, matching its gentle pace. A rumble drummed in the background.

The edge of a cliff brought them to a sudden halt. Their stream fell as a drip into a grand abyss.

With deafening furor, white water crashed down; a grand set of falls spread out in the distance. The rim of the chasm sparkled, encrusted with light crystals. Titanic formations.

From those lights, George could see the full outline of the chasm, but it did not wrap in a full circle. The crystals stopped, and their glow fell on a solid wall. It donned on him where they were. “We’re on the other side of the dam,” he said. “How do we get down?” He couldn’t see the bottom, nor how far the falls went down, and in part that was a relief. It meant he didn’t have to reckon with the exact knowledge of how high they were. Even from what was visible, though, the bridge over Meriford’s lake would be much lower than where they stood. He shuddered as he imagined having to climb down the cliffs. But even that wouldn’t do anything for them. The dam would still be in the way, and the waters were infested with monsters. He felt his heart pound as if it were banging against the dam. After all they had gone through, they were trapped a few feet away from Meriford.

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“I-I don’t know,” Lestra said, her eyes humbled by the chasm’s expanse. “Let’s just… walk around?”

It was as good a suggestion as anything George would have come up with.

The two walked along the chasm’s rim. They hopped across steppingstones to get across the rushing rivers which fed the falls. Each one rose above the waters such that their surface was dry, keeping them safe from slipping.

Between two of the rivers, a hole gaped through the ground. It looked out of place. It was perfectly circular, and there was no slope around it. As George and Lestra stared down the hole, he thought about what could have been responsible. There was only one suspect. “Did the burrow worm do this?” He asked.

Lestra nodded.

George remembered how the burrow worm ascended through the street, bursting through straight up. It must have left a similar hole. He tried to imagine it going under in the same manner, but it was difficult. There was always some angle it had to take to start off. He knew that it had breached the dam under water, so it had to have descended a great way. Perhaps the people who led it sent it up and over just to throw off people who tried to follow it. If that was the case, it didn’t work.

A notched rope descended into the hole. It seemed someone did try to follow it, and they had thought about the same possibility as George. He didn’t envy the poor soul who had to use it to climb down and likely back up the pit. No doubt it was someone, or some people from Meriford, sent to find the burrow worm’s origins. He remembered that it was a mystery as to how the worm got there.

George had a suspicion now of who had sent the worm, and it wasn’t Ardelians as commander Morris thought. It was the graldor. George didn’t know the exact reason, but it couldn’t be a coincidence such a disruption occurred to the city closest to their two targets.

Wherever the burrow worm came from, it wasn’t where they wanted to be. And even if it was, George would rather die of starvation than have to use that rope to get down such a drop. But the rope being there was still important to them. It meant someone had been there recently, which in turn meant there had to be a way out.

Lestra left the hole and bent over to inspect the light crystals at the chasm’s rim. “Look at this.” She waved for George to come toward her.

Unlike the flat, smooth slates they had seen face inward from the other side of the chasm, the surfaces they inspected were marred with chiseling. There was too much for it to have been from a small excavation team.

“This is old,” Lestra said. “Maybe these crystals were once used for spell creation. Or some kind of ritual was conducted around here. Do you know anything about…?” She shook her head. He wasn’t really from Meriford, so he wouldn’t have any better idea of the history than her. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” The carvings were all made with the same direction, forming a sort of slope in the crystalline rim. He imagined that it might have been early settlers, before Meriford came to its current identity, before the dam, maybe some of the first people to descend after the prowlers took control of the nights. He understood her curiosity. He had it himself. Those ancient people could tell him so much more than that worthless book he picked up from the library. For now, though they still had to focus on getting out. “I don’t think we should worry about how these were made.”

He glanced around to see if there were any more clues. Looking at the steppingstones, they didn’t seem to be natural. Octagons with straight edges, all of them appearing identical. From one river to another, they connected to each other, but with a curvature opposite to that of the chasm’s rim. George drew a slope with his finger to match the invisible line he made through the steppingstones. Lestra saw the same thing he did. They continued on, a bit more hurried as they put their faith in the layout of the steppingstones.

As conformation that it might lead out, the trend of the steppingstones led directly into one of the river tunnels, and beyond that, they stopped. Without a way across the rest of the rivers, no one could have come in from anyplace beyond that tunnel.

At the side of the tunnel, rocks were stacked in a stepwise fashion. As with the steppingstones, they were a bit too perfect to be a natural formation. The rocks were short, their flat tops just the right size for a foot to fit comfortably.

George and Lestra ascended step by step up the ancient stairs. Rubble and dirt piled at the sides, but the center always remained clear. The steps stopped abruptly after a long climb up. Lestra lifted her pendant to get a better view of the ceiling. The glow revealed a darkened crease in the shape of a circle- an indentation which marked a seal above them. Cobwebs surrounded it, but they stuck to the edges. She stopped her hand just before it hit the seal and she breathed in. Then, with a softer approach, she creaked it open to let a sliver of the sky pour through. The lining of the hatch was light. “It’s day.” She exhaled and let her hand unleash its full force against the seal.

The two climbed out onto the bright, open surface. Late afternoon, the grass was golden. Yellow leaves brushed softly against them as they stormed through the field.