7. Down in the Underground

After a near-disastrous crash in the dodecahedron transport pod, the refugees spent a quiet night on the shores of an underground lake. With resources running low, the group’s only hope is to find a way out of the underground.
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The caravan gathered the next morning to prepare and eat breakfast. The meagre bowl of cooked grain left no one satisfied. Fureva-Yung thought she had the solution, walking the beach, chasing crabs. She’d collected a dozen of them before heading back to the group, her fur stained blue and glowing from various crab attacks. The now-dead crustaceans were even less appealing, their shell cracked and oozing.
 
Marius, never one to back down from a challenge, put his mind to the task. Soon he was putting on a show as he twirled knives and extracted white flesh from unappealing shells. He seasoned them as best he could with the caravan’s stores and presented Crab Tartar to the audience to many small applauds. The end when it came started slowly. A spark from one of the bodies arched to another nearby crab. That spark grew and jumped to two more bodies laying ready for Marius’ attention. These two quickly arched to six more, and the charge increased. Marius’ danger sense had him ducking for cover as electricity arced across his two blades before the remaining crab exploded, showering everyone present in raw crab.
 
Nox looked up from the water’s edge after testing the underground water source for quality. She was glad she had not wanted any crab as the caravan members started picking sticky shells from their hair and clothes. A few hardy souls, including Marius himself, did try the Crab Tartar and found it very palatable, with a bit of electrical zing at the finish.
“What was that about?” Marius asked the universe in general.
They do that, replied Nox matter of factly, standing back from the mess.
“Hey kid, do your thing!” He said, holding up a crab that had survived the destruction.
Their icky, She stepped back. Just the thought of the one last night climbing her back sent off shivers.
“You don’t have to hold it. Here,” He thrust it forward, and Nox’s eyes danced between his expression of mild frustration and the squashed crab.
 
She scanned the crab found they did have an organ in its body that collected and stored electrical energy. With that energy, they could use the cyphers they found and cemented to their shells. She had to admit it was a fascinating step life had taken in this forgotten cave of crystal.
They do that, she shrugged and walked off to help Jaden and others prepare the caravan for travel.
 
The caravan slowly pulled itself together to prepare for the next leg of their adventure. Having washed the last of the dead crab off his hands, Marius looked out over the pond. He couldn’t help but wonder what treasures hid under those placid black waters. What discoveries would go unclaimed and unknown if, as it looked likely, the caravan just walked up the path and left?
“What do you think, Furry? Should we have a little look in the pond and see what there is to find?” He asked out loud of his crab crunching companion.
 
Fureva-Yung looked out over the pool, the waves from Marius’ washing already lost in the darkness. She knew she could hold her breath for a long time, and her big size meant she was not bothered by the cold overly much. Her eyes were keen, so she saw more than most, and she was strong and could swim far if she had to.
After much thought, she replied, Big things live in water.
 
The caravan moved on, up the path, and into the passage leaving the pool behind. The way was dark. People gathered around the few points of light strung along with the caravan. Jaden used her spear to guide the way, with Marius and Fureva-Yung close behind. Fureva-Yung found her eyes drawn continually to the now dark tattoo on her left arm. It had been there for as long as she could remember, even longer. In all that time, one spot had given off a soft blue light. Now it was gone, and it made her wonder if leaving that little glowing light behind was a sign she was heading in the wrong direction.
 
“You know, I have a theory about that tattoo of yours,” Marius said, having noticed Fureva-Yung thoughtful glances, “I think it’s a giant transport network, all made up of those black pods on rails.”
Fureva-Yung’s eyes flicked from her tattoo to Marius, trying to work out which in this situation did not belong.
I think not, She said solemnly, It is very tiny, and we are not travelling my arm.
“Are you sure? I dreamt I was a butterfly. Couldn’t we be dreaming this?”
My eyes are very good. I would see us, She peered closely at the tattoo on her arm, and not seeing anything to show they were travelling there and felt sure she was correct.
 
