The Night Cave was less like a hole burrowed into the side of the mountain and more like the mountain had nearly been split in half. The cave opening looked like a lightning strike, if the bolt had widened significantly where it struck the earth. The forest that had been pressing us close to the valley’s edge also gave the cave’s entrance a wide berth. Though, instead of the scenery looking like it had been blasted away from a lightning strike, it oddly looked like they were reluctant to grow near it and instead ended up in a tangled cluster at least thirty feet away. Similar to how the pine forest on the outer mountainside wouldn’t grow close to the fog.
That, in and of itself, made me interested in the cave even if I decided to ignore the fact that Tike had named it as one of the places the mountain spirit might live. Why would the unnatural trees of the inner valleys avoid the cave? What could cause the plants to behave in such away? The goddesses’ influence or something else?
I didn’t miss the way Tike shuddered and stopped just before leaving the tree line. Klus hissed at his feet. I raised my eyebrows at him. “Have you been inside before?”
He shook his head sharply even as his gaze didn’t leave the imposing cave in front of us. “No. Sometimes the others dare each to see who will go in farthest but I…I never did that.”
I immediately turned my attention on Deamar. Surely he would have done something considered foolish to prove his “courage”.
He scowled back at me before he took in the rest of the group and couldn’t help but puff out his chest. “I went all the way to where the entrance turns. No one else made it that far before they turned tail.”
I nearly rolled my eyes but stopped as Prevna’s request to stop driving wedges into the group dynamics whispered through my mind. Still, it boggled the mind how he could stand there, radiating confidence, when he was basically admitting that he had been too scared to break his eye line of the cave opening.
Sadly, Tike looked impressed by his boast.
Prevna asked, “Why do you avoid the cave?”
Tike gestured vaguely to the abrupt change in scenery from dense forest to grass meadow and the steep mountainside broken open by the cave. “Something about it doesn’t feel right. And more than few think this really is where the mountain spirit lives if she’s real—no one wants to become her next victim.”
“She’s not real,” Deamar insisted.
I gestured to the cave, “Why don’t you go in and confirm what is in there then?”
He shifted forward, a resolute expression on his face, but he faltered as soon as his foot touched the grass and I smirked at him. He looked away, fists clenched.
Dismissing him, I focused on Prevna. “Both of us or should one of us stay out here to babysit?”
We both knew that if one of us stayed it’d be her. Otherwise, when she returned it’d probably be to the vestiges of a fight. But it was also true that she had been repeatedly pressing me not to go off and do things on my own while she got left out. So it came down to the question if she was willing to abandon the boys and the Pickers she had insisted on dragging along to go explore with me.
“More eyes are less likely to miss anything important.”
Or she could insist that everyone came along and ruined the fun. I wrinkled my nose at her but she was unmoved.
Tike, thank the storms, very much was. “Y-you want us to go in there?” his face brightened as he thought of something. “I could spend the time you explore to figure out the best route to the Mountain’s Tears from here.”
Jika and Kuma had been standing off to the side since we stopped to take in the cave and neither of them looked thrilled to enter a cave where a spirit—or crazed woman—who buried men alive might make her home. Even if she wasn’t something like the spirits in the Warming Winds, it took a lot of strength or very dedicated effort to dig deep into the frozen ground and if Minhel wasn’t the errant friend we were looking for I wasn’t keen on finding out which option was the truth, either.
Then I remembered the molten rivers of rock and every other unnatural thing in these valleys. Perhaps the ground was just as unnatural as the rest and didn’t have the rock hard layer of frozen dirt under the top soil. If that was true, than burying people wouldn’t be nearly so difficult.
“I’ll go.”
My glare cut across to where Deamar was doing a poor job of putting on a brave face. “We won’t be stopping at the first corner.”
He stared back, indignant. “I’ll go.”
I took a step forward and Prevna opened her mouth to say something but I held up a hand and she stayed quiet. I pressed my point, “Prevna and I don’t need light to see—just a little trick of the goddess. It’d be a waste of time and materials to make a torch to light the way. So unless you want rely on the hope that there’ll be some glowing moss, you better be prepared to be in the dark with us. Blind. Stumbling. Perhaps a nice bit of prey for mountain spirit you don’t believe in.” I watched the horror slowly overtake his face. Then I smiled, purposefully cruel when he looked about ready to piss his pants. “Still want to come?”
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He didn’t admit that he was being an idiot or that he shouldn’t have insisted on joining us. However, I could give a point to his pride since he didn’t let his gaze drift from mine. “We’ll keep watch and if you’re not back in two hours we’ll go back to the village.”
No offers of coming in after us or even a generous wait time, but that was hardly surprising given how things had gone so far.
I glanced to the side. “Prevna?”
“Fine, we’ll go.” She took in the rest of the group. “Shout for us if something attacks and we’ll come as quick as we can if we hear you. Otherwise, don’t forget you can retreat into the trees or the cave if you need to. Decide on our next route and a few options for where we might camp tonight.”
Tike nodded, very serious in response to her instructions while Kuma and Jika shifted more of their focus to the surrounding woods. Deamar just looked put out but we both ignored him and headed for the cave.
