It was only when Jonathan got up to leave that he saw the light. From the angle he’d come in from it was entirely invisible, but when he looked over to the far side of the cavern to investigate the mushrooms, he noticed it. His first thought was that he was imagining things, but when he covered his dimly glowing light stone it was the only thing he could see, and as he moved his body from left to right he could see an interposing stalagmite blocking part of the light with its silhouette.
He tried not to get his hopes up, but after that it was hard. He scooped up his meager possessions and scampered across the uneven cave surface as quick as he could as he wove between the mushrooms towards whatever crack was letting the light in. It made sense, he supposed. After all - he’d been walking for days - who was to say he wasn’t already at the surface? Maybe he’d been worried about nothing, Jonathan thought with a smile, as he pushed another mushroom cap out of the way.
This place was obviously delicate, so he tried not to break the moist, flexible stems that were almost as tall as he was sometimes, but sometimes the clusters were so dense that he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t even halfway through the tiny forest before he was coughing, and by the time he got to the other side, he was covered in a fine black dust that must have been on the mushrooms.
It was gross, but there was nothing he could do. He would just have to wash himself in a stream when he got to the surface. It took a second, but eventually that thought brought him to a stop as he continued to navigate through the winding tunnel towards the light. He was going to be on the surface soon. Not in a week or a day, but in perhaps minutes. He would get to feel the sun on his face and the wind in his hair. He wouldn’t just be technically free like he was now. He’d actually be free.
He wasn’t sure what he’d do from there, but he couldn’t be too far from Dalmarin. He was sure there were still friends of his father there that would shelter him, and he would get to see Claire.
He quickly shook his head to clear that thought before it made his heart ache. Maybe he wasn’t close enough to Dalmarin for him to get his hopes up like that. Even if that was the case, and he’d somehow gotten further afield, then he could make for one of his sisters’ estates outside Lloren. Brandwyn lived somewhere near Parvin’s Cross and Sarah was on the coast just past Keller’s Bay. Because they were both technically in someone else's family, or clan, after marriage they’d both been spared the root-and-branch judgement against the Shaw family. Despite that, he was sure that one of them would shelter him and help him clear the family name.
Jonathan was so fixated on his thoughts about what he should do next and the logistics of what he would do once he’d scrambled his way up to the sunlight that when he finally got to the light, he wasn’t paying as much attention as he should. He just kept pushing ahead. It was only when the patch of light had grown so large that it was basically on all sides of him that he came to a stop and looked around. It wasn’t a crack. It wasn’t even sunlight. The walls themselves were glowing.
Dumbly, he reached out to the wall and touched it. “What in the hells is this?” he asked, as his hand stroked the soft carpet of luminescent moss that clung to the walls and the ceiling of the tunnel ahead. It wasn’t a way out. It was a trick!
“Damn it,” Jonathan yelled out in frustration as he punched the wall, only to yelp in pain as his knuckles impacted the stone behind it. It wasn’t nearly as soft as it looked.
“I was so close,” he sighed. “Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. Nothing ever is.”
He sat there for a few minutes in self-pity, idly rubbing his hand until it stopped hurting, then he just pressed his hands against his eyes to block out the terrible disappointment that was the light. He was more mad at himself than anything, though. He was the one that had thought that light equaled surface. No dwarf had ever told him that was the case.
Jonathan might have sat there for an hour telling himself how stupid he was, but a wave of nausea hit him. He tried to ignore it, and rose to his feet, but moments later he doubled over and vomited everything he’d eaten recently back out. It was a miserable experience, and it gave him time to reflect on whether or not he hadn’t cooked the fish through completely when he’d steamed them.
Even thinking that was tough. His mind felt sluggish and scattered. It was like he was drunk, but it couldn’t be that. He’d had plenty of water yesterday, and it had been fine, whereas he hadn’t even had a sip in hours today. When he looked up, the world had transformed. He was still in the same tunnel, and it was still covered in patchy carpets of green, gray moss. Instead of the pale white light it had emitted before, it was glowing a vibrant emerald green. It was a beautiful sight, and looking down the tunnel it no longer seemed to be a dingy moss strewn stream, but a trickle of clean blue water, lit on all sides by the moss that was all around it.
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How could Jonathan resist such a view?
He’d originally planned on heading back to the rail tunnel and following the tracks. After all, they definitely went somewhere - even if it was somewhere far away. Many of these tunnels went nowhere, and even if he had the stream here, he could still end up hopelessly lost or trapped up ahead.
