---Ksem’s perspective---

I’ve never experienced darkness blacker than that that surrounds me right now…

I can see absolutely nothing!

Besides the lingering pain of being tackled to the ground, I can feel just three things; the hard stone floor beneath me, the pressing weight of the woman on top of me and her panted breaths hitting my face.

Well… we’re both alive at least… and it seems she isn’t immediately trying to murder me?

I feel her weight shift as she pushes herself upwards.

“Raala? Are you alri-”

*CRACK*

“OW!” I object to the full force, open handed smack I just took to the right side of my face.

The only answer is another glancing blow to the top left side of my head, then a deluge of variously effective slaps to every part of my upper body, accompanied by noises somewhere between growls and screams!

I raise my arms to shield myself, begging “Raala!... Ow!... Raala!… Ow!... RAALA STOOOOOP!!!... OW!!!”

A powerful hand grabs me by the lapels and lifts my back a few fingerwidths off the floor before slamming me back down.

Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her breath on my nose, she screams into my face “Do you have ANY idea. WHAT. YOU. JUST. DID!?”

“Yes, Raala! We almost died and I’m incredibly sorry! I absolutely shouldn’t have snooped around up here… and I shouldn’t have run from you when you came after me! Those are both entirely my fault…” I state sincerely to the madwoman pinning me to the ground “…but it’s alright now, right? We’re both alive… I’m fairly uninjured and you’re at least well enough to scream and pummel me… We can just go back to the hearthstead and chalk this up as a learning experience, can't we?”

Her body shakes with joyless, hysterical laughter as she accuses “You don’t get it at ALL!!! WHERE exactly do you think this passage goes!?”

“Oh… well… I know it goes somewhere… I saw the blaze symbol so I know we aren’t trapped down here… Right?… Somewhere a bit of a longer walk back? Somewhere I’m guessing might mean we end up needing to spend tonight at your grandmother’s and set off tomorrow?”

“NO, shit-for-brains!!! NOT ‘a bit of a longer walk’!!! YOU’VE only gone and trapped us OUTSIDE. the. FUCKING… BAAAAASIIIIIN!!!!!!!”

My stomach drops at that revelation!

I want to tell her ‘that’s not funny’… but everything about this situation informs me she’s not joking!

“OH! And it’s the Winter Solstice in less than a Moon! ALL the routes through the Ice Wall on this side of the Basin are gonna be completely impassable until the Spring thaw**! Four Moons at LEAST**!”

I lie beneath the apoplectic woman, utterly dumbstruck by what she’s revealed.

Eventually, I manage to answer “…Well… maybe the way behind us isn’t completely blocked?… If you let me up, I’ll relight a torch and we can see if there’s a gap we could squeeze through.” my voice subdued.

There’s about a six heartbeat pause before she growls and I feel her weight removed from atop me.

Now able to get up, I feel around on my right for where I dropped the torch.

---Raala’s perspective---

*Klih*

I flinch at the flash of light that illuminates the man for the briefest moment as he strikes his flint against his magic sparking stone.

*Klih**klih**klih**klih* click the eery rocks, throwing the man’s shadow through the dusty air to loom on the wall and ceiling behind him… making him look every bit the cursed ghoul I now know him to be!

Finally, the tiny sustained light of an ember appears and rises into the air.

He blows, causing the spark to bathe his unnatural face and the palms of his spindly hands in orange light, the only things visible in the darkness.

The flame catches and I hear the scrape of wood against stone before the head of a torch appears.

It quickly takes the flame and the dust choked cavern comes once again into view.

I turn my attention back the way we came and immediately see there’s absolutely no getting through that!

“Uhhhm… maybe if we dig at these piles of rocks we could-?”

“No…” I scowl, bitterly “We need to get moving now or we’ll run out of torch light before we reach the other side. The torches would burn out long before we dug through that and, when we discover there isn’t a way through, it’d mean we’d be stuck on this side of the blockage in the dark!”

“Oh…” says the man with infuriating disappointment in his voice, as if this isn’t all his fault!

Sneering, I look around for my spear…

I gasp as I see its bottom half, the top crushed beneath a stone at least 20 times my weight.

Wrath boils inside me as I see that his bow made it out of the collapse just fine!

Impulsively, I lunge to snatch it up from the ground but (the outlander clearly having gathered my intention from my face) a long fingered hand whisks it away a fraction of a breath before mine grasps it.

Rage in my face and in my voice, I snarl “Give it to me, outlander!” pointing down at the shaft of my ruined spear “You broke my weapon, I break yours!!!”