The entrance was wide enough for at least ten people to walk in shoulder to shoulder, though it did narrow a bit the further we walked in. I made sure not to hurry as we strolled down the mostly straight path until we reached the first true corner.
At that point I looked back to where Deamar was staring after us, caught his eye, and then gently slapped the corner before purposefully stepping around the corner. I did roll my eyes at how close to the entrance it was.
The gloom in the cave immediately grew as soon as we rounded the corner and both of us were on high alert for any sign of movement. However, it seemed that Prevna had also taken turning the corner as a chance to talk without needing to be concerned with anyone’s feelings.
“I know he’s easy to poke at, but did you really need to scare everyone away?”
I crossed my arms. “None of them wanted to come and it is true that we don’t need anything to help us see. This way we don’t have to worry about them spooking at every shadow.”
She touched my arm. One moment there and the next gone again. “So you didn’t just want to get me alone in the dark?”
I didn’t stumble, didn’t even freeze though when my mind caught up with my body a few moments later I seriously wondered how I managed it. Instead, I poked her in the side and gave her an impish smile like she often gave me.
“I don’t remember saying that.”
Some emotion flickered past on her face, too fast for me discern, irritatingly enough before she gave me her familiar knowing smile. Like we both shared a secret but I couldn’t know which one she knew. “That so?”
She looked about to say something else but this time she did slow to a stop, whatever the words had been lost to imagination as she looked past me, eyes wide. “Gimley.”
I whirled, expecting to see a woman with long limbs but that wasn’t it at all.
We were surrounded by the night sky. Standing on it. The path we had been following had widened into a large cavern, impossibly round and smooth, like we had just walked into a larger than life size version of one of Shawsh’s sculptures. Except where his miniature sculptures normally depicted a landscape or something to symbolize a section of books in the nested library, this place seemed more akin to something out the imagination.
Oh, I was sure the dots and clusters of stars beneath our feet were very similar to what we would see above the mountain if we got past the fog, but rather than points of light each star was a divot of darkness. Painstakingly carved and smoothed. Even the floor seemed to have been washed a lighter color so that the little fingertip sized holes stood out better in contrast. I wasn’t sure if the difference in color was from the lack of light or somehow there were two different types of stone or someone had taken the time to paint every little star.
The true wonder was over our heads though.
Carved pine trees jutted down from the ceiling to point at our heads. And beneath their boughs were carved cooking fires—and people. Heads thrown back in laughter, smiling, other positions of excitement. Happiness. No fear of reprisal or judgment as they enjoyed their peace in the Silver Forest.
Beyond them, in one far off corner, the single spot marring the smooth sphere of the cavern, I could make out hands reaching from a pitch black hole. The sheer multitude of them monstrous but futile. There was no escaping the Ever Dark.
“What is this?” Prevna asked as she turned slowly in a circle. “Who would make this? And how?”
I didn’t point out that it was clearly a replica of the afterlife: the sky we saw, the one we hoped to one day join, and the one we feared to ever cross into. Prevna could tell that as easily as I could, so I stayed silent. There wasn’t any other good answer I could give.
My first thought was Shawsh since he made those miniatures and had apparently been invited into the goddess’s nest to carve one of Her walls. His talent could match the scene surrounding us. But when would he have been here? And how would he have reached the ceiling? Why would he, or any one else, bother to carve such a scene in this random place painstaking detail by painstaking detail? It wasn’t as if the hidden villagers were appreciating the work. They didn’t even seem to go far enough into the cave to realize what was here except for perhaps whoever had first discovered it and given it its name.
My next thought was that for some reason the goddess had created the scene as reminder for the men in the valley—that She was inescapable one way or another in death even if they couldn’t see the sky, but the whole scene seemed too…intricate for Her normal displays of power. Besides, as far as I could tell the only statues She bothered to create were of Her Beloved, and it seemed more than odd for Her to give such attention to statues of other people. Or portraying them as happy and carefree since the only thing I could think of where She had bothered to make carvings of people other than the Beloved was Flickermark’s tortured exit tunnel.
I didn’t have a third explanation unless the mountain spirit the men were so frightened of turned out to be an exemplary stone carver. Perhaps out of boredom. Or maybe this could also be an abandoned carver’s enclave, but that guess lost weight given that their focus was supposed to be on carving wood not stone and the latter seemed to be something only done on individual statues, not a whole room turned into another reality. And it brought up the same question of how they would have managed to reach the ceiling to do the carving in the first place.
We stood there taking in the room for a long while. Caught by all the detail, the wonder of the place. The overwhelming happiness of the stone people above us, so unlike the carefully contained reality we knew.
Finally, we pulled ourselves from staring at the carvings to looking for any other exits or tunnels that might lead from the cavern. At first glance the walls seemed incredibly smooth with no place for tunnels to ruin how smooth and rounded they were. But that was a lie created by the darkened chamber. When we got close to the edge of the cavern we could see that some parts of the walls were further back than others and had alcoves hidden along them.
And one alcove in particular had a question carved into its back wall.
What binds you?