Somehow, though, the magical view spurred him onwards. This was something special, and he would be a fool to ignore it. So he began to follow the winding tunnel, and the farther he went, the more moss there was and the smaller the route became. It felt like it went on forever. Jonathan couldn’t begin to guess how long he’d been crawling down the shrinking tunnel, but when he looked behind him, it seemed to go forever in that direction too.
He was lost in that view. Suddenly he couldn’t tell which way he’d come from, and which way he was going. No matter which way he chose at this point, it felt like both of them were wrong. Like they were moving and shrinking, even though that should be impossible.
Jonathan’s breath caught in his throat as he realized that maybe it wasn’t impossible. Maybe this wasn’t a tunnel at all. Maybe it was some sort of giant underground creature, and he’d been crawling ever deeper into its gullet. The thought filled him with dread, and he turned around and started crawling back the way he came. Or, at least, he thought it was the way he came. He was so far down its throat that he could no longer say for sure.
Jonathan struggled as the walls started to close in on him. He wasn’t surrounded by the dark he’d dwelled in for so long. He was surrounded by the light as he felt himself being dragged down the stream of bile that was flowing down this thing's constricting throat. Soon enough, he was struggling and screaming as he tried to fight. He tried to reach for his knife, but he was too weak, and the bag might have been a thousand miles away. He reached for his fire instead, but even that felt impossible to grasp. In the strange drunken haze he found himself, it was utterly impossible to focus.
After that he had trouble breathing, like the air had suddenly left the tunnel, but that disappeared as soon as another wave of nausea hit him, along with the rest of his consciousness, or at least he thought it did. It was impossible to say. There were some moments he was still pinned in that glowing tunnel struggling to breathe, but sometimes he managed to escape, and each time it took him to a different place. Once he crawled right back into the sewers of the powder mill, and was forced to gather stone salts all over again like he’d never bothered to escape in the first place.
Another time, the tunnel led to the train engine that was pinned in the collapse his escape had caused. That time there was no way out. There was no clever way to slip out of the window and into the tunnel beyond. He was just trapped as the weight of the rocks grew heavier and heavier, and the engine’s passenger compartment grew smaller and smaller. In the end, he woke up back in the accursed tunnel before he could be suffocated by the twin weights of his guilt and the endless miles of earth above him, but it was a close thing.
It was only after that, that he found his father. He was waiting for him when he returned to the tunnel. Jonathan tried to cry out to Lord Shaw as he stood over his pitiful son with a look of embarrassment on his face. Somehow the tunnel had grown wider, and a bit dimmer. It looked almost like it had at the beginning, before the creature had swallowed him.
“Father, please!” Jonathan yelled as the ghostly man turned and started to walk away down the tunnel. His father’s spirit ignored him, though. He would clearly rather return to the underworld than see his weak and dishonored son laying there.
Jonathan staggered to his feet and began to chase after the man. He found the glow stone in his hand, and was surprised to remember that it had always been there. It was brighter now. It shone like a beacon as Jonathan chased his father. All he wanted to do was apologize for letting the man down so completely and utterly but he wouldn’t even get that chance.
“I’m sorry father!” Jonathan yellowed as he stopped running long enough to cup his hands to his mouth. “I’m sorry I didn’t avenge you, but I will. I promise I will! On my life…”
Jonathan didn’t stop talking when his father faded into the darkness, but he did when he heard the noise of something moving in the darkness. Rats? Goblins? He covered his light, plunging himself into the perfect darkness that was the only way to hide, as he realized it was neither of those things. It was worse than that. This deep beneath the earth he must have followed his father into the netherworld, of at least the outskirts of Pandemian, where the unquiet spirits who could not afford to pay the ferryman lingered searching for something they could trade for a coin or two.
He stopped breathing and covered his mouth with his free hand as he realized that the shades would quickly tear him to pieces just for a scrap of his warmth or a taste of his blood. It took several long seconds of standing there like that, before he could force his way past his abject fear to move again. He was so blind and still that he might as well not exist any longer, but for the moment he did, so he began to back up, trying to retrace his steps back out of the afterlife, and back to the mortal world he’d come from.
In the end, he could only manage that for a few minutes. He managed to find the stream again by its sound, but it had become a larger river, so he walked carefully along it as he sought to find the slender stream he had followed here. Eventually the weight of his dread became a burden that was too large to bear, so he found a crevice just large enough to hide himself in, and he crawled as deep as he could go. He’d meant it as a defensive move, but soon enough he passed out as whatever terrible sickness gripped him took its toll.