Holding his bow far above his head (well out of reach for me) and holding the lit torch between himself and me to ward me back, he seriously and calmly states “Raala, I understand you’re upset, about your spear, about everything, but just think for a moment!… Whether or not you breaking my bow is what either of us deserve, it will mean that once we get out of this cave, neither of us will have a weapon to hunt or defend ourselves with… right? Is that what you want?”

Stolen novel; please report.

That stops me dead from trying to fight my way to him around the fire.

Damn it!

He’s right!

“*GrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRR*! Fine! But you owe me a spear as good or better than that one!”

“Agreed… and, when we’re both back with our respective peoples, if you still feel it necessary, you can break my bow then, alright?”

“Mmmh!” I grunt, having every intention of making him make good on that promise!

“We should probably get moving, shouldn’t we?” he asks, bending to pick up the other torch and touching it to the one he already relit.

I snatch it from his hand and wave it rapidly through the air to snuff out the fire before it catches.

I round on him “What do you think you’re doing!? We need both torches to make it! If they’re both lit at the same time, they’ll both burn out halfway through, won’t they!”

Realisation hits his face as he sheepishly admits “…Ah… Right you are…”

Sneering, I snatch the lit torch out of his right hand and press the one I just extinguished back in his direction.

“Take this! I’m leading the way! I’m not stopping for you so don’t fall behind!”

---Ksem’s perspective---

Falling behind hasn’t been a problem.

She began limping as soon as her blood had cooled down after the fight.

I want to suggest she rests… but, if what she says about the torches is true, it sounds like we wouldn’t have the time… even if she were willing to take any suggestion from me(!)

We’ve been walking now for (my guess) around a third of the sunlight. It will probably be around sunset by the time we get to the exit.

This cave is truly incredible !… I just wish I were traversing it under better circumstances.

Some places, Raala has needed to squash her deep torso through with the stone walls pressing her from both the front and back (less of a problem for me, obviously(!)) but other points have been so cavernous that the torchlight didn’t touch the ceiling or any of the walls, giving the unearthly impression of walking outside on a still night with the Moon and all the stars stolen from the sky!

The echoing drip of water has been a near constant companion as we’ve travelled.

The torch I originally brought starts to sputter and dim… hopefully, we’re at or past the halfway mark by now!

Wordlessly, Raala holds her right hand out behind her without looking at me.

I place the spare torch into it and, without a ‘thank you’, she brings it in front of her to touch to the dying light of the one she snatched from me earlier.

The flame takes and the handle of the now expired torch is dropped to the ground.

I wordlessly bend to pick it up.

It’s no good to light our way anymore but could still serve as good firewood on the other side.

We continue walking for a bit, the echoing drips of distant water drops and the flicker and crackle of the freshly relit torch the only sounds.

Then, the hobbling woman turns her face to me and sneers “You gagged… didn’t you!” addressing me for the first time since our cave journey began.

Confused, I ask “Gagged? Gagged at what?”

“On the smell!… Obviously! You got to where the smell of the Bone Chamber reached you and you reacted to it with audible disgust!”

Thinking back, I realise “…Oh… well… I guess I did… Why do you ask?” bemused.

Too exhausted to fill her growl with the rage I think she really wants to, she answers “*Rrrrrrrr*!… Because you got yourself cursed by offending the dead, idiot!… And, because curses never stop at just their intended victim, you got me cursed too!”

“Wait, hang on…!” I stop her, confused “…the dead cursed me? How does that work? Aren’t the dead all either busy enjoying the Forest of Plenty or being chewed on by the Maw of the Wolf? Why and how would they have any care about indirect insults to the corpses they don’t inhabit anymore?”

“Oh! So you’d be fine if I held up your dad’s skull and spat on it then(?)” she spits “Afterall(!) He doesn’t ‘inhabit’ it anymore(!) He’s ‘gone back through the Cycle’(!)

I cock an eyebrow and answer “Well, no… If you somehow produced my father’s skull from somewhere and spat on it, I would find that extremely upsetting as an insult to both me and to his memory… but I don’t think he would care!… Even if he somehow knew you’d done that to his old bones, I certainly don’t think he’d care enough to expend the metaphysical effort to lay a potentially deadly curse on you! You’ve also not answered that ‘how’… They’re surely not here to be offended, right?”

