“The encounter is still closing with us.” Anne looked around, arrow held to her longbow, although it was undrawn; they were moving quickly but efficiently up the foot of the mountain, loosely grouped in a combat formation, with Thomas and Anne in the front, Norris and Madelaine in the center, and Arias trailing behind them a ways, her own shortbow ready.

It had begun that morning; Anne's ability to control what they ran into had, according to her, failed. Days of sedate travel had turned, in the final leg of the journey, into a mad rush to make it to the cave; they had not run, but rather Anne had set a brisk walk that blurred the line into a jog. Norris struggled the most to keep up; Thomas found himself surprised to not be in that position.

Now, as the mountain rose over them, and grass began to give way to pebbles and rocks, the exhaustion of hours of travel under the certainty of threat had given way to a moment of hope, that they would make it to the cave before whatever it was that Anne could somehow sense caught up with them. Thomas had begun to breathe more easily, until he'd noticed Anne's increasingly grim expression. And then he'd asked.

They had spent those hours watching for a threat that never arrived; his eyes burned, his neck ached. Arias whistled, pointed. Thomas looked, but could not see what she pointed at; Anne, however, gave a curt nod, and began a dash up the slope, the others a moment slower in following her. Thomas immediately fell forward, pebbles sliding underfoot; it wasn't far to fall, owing to the steep gradient of the slope. He rose, and started up again. He wasn't sure if they were running from something, or running to something, but he ran, anxious and alert.

He nearly ran into a stone wall as he crested a small rise; Anne waited beside a dark opening, a crevice between two boulders that seemed to hold the mountain over them. A small line of pebbles ran down from the crevice to the side; a dry ditch, where water might overflow from within. Madelaine arrived beside him, followed by Norris. Arias came up only slowly, her attention behind them.

Their small group looked down the mountain; Anchor, in the distance, looked like a tiny mushroom. The hills looked flat. Countless tiny streams, some wet but most dry, ran down amidst the hills, joining and growing, until they vanished in the blue-gray fog of distance itself. The view was beautiful, but his eyes drifted back down, searching the hills and valleys below them for their pursuers. Nothing. He turned, to join Anne in searching the slopes above them. Nothing in that direction as well.

A hiss, and he turned; Norris was following Arias' pointed finger, straight up into the sky. Thomas looked, and it took him a moment to figure out what they were looking at. A bird? It looked like a black vulture. He looked at Anne, who was also watching the bird, the color drained from her face.

“What's with the bird?” Madelaine shared Thomas' confusion at their reaction. Norris began moving into the cave, followed closely by Arias. Anne moved more slowly, looking to Madelaine.

“That bird is a roc. Of the dangers in the mountain, it is exceeded only by strix, and the strix would be satisfied with one of us.” Anne hesitated, attention raising to the shadow once more. “That bird could eat all of us a dozen times over.” Thomas blinked, looking back up at the roc.

“How large is it?” How high up was it?

“Its wingspan is about the width of Piketown.” Oh.

Oh shit. They made their way into the cave, where Norris was lighting one gray torch from another, and passing it to Arias; the flames flickered in a breeze, which smelled of earth and rock. Thomas accepted the next torch, but turned, staring at the entrance.

“Anne? Is the encounter … ?”

“Still approaching.” She was the last in, gaze directed upward until the last possible moment. The flickering light of the torch flames made her expression all the darker, as she looked around at the group. “I don't think it's the roc. If it wasn't hunting us, I should have been able to shift it away; if it was hunting us, it has been doing so all day, and it had no reason to wait so long. Weapons out. I begin to suspect that the encounter cannot be avoided simply because it is our destination.” Thomas turned, looking even as Arias, swapping her bow out for a rapier, started into the shadows of the cave, her torch banishing them.

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“So what kind of thing might we encounter in here?” Thomas found himself following behind Arias, the others trailing after. His voice echoed oddly in the narrow crevice he walked down, feet crunching on the pebbles of the dry stream bed underfoot; they were moving uphill.

“Elementals.” Norris' reply was dry and calm, if very quiet, echoing emptily. “Insects. Undead. Husks.” A hesitation; his voice carried a note of … something. “Offworlders.”

“Offworlders? Like us? We're not monsters, Admiral Norris.” Madelaine sounded offended. Maybe. The echoes made everything sound odd.

“Not like you.” Anne, now, speaking very softly, her voice barely carrying. “Offworlders is a general term for three different groups of creature which are vulnerable to void magics, and who share in common an origin in the substrate; they are ideals made flesh. The phagii are perhaps the most common. They are … hunger, idealized. Mouths that open to nowhere, consuming the concepts that make up reality itself; for instance, there are luciphagos, that eat the light, or erephagos, that eat darkness itself. The light and shadow they leave behind is … less than substantial.

“The sapia are a variety of human faults, distinctly human, for they are faults in a rational and reasoning process. The centisapien, for instance, resembles nothing so much as a centipede made out of a human spine, with fingers for legs, ending in a mostly human head, save for the pincers.” Thomas almost stopped walking at that description. The fuck? “They represent an idealized form of greed, of hoarding.” How did that even make sense? “Then we have the bestia.

“They are idealized primal states. The siresquid is … ” There was a pause, while Thomas processed the name. Anne cleared her throat, then continued. “Well, it is an idealized form of lust.” Thomas nearly stopped in shock, at her skipping past the detailed description, before he realized Anne was talking to Madelaine and not him.

“What do ideals have to do with it?” Madelaine demanded after her own pause; Thomas' mind was full of guesswork images from the name, and he wondered what she might imagine.

“That's what the substrate is. Ideals. Complex concepts.” Norris answered in turn. “Beneath - ”

“Let's be quiet.” Anne interjected, as the volume of their conversation had begun to drift back to conversational levels. She continued after a second, the sound of pebbles under their feet loud by comparison, “We can talk about it later, Madelaine.” She got a quiet huff in reply.

The crevice widened as they moved into it, and Thomas found himself straightening back up; he had hunched without even realizing it as the walls and ceiling had moved in towards them. In the quiet, he became aware of a gentle breeze, blowing into them from ahead; it was cool and wet. They kept walking single file, even after the walls had widened enough for them to walk three astride, always uphill.

The scent of rock gradually gave way to another smell, which Thomas couldn't quite place. Arias abruptly raised a hand, causing them all to stop – and then pointed up. Thomas followed her gesture, looking up into the dark shadows that now rose above them, the ceiling having – oh. Oh.

Yellow-green lights, like tiny stars, dotted the ceiling overhead. His eyes swept across them, more coming into view every second, as his eyes adjusted from the brightness of the flames. They were countless, endless; above them was a river of stars.

“Beautiful.” Madelaine's voice, loud. Anne didn't shush her; he could hear the others as they took in deep breaths of their own. It was beautiful.

Their journey into the cavern continued under these new stars; the scent became clearer as they walked; rotting fish. Well, not quite rotting fish, but rather that seaside smell that wasn't quite not rotting fish, either, but rather an almost inoffensive version of the same. Their upward trek turned flat, and the pebbles began to splash under the boots of the others; Thomas' bare feet did not make so much noise, but he was acutely aware of the slimy texture of the stones, and the way they stopped moving so much. It was mildly unpleasant.

The lights opened up into vast constellations, a dark sky of beautiful little lights, now distant and small. And the corner they turned next doubled the sight, stars disappearing into a distant horizon, reflected on a lake that seemed to stretch into infinity, marked only by the tiny lights fading into a milky-green haze in the distance.

It was as Thomas stopped once more to stare in awe, of course, that the attack came.