‘Ah!’ I screamed and my foot slipped on a wet moss, I threw my knife on the ground and tried to recover balance clinging with both hands onto the wall, but my attempt failed, and I fell on the ground.
When I looked up, Senka was standing in front of me shaking. His vest was cut on a chest and he was touching it with his trebling hands. He stepped on an arrow that I left for him.
‘I couldn’t go…’ he cried out, ‘I was following you. Sorry…’
Now he definitely looked a lot like a puppy who was left by his master. I wanted to hug him and pat his head to calm him down, but anger filled me first,
‘Why didn’t you tell it back then?! I would have completely understood that!’ Now my clothes were wet from the moss and I had bruises on my palms.
‘Sorry…’ Senka’s apology was swept away with the wind that rushed towards the darkness of the cave.
‘Senka! Wind! It means that this cave has an exit on the other side!’ my anger had disappeared in an instant, now I only felt relief.
A second breeze swept through my back and my nose started itching so hard that I couldn’t resist and let out the loudest sneeze in my life.
RRHHACHUU!
Then right after the sound the whole cave filled with sapphire light. My mouth opened in amazement, this view was stunning and scary at the same time. I regained my balance on these slippery rocks and stood up. With this light I could easily find the knife that I dropped earlier. The cave was filled with flowers that emitted blue light. When I made a step, flowers on the walls turned away. I think they were sleeping, and my sneeze woke them up. Maybe Hina was right; my sneeze is what is going to help me defeat all of my opponents. Maybe it was some sort of warning system to alert everyone if some intruders get inside but it didn’t matter to me. I tried to pluck out some of the flowers and to my surprise they separated with the wall quite easily, gathering a dozen of them in my sac I turned to Senka. The look on his face was like he just discovered a jar or jam under his bed pillow and now he can it eat all up alone.
My heart began thumping harder with each step I took. I reckoned everyone could hear my sneeze both inside and outside the cave, so there was no point in hiding. I was making my way through the tunnel walking straight down the middle with my nose proudly pointing to the ceiling. I felt like a person from a royal family that everyone would admired in our village. We had no royals in our village, but this is how they would walk, I thought. With all these lights around me, shining like stars in the night’s sky, I completely forgot about caution and why in the first place I stepped into this cave.
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‘Senka, come!’ I waved at him to release him from this mesmerizing curse of blue flowers.
We began walking slowly into the depths of the Cold Peak. In front of me saw a blue dot that was not afraid of sounds and stood still, it was constantly growing bigger as we were approaching it, as well as, the wind got stronger and cooler. I started hearing water croaking and when I came up to the end of the tunnel a huge cavern unfolded in front of my eyes. It was so huge that the half of our village could fit in here. A steady river was flowing from left to the right in the middle of this cavern and I couldn’t see from where it was running and where it was heading because the tunnels on both sides were not illuminated. On the other hand, the cavern itself was covered with same blue flowers as before and I could see everything like it was daylight. Both banks of the river were filled with flowers and whenever a stronger wave hit the bank flowers would turn away. It looked like a dance. Small blue lights leaning towards and outwards the stream.
‘How can they grow here if there are no bees to pollinate them?’ I whispered to myself in amazement, ‘Or they grow like mushrooms with spores? It’s so fascinating…’
I sat down in front of them and was stunned with what I saw. I could see liquid flowing inside of the veins of these flowers as if they had blue blood streaming up from the ground. Then a quiet buzzing noise broke the silence. It was a small stag-beetle flying around me, covered in something blue. The beetle sat down on a flower and started scratching it with its little horns. Then little drops of blue liquid appeared, and stag-beetle drank them. The beetle turned blue and began shining same as these flowers. I crushed some of the flowers to get the juice out of them and poured it onto the blade of my pocket knife. The knife soaked all the liquid and began glowing.
‘Senka! Look!’ I showed him my discovery, ‘These flowers interact with metals and I think if you consume them, they will have the same effect on you.’
‘I don’t want to try it out… It’s cool and all... but we didn’t find any traces of Hina!’ Senka’s voice brought me back to reality.
‘Senka, do you really want to find her so hard? Look at these flowers, look at these shining beauties! Don’t you want to explore the world to see things even more incredible than that? Screw Hina and her survival skills! We were alone in the beginning and planned our adventure to be ours, not hers!’
That’s right! We didn’t find evidence that Hina was actually here! She is not real, she is just a plot of our imagination. We don’t need her to have an adventure.
‘Our families lived here for decades and we never heard stories about these caves and rivers inside of the mountain. They only told us stories about witches and other scary creatures, don’t you find that odd?’ Senka wondered.
‘There must be a reason for that…’
CLUNK! CLUNK!
I swallowed the last words of the sentence because we heard a noise coming out of the left river tunnel.
CLUNK! CLUNK!
‘There is nowhere to hide, Senka! Prepare your bow and when this thing from a tunnel shows up be ready to shoot!’
CLUNK! CLUNK!!!