Nox was further back in the caravan, near a lantern attached to one of the platforms. Here Temila, along with Ekarin Ghan and Willara Taven, walked and chatted about everything and nothing. Nox had never been part of a group of women before, and initially, she found her inclusion touching. She and Jaden had not…belonged in Cerelon. Now, with expected social behaviours turned on their heads, Nox found herself part of a larger community of women…albeit only three other women.
 
Unfortunately, most of what they thought was dull compared to the insatiable curiosity of Marius, the hard-earned wisdom of Jaden or the unexpected insights of Fureva-Yung. Nox found her thought drifting to what she could see of the natural surroundings, the rock that made up the tunnel they were now travelling. It was nearly all limestone. Occasionally the light picked up fossil shells and other hard-bodied creatures, the remains of an ancient ocean. The rock was smooth, only occasionally broken by the movement of the earth. She supposed that the passage had been eroded by an underground stream sometime in the distant past, maybe contributing to the underground lake. Since then, the water table had dropped and left the passage. Ancient and unyielding, the rock assured Nox that not everything was as unstable and fleeting as their lives seem to have become. It was then that the whole cavern shook.
 
At the head of the line, Jaden swung the glowing spear around as, at first, they could feel and then hear the rumbling from deep below. Suddenly the smooth rock of the passage broke upwards as a foot long spear of crystal thrust through. As quickly as the sound and vibration started, it ceased and no more crystal formed. The caravan picked their way around the new obstacle and continued.
 
Not long after, the passage started sloping up upwards steeply, and the Aneen complained as their labour became more difficult. More crystals were seen in the walls, hanging like stalactites from the ceiling or breaking through the ground. In the lead, Fureva-Yung and Jaden were suddenly aware of voices whispering in their minds. The voices were unintelligible. Only the tone of vague anger and maliciousness was discernable.
Nox, I hear more voices in my head, Fureva-Yung thought, the big woman nervous about what she couldn’t see or touch.
 
Listening in over the telepathic network, Nox now disregarded the gossip of the three women entirely for the voices vaguely threatening tones. Intelligent minds that used telepathy as she did? Without a word, she quickened her pace and left the chattering ladies for whatever was happening ahead. Marius was also in the lead with Jaden and Fureva-Yung when Nox arrived. His head cocked to one side looked strangely cute as the three of them listened to the voices. Nox quickly skittered past and joined Jaden, who was waving her up, “Can you tell what it is?”
Reaching out to connect with the voices, she found a group of minds linked together much as she, Jaden, Fureva-Yung and Marius were. Under the profoundly unpleasant feeling the voices projected, Nox could feel Jaden’s hand on her shoulder, her warm and steady link as always.
“Project calm, as you did with the Aneen. Let them know we mean no harm,”
 
Nox nodded and did as she was told. She slowed her breathing and thought of the pool waves, for her a calming and gentle image. The response was immediate and violent.
 
Confusion, ALIEN, unknown, DISTURBING…HATE HATE HATE…
For the others, the voices rose, buzzing like disturbed bees. Fureva-Yung charged into the dark as a whirring sound started behind the anger of the voices. A rock flew invisibly out of the darkness and smacked Nox in the forehead, and Fureva-Yung almost stumbled into a small hunched figure waiting with a blade in its hand. Fureva-Yung’s chain whipped up and caught the creature whose chittering cries drew others from the shadows.
 
“Go back to the caravan, Nox,” Jaden advised as she and Marius ran up to support Fureva-Yung.
To the darkness around them, she called in her best caravaner voice, “You attacked first. Not friendly!”
“Come on guys, can’t we talk this out?” Marius added his more conciliatory tone. His cries bounced and echoed unheeded down the passage.
 
Three of the small hunched creatures slunk out of the dark around Fureva-Yung. One also had a serrated blade, the other two were swinging weighted slings above their heads. As they let go, rocks sailed past Fureva-Yung on a collision course with Jaden and Marius. The second bladed creature leapt out at Fureva-Yung. The two rocks missed their marks, Jaden dodging hers and Marius parrying his aside with the flat of his short sword.
 