“Their spirits are gone… I hope all to the Forest… but their shades are still here! Listening, watching… Shades don’t like to be disturbed… and you disturbed them with your careless bad manners! You got yourself cursed to exile and you kidnapped me along with you by your carelessness!”

I frown “Surely, Raala… that smell was coming primarily from your brother and lover at this point, right? Would the fact that I’m the one who avenged their deaths not carry any weight to them?”

Disgustedly, she shoots back “They don’t know you’re their avenger! Obviously! They were here, not in Bison, when you magicked that bear dead!… And Morlu wasn’t my lover! Not that that’s any of your fucking business!”

Here, we reach a fork in the cave.

Raala angles her torch down for the briefest moment, inspecting the stone slabs that have been propped up at the mouths of the paths.

Two have footprints with the toes pointed downward and pebbles scattered loosely around them.

The last has the footprint pointed facing up.

She continues down the odd path out, having barely broken stride.

I follow.

---Raala’s perspective---

The torch flickers, sputters… and dies…

Well… I think we at least made it past all the forks in the paths that we could’ve got lost down.

I turn and see something spine chilling but, in spite of that, reassuring…

A pair of eyes hangs in the air, about two heads above mine.

Just the whites are very dimly visible but that’s a good sign.

If I can see the monster’s eyes, it means we’re close enough to the exit for some light to be flowing here from there.

I turn my body sideways, pressing my left hand to the left wall, and walk by sliding my uninjured foot across the ground in front of my left, keeping my right hand directly in front of my face, so it doesn’t bump into any rocks that hang down from the ceiling.

Suppressing my fear of the darkness and the man looming through it behind me, a make my way along the passage like this for a few hundred breaths.

It steadily gets brighter and colder until.

I catch the briefest glimpse of a sliver of sky.

My excitement makes me careless.

I suck in a mouthful of air through my teeth as I step on a loose rock with my left toes.

Quickly controlling myself, I continue.

The entrance appears properly now, a dusky sky visible through it.

We’ve been missing since before noon… I wonder if they’ve worked out what happened to us yet?

“Alright.” comes the deep voice from behind and above me, making me jump out of my skin “Get your shoe off and lets take a look at that injury before we lose the light.”

I turn around to my now fully visible kidnapper and snarl “What makes you think there’s anything wrong with my foot and what makes you think I’d let you anywhere near it if there were!?”

“The evidence of my eyes and ears to the first… To the second, now we don’t have to keep going to make it through the cave, you need medical attention and I’m the only other person here who can give it to you, so sit down and take off your shoe!” he insists.

Scowling, I stare back up at him, expecting him to break.

When he doesn’t, I sigh.

Looking around, I find a flat, knee high rock.

I reach down and begin pulling my shoe over my foot.

I grimace as the action causes new pain to shoot out from the toes.

As soon as it’s off, I see that the second toe is crooked, bruised and there’s inflamed swelling that’s spread to the entire end of the foot.

The outlander calmly states “Alright, Raala… That’s not supposed to look like that. Well done for making it through the cave on a broken toe but we’re camping here until you can walk properly again.”

“What makes you think-!?”

“I’m the only one of us who’s able bodied right now, Raala… That’s what ‘makes me think’!” he asserts “Until you’re back to fighting fitness, I’m making the decisions and I’ve decided we’re staying here and you’re resting up until such time as you can go anywhere… We can use the time your toe is taking to knit itself back together to talk about what comes next… Now, I’m going out… You’re resting!… I’ll bring you some compacted snowballs to help to bring the swelling down for now… then I’m going to find us some food and some firewood? Do you have any requests? Anything for your foot?”

I glare at the suddenly assertive man for a breath and a half before spitting “Willow bark, sphagnum and garlic!”

He screws up his eyes in thought before saying “Alright… I know garlic… I know willow is a tree and sphagnum is a moss?… Could you describe them in enough detail to let me make a more confident identification?”

Scoffing at the uselessness of him needing help with two of the three things I asked for, I snarl “Willow’s the swishy tree that looks like it’s crying! Sphagnum’s the bushy moss that grows everywhere! Why even offer to get me things if you don’t know any of the things I might ask for!?”

Not engaging with my antagonism, he turns and, walking out of the cave, holds up his right hand, his thumb pressed against the middle joint of his sidefinger, and starts “Got it! Food…” moving his thumb to the next joint up “…firewood…” then to the bottom of his little finger, counting upwards along the joints “…garlic, swishy tree bark and bushy moss… Oh, and snowballs for right now.”

He steps from the cave and I hear him immediately turn to dig his hands into the snow.