Thankfully, whatever had once lived in the den we had exited through didn’t appear to live there anymore. Our night was hassle free. Of course, I wondered if something had fought and defeated the creature that had once lived in the cave. The evidence suggested that the thing was quite nasty so if it became prey for something else in the vicinity the thing that killed it had to be even more nasty. I didn’t want to meet more nasty. Perhaps I was wrong and the creature had just wandered off and died of old age somewhere. Yeah, for peace of mind let’s go with that.
Before we headed back into the mountain we wandered around until we found a small stream that allowed us to wash bat poop off and then refill our water supply. We made certain to collect our water from further upstream from where we bathed since the brook wasn’t running very swiftly. After that, we headed straight back in.
The walk back to the room we fought the grubs seemed longer this time. Before we reached the room, we prepared for combat. I didn’t know whether there would be more of the things hanging out in there and I wanted to be ready. Maybe if we had to fight the things again, this time I wouldn’t get injured. When you dream, dream big.
It was somewhat anticlimactic when we burst into the room ready for battle only to find no new opponents to battle with. I felt a strange sense of both relief and disappointment. Traversing the room took little time, and then we were in a new passage headed to parts unknown. So far, this expedition had been a bust. We hadn’t found one thing that was valuable enough to sell and unless our new five-fingered friends wanted to sleep with a colony of bats, we hadn’t found any expansion room either. As they say, though, hope springs eternal. Maybe in the next cavern we would find our pot of gold.
That day, our exploration was strangely peaceful. As a matter of fact, everything was so peaceful that the lack of conflict started putting me on edge. When you’re keyed up to fight at any moment and the fight doesn’t come, it is exhausting. We traversed passages and caverns. One had a small underground lake where pale, eyeless fish swam around eating lichen or algae or whatever pale, eyeless fish eat. I tasted the water and it was cold, clear and had a strong mineral aftertaste. It was better than what we had collected from the stream earlier in the day so we emptied out our containers and refilled them. I thought about trying to catch and eat a fish or two but ultimately decided it would be a needless digression.
When we entered areas with multiple exits, we utilized the right hand rule in the hopes that we wouldn’t become hopelessly lost and starve under the mountain. That would be an inglorious end to our expedition. Many of the passages started out easy to follow but soon lowered or narrowed to the point that they couldn’t be traversed by people of our size. Then, it was back up the passage and on to the next rightmost passage, hoping that it led somewhere. And many of them did lead somewhere, often to another cavern with even more passages splitting off from it. We started leaving trail markers, etchings on the wall, piles of stones and the like, in an attempt to mark the passages that we had taken and our way back out. After you have seen enough caverns, many of them start to look the same.
By what felt like midday, I had lost my sense of direction. I had no idea whether we were heading north or south, east or west. The paths weren’t straight and level by any means. Sometimes we had to climb a little bit to find the next exit but none of it was very technical. Hour by hour, we moved deeper into the cave system. Without the sun and witnessing the ebb and flow of nature, I lost track of time. Despite my optimism, we didn’t locate anything that looked too valuable. We did find a cavern full of quartz crystals that glittered and danced in the light of our lantern but I didn’t know whether they would be worth much. We took a few, but let’s be honest. Rocks are heavy and we were many hours away from any known exit. Even if they were worth their weight in gold, getting them out of the mountain would likely be more effort than it was worth.
It was clear that we all had enough of the day and we made our camp in that cavern for the night. Aleyda seemed entranced by the crystals. I wondered whether she had ever seen the like before. I certainly hadn’t, at least in this number. We ate dried rations and took turns keeping watch. During my watch, I measured the amount of oil we had left for the lanterns. At our current rate of consumption, we could maybe explore for one more day before we were forced to retrace our steps or rely on me as a light source. In all honesty, I was starting to become pretty damn frustrated. I felt like we were wasting time that we could have spent on doing something more profitable. Honestly, almost anything was more profitable than what we had been doing, wandering around what seemed to be a desolate and lifeless mountain.