Confident in the noise of battle hiding her, Nox crept up. In the glow of Jaden’s spear, she now saw the creatures as Fureva-Yung brought her chain down on the first and smashed it into the dust of the passage. Marius and Jaden engage the two with the slings. Though small, the creatures were fast and for a long time they dodged and sidestepped the caravaners’ attacks. Marius muttered good-naturedly to himself as he finally made contact with the one on him. Fureva-Yung turned just in time as the last of the creatures struck out at her. She brushed it aside, aware of how close she had come to being skewered.
 
The voices, now one less, became more insistent, more distracting to the caravaners. Nox, in particular, had a hard time focussing on anything under the violent roaring of the voices in her mind. With one clear thought, she reached out with the scintillating energy she’d seen in the lab upstairs. The energy wrapped around the one on Jaden and froze the creature in place.
Jaden looked around and spotted the poorly hidden Nox just behind.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Jaden said as the girl shrank back from her gaze. Sighing, Jaden pulled her spear back to make a killing blow against the creature.
You can’t hurt it, Nox’s voice came through the roar of violence and hate in Jaden’s mind, It’s not really there.
 
Fureva-Yung allowed her chain to swing around, keeping the momentum moving. The end of the chain hummed through the air and smacked the second creature. Its head disappeared in a spray of black. Fureva-Yung was now free to help. The creatures on Marius and Jaden had also dropped their slings and produced rough serrated blades of rusty iron. Now that Jaden’s opponent was frozen in place, only Marius and his adversary circled each other. Though there was only one voice whispering unrecognisable horrors into their minds, the effect was no less intense, and Marius’s attacks failed as his focus drifted.
 
The small trickle of blood from her cut on her forehead forgotten, Nox curled up in a ball beside the stone wall of the passage. The voice was all she could hear, see and think of.
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She screamed back at the voice, unable to match it in its intensity of hate and violence.
You are hurting my brain, Nox! Fureva-Yung called through the link as she swung out and missed the last aggressor. She and Marius continued to struggle against the mental onslaught, missing the creature as it continued to dodge their attacks. Jaden, her senses clearer, struck out and clipped the creature as it, in turn, hit Marius.
“I’m trying not to hurt you, dude!” Marius pleaded, “Put down your sword!”
 
Fureva-Yung’s words made it through the interference to Nox, and she quickly stopped her screaming. Seeing her friends still engaged with the last creature, Nox drew on her Hedge Magic and created a flash of bright light. Small and undirected, it still startled the creature for a moment, long enough for Jaden to bring her spear around and pin the creature to the ground. Suddenly the voice stopped, and the group were left listening to their own gasping and sighs of relief.
 
Now that the threat was past, Furea-Yung turned her attention to the creature still held in stasis by Nox’s energy field. She tried to grab the creature but found it as insubstantial as the scintillating energy.
I remembered the energy from the lab, Nox explained the sole quiet voice in all their minds, I figured that if it could be used to go places, then it could be used to…not go places…maybe all places at once. Understand?
“Not at all,” Marius replied as he and Jaden circled the creature, their weapons ready. Fureva-Yung tried pushing the creature and was frustrated when her hands went straight through.
“Furry, get ready, and Nox will release the creature for you to grab,” Marius suggested, and Fureva-Yung nodded, instructions she could understand. She placed her hands as close as she could against the energy field around the beings neck and waited.
“Hey, kids? Do you think you could try reading their minds? Find out what they’re about?”
 
Nox nodded. She’d never tried to read anyone’s mind before. As she released the energy field the voices returned, Fureva-Yung caught the creature around the neck, holding it fast as Nox opened her mind to the creature. All Nox could sense was the voice and now the full intent behind it. A xenophobic hatred of anything not them. A homicidal mind bent on nothing but hating and killing, full of fear and disgust for anything different from itself.
Kill! Kill! Kill!It spoke to Nox and the anger and violence were her own. Her small blade appeared in her hand and lashed out at Fureva-Yung. Ready for attack from all quarters, Fureava-Yung saw the movement and gently brushed it aside as Marius thrust his sword through the creature, and the voice stopped for good.
 
