Dem and Tir awoke from painful dreams several hours later in the same place they had collapsed — on the rocky floor of a large cavern, close to an eight foot drop that had taken all their strength and determination to climb.
They awoke with arms and legs tangled, and spent several minutes muttering apologies as they untangled themselves.
Two small deer paused in licking each other’s fur to glance at the humans, then returned to their grooming.
Eventually, Dem and Tir collected their wits enough to sit up and consider their situation. Tir looked in her mushroom bag, found two, and handed them to the deer.
Dem found one and a half in his bag, which he divided equally between himself and his sister. “That’s it.”
“Hear that, guys?” Tir said to the small animals still eating their mushrooms. “What you see is what you get.”
“Maybe this is another bird cavern,” Dem wondered aloud.
They both fell silent for a moment to listen for bird sounds, but heard nothing.
After finishing his mushroom pieces, Dem pulled the remaining item from his bag. “According to the Map . . . we’re in a medium-size cavern with an exit tunnel somewhere on the far side.”
They took a moment to look around, as far as their glow-stones would illuminate. Old waterways seemed to twist every which way on the cavern
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floor, and once came together in their current location before plunging into the tunnel below. More recently, stalagmites and flowstones had covered some of the old water channels, and stone draperies and stalactites had grown down from the ceiling.
“After this cavern,” Dem continued, looking at the Map again, “there’s just a short little tunnel, then the cavern where the Angels . . . camp? Float around on shafts of pure energy? Whatever.”
Tir looked up from the Map, grinning.
With a little strength spreading from his belly to his sore muscles, Dem stood up and stretched his arms. “I guess we’d better get started.”
Tir shouldered her empty mushroom bag. “Your turn to wear the coat.”
He nodded as he put it on and picked up the little female animal, but fully intended to give the coat back to his sister as soon as he got warmed up from walking.
During the next three hours, with his last burst of energy rapidly fading, Dem led his sister along seven different ancient water channels, all of which ended in unclimbable vertical shafts, or looped back to another dry channel in the same cavern. None required crawling, so the little deer in his arms experienced no pain. The male followed along behind faithfully. As the hours passed, Dem began moaning with frustration, and stumbling on loose rocks more and more often.
After a short rest, he took another two hours to drag himself and his little company into four crawl-holes, but none went anywhere. During those hours, at first Tir could see him holding back tears, then later not bothering to hold them back as they ran out of crawl-holes to explore.
Back in the complex cavern with its many dry water channels, Dem plopped down onto a rock and finally poured out his feelings. “I don’t understand it. I keep trying things, and they don’t go anywhere! But one of them has to! It just has to . . .” He wilted into deep sobs.
Tir sat down close beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. He was still wearing their only coat, but she didn’t say a word.
The two deer, sitting together on another rock, looked at the two humans with dark, sympathetic eyes.
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Another half hour passed as Dem mumbled his sadness and anger at his dying civilization, at every rock in every tunnel and cavern in the world, and at himself. He admitted that his head was pounding and he couldn’t think straight.
His sister listened and nodded agreement at everything he said. She was experiencing all the same feelings, and was as close to starvation as him, but somehow she knew that only one of them could be weak at a time, and it was his turn.
So Tir, nine-year-old mushroom planter of Sonmatia Two, looked inside herself for the courage to be the strong one. She knew she didn’t need it for very long — they would either find food and water soon, or die.
Her brother continued to cry softly and mutter his frustrations, and the two little deer curled up together to sleep.
“I have an idea.”
Almost a minute passed before Dem realized that his sister had said something important.
“Wha . . . what?”
Tir took a deep breath. “There are lots of tunnels and crawl-holes out of this cavern, right?”
“Uh huh. And we’ve tried them all, some of them twice.”
“How do we know we’ve tried them all?”
Dem’s head was pounding worse than ever before, and he couldn’t think of an answer.
In the silence, Tir continued. “We’re going to try them all again, and make a pile of rocks at the entrance to each one. If there’s any we missed, we’ll find it. We’ll leave the deer here until we find it.” She resisted the temptation to also suggest that her brother wait with the deer.
Dem sat blinking and trying to think, but only succeeded at blinking.
Tir stood up. “You with me?”
Dem swallowed, and with a great effort, stood, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
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Once again, sister and brother again dragged themselves into and out of tunnels and crawl-holes. They had lost all ability to guess the passing of time.
It may have taken two hours, or six. They didn’t know nor care. It was their last effort.
Making little piles of rocks took all the strength left in their arms. Putting one foot in front of the other drained their legs. Slowly, hardly realizing it, they started running out of tunnels without rock markers.
Breathing became hard, but they didn’t sense the air was bad, just that they were exhausted beyond anything they had ever experienced.
“That’s all of them . . . I think,” Dem gasped out, hands on his knees.
“They all . . . have markers.”
“Now we find . . . the one that doesn’t,” Tir said, also struggling to breathe.
Dem nodded. He had no hope of succeeding. It was just something to pass the time before dying.
They stumbled this way and that on the edge of the cavern, sometimes leaning on each other, sometimes falling onto a rock to rest, or perhaps just die, they were never quite sure which. They found all the half-remembered tunnel and crawl-hole entrances, each with it’s rock marker.
Finally Tir collapsed onto an angled boulder and leaned back. She gazed up at the cavern wall in front of her. A stalagmite was casting a dark shadow on the wall.
Why is that shadow so dark?
She struggled to wrap her mind around the situation, but the pounding in her head made it difficult. She looked around, and saw that Dem was about five feet to her right.
Even if my glow-stone’s casting a shadow, Dem’s should be lighting up the wall behind the stalagmite.
Her eyes snapped open wider. “Dem, we just looked for tunnels at about the level of the cavern floor, right?”
He blinked several time. “We looked up at the walls and ceiling plenty of times, and didn’t see . . .”
Tir looked at her brother. He was looking in the right direction, and his eyes were open wide. “You see it?” she asked.
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He struggled to stand up, then moved his glow-stone back and forth while he watched the shadow behind the stalagmite.
Tir watched also. “It think . . . it always looked like a shadow, so we didn’t really see it. Is it in the right place on the Map?”
With weak and trembling hands, Dem struggled to unfold the Map. A long moment of silence passed.
Tir looked from the Map to the cavern wall several times and knew the answer even before Dem spoke.
“Yes . . .” he whispered with trembling lips.