After everyone had rested sufficiently, we move on once again. It could have been dawn, it could have been in the middle of the night. I never realized how accustomed I was to generally knowing what time it was and how uncomfortable I became when I didn’t. I felt as if I had been excised from the world, cast into an afterlife where the punishment for my sins was to wander lifeless tunnels for eternity. My companions must have felt similarly because they became more subdued. Our previous chatter with one another dwindled to nothing until all I could hear were the footfalls and breathing of my companions.
We were traversing a narrow passage, wriggling along with our packs off our backs and our arms planted at our sides, eeling our way forward. I was seriously considering turning around. Out of my companions, I was the largest and was starting to become very concerned about getting stuck. Aleyda was having less trouble than I was, although from time to time I could hear here armor scrape against the rock. Bowen was nearly my height but of slighter build, so he wasn’t having as much of a problem either.
I had just opened my mouth to sound the retreat when Aleyda spoke.
“I think I see light up ahead,” she said.
Light! Light would be great. That would mean there might be a way out and we could retrace our steps to the camp on the outside of the mountain instead of the inside. Sure, the outside seemed like it was the more dangerous option but I would be willing if I could feel the breeze caress my cheek or the sun warming my skin. All previous thoughts of retreat vanished from my mind as I forced myself through a particularly narrow spot, losing a little skin in the process. We continued to press our way forward until we burst out into a cavern from a crack in the wall. It seemed almost like a hallway, much longer than it was wide. We entered through one of the side walls and the opposite side of the cavern was only ten or fifteen feet away.
Just as Aleyda had said, there was light. But instead of coming from one of the sides of the cavern, it was filtering down from the ceiling. That seemed very odd to me, so I moved to investigate. What I saw was quite shocking. Three narrow shafts allowed diffuse light to enter the room. The shocking thing wasn’t the light, it was the fact that the shafts did not appear to be natural. Instead of cracks or crevices, the light was coming from what looked to be regularly sized, crudely worked stone shafts.
“That’s odd,” I said out loud. “Those shafts don’t look natural.”
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“Do you think we’ve wandered far enough to find ourselves in one of the other company’s bases?” Bowen asked. “If so and we are discovered, that would be bad. Really bad.”
I glanced around the floor looking for tracks or any signs that the passage was well trafficked. I didn’t see any. The floor of the cavern looked like every other cavern we had passed through.
“I don’t see any signs that this tunnel is often traveled,” I said. “And I don’t know how we could have wandered far enough to get get anywhere close to town. I think something else is going on here. Look how faint the light coming from the shafts is. I think they might be covered by vegetation or something. I wouldn’t know why someone would go through all of the trouble to mine out these light or air sources and then not keep them clear enough to serve their intended purposes. What we have here is a mystery.”
“I don’t like mysteries,” Aleyda said.
“Well, we’re running out of oil for the lanterns,” I replied. “I think we need to keep exploring unless you want to try to rely on me as a light source.”
“Which way do we go?” Bowen asked. “Right or left?”
“I don’t see any reason to deviate from the plan,” I said. “We’ve been going right so far. Let’s keep doing what got us here.”
We turned and headed down the tunnel to our right. While we were walking, I didn’t see any other exits from the tunnel. The first shafts that we encountered weren’t the only ones. At somewhat regular intervals, we encountered more. Some, but not all of them had light filtering through them, however. I assumed that they had been blocked by the passage of time. This was clearly not new construction.
After we had walked for ten minutes or so, I started seeing more light. It wasn’t coming from the ceiling of the tunnel, though. It was coming from the tunnel itself. We walked towards it, our eyes squinting against its intensity. After spending so much time wandering in the dark with the light of a single lantern to illuminate our way, sunlight was damn bright.
Finally, we came to the end of the tunnel. We found ourselves on a high, rocky shelf on what I presumed to be the west side of the island. Below us, the ocean lapped against the shore in a fairly large yet secluded cove. On one side of the shelf, I saw what looked to be that start of a fairly eroded, wide switchback path that had been almost completely overtaken by trees and brush.