The anger quickly dissipated and Nox was confused then horrified as she saw her knife and Fureva-Yung stare.
I… Tears burst from Nox’s eyes as the knife dropped from her numb fingers.
“What? What did you find out?” Marius asked
Nothing good, all horror and hate and killing and… Nox ran out of words to describe the creature’s thoughts.
“The world well shot of them, I say,” Jaden said and went searching for the creatures’ home.
“You couldn’t work out what they wanted? Anything?” Marius asked again, hoping for a different outcome.
Nox shook her head in reply, taking a moment to take a mental breath, Just… hate.
 
Now that the voices were gone, everyone present was aware of a soft purring, deep almost out of human hearing. Like waves or the rolling of thunder in the far distance, it swept through the group to nearly disappear only to return seconds later. Marius moved around the group until he found the source, Fureva-Yung herself.
“You know, if I hold my ear up to you, I can almost hear the sea,” Marius joked. Fureva-Yung shrugged her shoulders, once more confused by her own mysteries. It was the first sound that anyone had heard from Frueva-Yung. After the violence of the past few minutes, the sound was soothing. Without knowing it, Nox started swaying to the rhythm, and Marius set his gait to the sound as they went in search of Jaden.
 
Jaden, in the meantime, had found where the creatures had been living. A small hole in the crystal-lined walls filled with scraps of cloth, dried fungus and other scavenged items. Among the refuse piles, she found a cypher, a tiny robot spider that made silk as strong as steel cabling. On the walls, she found scratches that Marius recognised as a written language of sorts. As his curious mind made sense of the scratchings, he confirmed them to be the same sort of mad ramblings of the whispers.
 
A huge crystal thrust up through the ground at the back of the small cave, taking up much of the available space. Trapped halfway through the crystal was an egg-shaped capsule, translucent and red. Just recognisable inside the capsule was a tiny silhouette of a humanoid in the foetal position. It was evident that this tiny group had thought of the capsule and its inhabitant as some sort of god but the small offerings and carvings.
“Most of these writings are full of hate, but here there is only reverence for the thing in the bulb,” Marius studied the capsule and its capturing crystal. At some time in the past, it seemed the capsule had linked to other technology. A cable snaked out of the capsule and out the back of the crystal. Trapped behind the tough crystal matrix, there was no way to reach it.
 
Nox looked at the thing inside the crystal. After the near-disaster of reading the creature’s mind, she was hesitant. This thing was trapped, it did not whisper, and it may have been human at one time. She reached out to listen.
There’s no mind there, She said after a few moments and left disappointed. There was nothing for her there.
 
“Leave it alone,” Jaden said out loud as her eyes scanned the capsule and cables. In her mind, she shared her interest with Nox, who had claimed one of the slings and was now collecting small sharp crystals.
Yeah, really interesting. Dead though. No mind. Nox replied absentmindedly.
Fureva-Yung had other ideas. Reaching into the cave, the body of the last dead creature still gripped around the throat, she ‘donked’ the capsule with a thick stubby finger.
“Furry, don’t eat him, okay?” Marius said with a grin.
Oh,Fureva-Yung replied. Eating was always at the forefront of Fureva-Yung’s mind. That was when she wasn’t attacking something. She reached out and touched the egg, noting that the round surface that projected out from the crystal was smooth and almost rubbery, yielding under the pressure of her fingers.
 
By this time, the caravan, which had stopped during the fighting, had caught up with its defenders. Reunited once more, the caravan continued down the passage, climbing up, hopefully to the surface. Eventually, the passage opened up into a large cavern, open to the sky two hundred metres above and falling to unfathomable darkness below. Sunlight streamed in, giving the caravaneers a good view of the vast cavern before them. Ahead the path split in two, one over a tapered steel bar that lay across the chasm, the other wound around the chasm, curving away into the sunless reaches beyond. The giant crystal formations jutted out everywhere, catching the light and projecting rainbow halos into the cavern.
 
“Should I climb up and see where we are?” Marius looked up, his ever-searching face lit by the light from above.
“I don’t think you could make that,” Jaden’s mind took in the overhanging walls of the cavern and the sharp crystals lining the ground.
“Sure I could.”
Jaden shook her head, “Look for a safer way.”
 
Marius, a lone figure and glow globe in the dark, took the next dangerous path, the steel bar bridge across the chasm. It wasn’t until he was halfway across that he started feeling uneasy. He stopped and peered into the gloom ahead and spotted a flickering human shape on the opposite end of the bridge.
“Hey! Guy! Are you okay?” Marius called, and the figure flickered once and disappeared…
 
…only to appear a moment later, right next to him.
 
The being flickering was not just the result of his appearing and disappearing. As he stood watching, Marius could see the beings face flicker through hundreds of different people and expressions. As suddenly as it appeared, it lunged at Marius, who dodged aside. Drawing his sword, Marius slashed back only to lose his footing on the narrow end of the bar. His feet slipped off into nothing and he started to fall. Letting go of the glow globe, and his sword as the bar flew past his face, Marius clawed at the rusted surface of the bar. The flickering being loomed above him, its clawed hands free to attack.
 
Watching from the broader end of the bar, Nox grabbed the sword with her Hedge magic, Get up, Marius, I have your sword.
“I can’t get up! Help!” Marius cried as the creature reached down to strike him. He swung aside, missing the claws, but he was going to need help and quick.
Fureva-Yung knew she couldn’t make it. She was too big and slow to sprint the distance to Marius and pulled him up. In anger and frustration, the purring, distant storm sounds that Fureva-Yng had been making up to that point increased. Out of her usually silent mouth, a terrifying bellowing scream roared, shaking the cavern, the bridge and the creature. A wall of sound hit the creature like one of her fists, pushing it off the bridge and into the chasm. The creature flickered and tried to zip back to the bridge. It fell with nothing to push against, disappearing into the darkness below.
 
“I told you, you should have talked to me,” Marius wheezed after it, his breath caught in his near-death predicament. Jaden quickly raced out across the bridge, and laying across her spear, placed one end close enough for Marius to grab. Swinging himself back onto the bridge, Marius looked back at Fureva-Yung, who was bent double coughing. A small crystal, one like many she'd eaten, shot out of her mouth and bounced away.
“Furry, you okay?” Marius asked once he’d caught his breath again.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Fureva-Yung replied in a voice deep and gravelly with unuse.
 
Marius and Jaden stopped picking themselves up and just stared at the ever-surprising Fureva-Yung.
“Furry! Your voice is furry!” Marius exclaimed as Jaden spotted the crystal that had caught in Fureva-Yung’s throat for months.
“Girl! What have you eaten!”
Fureva-Yung just looked back and shrugged.
 
As Marius continued the investigation of the other side of the bridge, Nox slunk back into the caravan and found the women still chattering. As soon as they saw her, they asked a dozen questions about what had happened? What had roared? Was everyone alright?
“Fureva-Yung…scared a monster away from Marius…he’s okay,” She replied curtly, slinking down beside Temila.
“Nox, you’re shaking!” Temila exclaimed, taking first the younger girls arm and then wrapping her free arm around Nox’s shoulder, “What happened? Are you okay?”
 
Nox silently pulled her legs up and hugged her knees. In Cerelon, her Father had bellowed. He was famous for it. He had often used his voice to scare and bully her, and it had worked. She could often hear him across town and know to stay away. Until the very moment Fureva-Yung had shaken the world with her voice, Nox had never felt afraid of the big woman. The sound of it still ringing in her ears, Nox put her head on her knees and started to cry.