“Yeah, this is not newly constructed,” I said. “This has obviously been here for awhile. Likely an awfully long time.”
“I thought that this island was newly discovered,” Aleyda said.
“What is newly discovered can be lost and discovered again, I guess,” I replied.
“Didn’t you tell us a story about five-fingered people invading from the sea?” Bowen asked.
“Yeah, I did. Why?”
“Where did those people come from?”
“Now that’s a damn good question,” I said. “Do you think they came from here?”
“Well, there are a lot of our people appearing on this island right now,” he said. “What if this shit runs in cycles? What if the last cycle was prior to that invasion? In order to build ships and other equipment for invasion, there would have to be some sort of base. What if this was their base?”
“That’s a lot of what ifs,” I responded. “But based upon the age of the things we have seen so far, it’s not completely farfetched.”
Now, I was getting excited. What if Bowen was right? Had the five-fingered invaders managed to pull themselves together here on the island and eke out an existence with some trappings of civilization? If so, how long had they built here? How long had they bided their time until they could make a play for power? How did they even know the continent existed? Had they built ships and sent them out as scouts? Were there the ancient remains of a shipyard in the cove below us?
“Which way do you want to explore?” I asked. “Do you want to go down to the cove and look for evidence there, or do we want to head back into the mountain?”
“That’s a long way down,” Bowen said. “I say we see what secrets the other end of the passage holds.
I tried to keep the expression off of my face, but inside I was exulting. That’s what I wanted to do as well. If there was any evidence to support Bowen’s theory, it would be better preserved deeper within the mountain, untouched by the ravages of the seasons.
“Aleyda, what’s your opinion?” I asked her.
“The mountain,” she said. “Definitely the mountain.”
“How are you both holding up as far as your stamina?” I asked.
“I could rest,” Bowen admitted. “Wandering around on edge all the time is draining.”
“Alright, let’s make camp just inside the tunnel,” I said. “Tomorrow, we will see whatever there is to see. Don’t get your hopes up too much. It might just be another day of fruitless wandering.”
“I don’t think it will be,” Aleyda said. “I think we just discovered something important.”
“Honestly, I do as well,” I said. “Whether Bowen is right or wrong, it is pretty clear that somebody made their home here at some point. And I don’t think that it was just for a little while. The amount of work to do the things we have seen so far would take many people working hard for quite some time. No matter what we find, I am sure it will be interesting.”
It was the middle of the afternoon when we made our way out of the cave into the sunlight. We spent the rest of the day resting. I am sure that Caider would have cursed us for our indolence while remaining completely oblivious of his own. When darkness encroached, we pulled back into the cave a little bit. Surprisingly, we didn’t hear things crashing around in the forest while we relaxed. Perhaps the slope was too steep or there was little to eat on this side of the island.
As I was drifting off to sleep I couldn’t help but think about the implications. If there were living quarters deeper in the mountain, we could hide our people there. Trying to produce enough food might be a challenge but I was certain that there would be things that could be eaten from the ocean, or perhaps there were other passages nearby that led to more fruitful places on the island. What were the odds that someone would stumble upon the five-fingered humans during the few months it took us to arrange rescue? Honestly, what were the odds we would find this place to begin with? It was almost like something or someone had its fingers on the scales, pushing us here, pushing us forward.
Finally, I managed to drift off to sleep. I had many strange dreams but I couldn’t remember any of them once I awoke to take my guard shift. Somehow, I had managed to be assigned to the last shift but I can’t say that I was fully rested. I stood at the mouth of the cavern watching the encroaching dawn. If one could ignore the deadly local wildlife, this place was beautiful, almost idyllic.
Soon, I heard movement in the passage behind me. Looking back, I noticed that both Aleyda and Bowen were awake and coming to join me.
“Since we’re all awake, we might as well head back in,” I said.