The Cave and the Light

Light pierced the darkness. A pinhole at first, then a crepuscular shaft emanating from a single point. Eri’s face appeared in the opening, bobbing back and forth to get a better look inside.

“Yup, this must be it,” she said aloud to herself as she often did when she was alone. She continued to dig, widening the gap below the rock. The sod and stone that covered the entrance were hastily placed so it wasn’t long before she had enough room to slip inside on her belly.

The hole she made beneath the large boulder to gain access to this cave did little to illuminate the place she was in now. She scooped a sticky fatty paste from a leather pouch on her belt and greased a clump of red hair she had cut from her head. Wrapping it around a stick she had found just outside the entrance, she struck a stone to light the torch.

Now that she could see where she was going, she slithered her way down until the cave opened up. Enough for her to crawl, then stand.

A new smell entered her nostrils. She moved the torch around and found little brown pyramids on the floor. Touching one of them caused it to crumble into dust, but the smell was on her hand, sharp and sour. Collecting some of this dust, she continued on, leaving a trail of sign for her to find her way back.

Climbing and crawling in places, she eventually came upon a great cavern and a chasm. The walls sparkled in the torch light but still no signs of life. Maybe the story the scav told Aris was made up.

Skirting a ledge, she made it around the chasm to a larger passage on the other side of the cavern. The stalagmites grew larger and the stone changed its character from brown to gray to a snow white.

A trickling sound hit her ear. So faint it was difficult to make out exactly what it was. She moved her head back and forth to catch more of it. She placed her ear against one of the stalagmites and sure enough, there was liquid, possibly flowing, within the stone spire.

She butted it with her torch. The crack came first. A spurt of pressurized water. Then the flood. Then falling.

Her torch drifted away as the cave dragged her down into the darkness while every outcrop she passed got its licks in. Left shoulder, something jagged. Ribs, crushed against a ledge. Skull, a glancing blow that filled her vision with colors the darkness didn’t contain.

Stone and water. One patient, one furious, both indifferent to the girl tumbling deeper into tunnels and canyons light has never touched.

Then there it was again. That faint hum at her forehead. She’d never understood it.

The floor had turned into fine mud and centuries of bat guano—turned to grease beneath her boots. The pack followed, provisions, sample jars, everything that had seemed important when she still had some control over her decisions.

They die of shame.

Mello’s voice, rough and fond, from a night she recalled whenever she found herself in painful situations—six years old, crying in the dark of the Westward’s hull, scared of some rough chop in the Corrihugh sea.

The sea’s a mean mistress, little one. Any chance she gets she will try and humiliate you, shame you. For those who can’t take it, they curl up and die. That will never happen to you, because you are too proud a lass to be beaten by such a thing. Shame has no place on this ship nor in your heart. Now get out there.

That was ten years ago and she’d never forgotten it.

The cave was just another mean mistress. As was the dark.

Too proud to be beaten by such a thing.

Time stretched. She knew this feeling. She beat it then… She’d do it again.

The cave got a few more licks in, then the water drained away—finding paths of less resistance than the girl wedged between natural pillars, and what remained was stillness. Stone. Silence. The small, stubborn labor of her own breathing.

She flexed her fingers—all ten responded, though three screamed. Fat and hot already, swelling tight against each other. She wiggled them in the dark and thought: sausages. Her pack was gone—swallowed by the flood. If she ended up starving, she could eat her own hand. Three courses, already cooked. She almost laughed. Didn’t. Laughing would mean moving her ribs.

Toes moved. Spine bruised, not broken. She tested her shoulder and hissed. That would limit her for days. But days required survival first.

The flood had carried her through passages that would have taken hours to navigate by choice. Above her, the way she’d come was a vertical shaft now, walls worn smooth, nothing to grip as far as she could feel.

Up above, the world continued. Aris would notice she hadn’t returned. He knew where she’d gone.

Her father, she could still remember his hands swinging her through the air when she was small, his laugh warm and real. Before he looked through her instead of at her. Before the stone face.

She let the thought go.

Climbing wasn’t possible. But maybe…

She opened her eyes. Closed them. Opened them again.

No difference.

The dark was absolute. Not the darkness of a room with the shutters drawn, not the darkness of a moonless night—this was the darkness that existed before fire, before stars, before The Creator spoke light into being. Her own hand, held an inch from her face, was nothing. She pressed her palm against her nose just to feel something solid. Just to prove she still existed.

Breathe. Think. Move.

Air moved through the stone. Faint currents against her cheek, carrying information if she was patient enough to read them. The water had come from somewhere. It had flowed toward something. She could follow the current. She could…

She crawled.

Pain sent its reminders. She noted them and kept moving. The floor sloped and disappeared. The ceiling lowered. Passages narrowed, opened, ended in stone. She backtracked, chose again. Built a map in her mind that might have been useless. Time stopped meaning anything.

And then,

she stopped.

Held her breath.

Stared into the black ahead and saw… not quite light. But the promise of light. The whisper of it. A difference so faint it could have been hope, or madness, or a dark lie.

She didn’t trust it. She’d been fooled before. The mind creating patterns where none existed, desperate for anything to break the monotony of black.

She crawled closer. The not-quite-nothing didn’t vanish.

It grew.

Her palms scraped stone. The color separated—blue-green, then distinct hues. Soft luminescence painted the passage walls. Light with no source she could name.

The passage opened.

She didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. Didn’t trust her eyes, her mind, any part of herself that could be lying.

Below her, impossibly, was color.

Not the gray-green of half-dead things. Not the brittle browns she knew. This was something else—something that broke every rule she’d learned about how the world worked.

Moss shimmering with white light. Not rhythmic, not steady—random, overlapping, like a conversation in a crowded room she couldn’t understand. Plump mushrooms rose taller than she was, glowing gold and white, throwing shadows that moved when nothing moved to cast them. Ferns erupted from every crevice, edged in colors she had no names for—colors that shouldn’t exist, that couldn’t exist, not down here, not anywhere.

Her breath caught. Her skin prickled.

What is this?

The air was warm. Warm and thick and it smelled like… she didn’t know. Not rot, not dust, not the thin sharp nothing of the caves. Something else. Something that made her chest tight and her eyes sting for reasons she couldn’t explain.

She pressed her palm against the stone, needing something solid, something that followed rules. Because this didn’t. This was wrong. Beautiful and wrong and impossible, and she couldn’t look away.

Despite its wrongness, she continued anyway, hands shaking on the rocks.

The moss quickened beneath her wherever she touched it, fading when she pulled away.

Small lights drifted between the mushroom stalks. Not fireflies—nothing with wings. Just motes of luminescence that wandered like they had somewhere to be.

She knelt there until her hands stopped shaking. Until the glow felt less like hallucination and more like fact.

Then she began to work.

The moss came away easily when she pulled. Its glow held steady in her palm—warm, pulsing, alive. She gathered more: ferns, mushroom caps, anything that would fit in her hands. A bouquet of impossible light to guide her way back.

She climbed, now with the surety of sight. The glow held through the first passages. Held through the vertical shafts the flood had carried her down. Held as she found handholds in stone worn smooth by ancient water.

Then the first fern stuttered—a flicker at the edge of her vision.

Light ahead. Faint, distant, but unmistakable. The orange rainbow glow of the surface world, filtering down through the entrance.

She climbed faster. The bouquet died faster. Each foot closer to the surface killed another piece of wonder. The ferns blackened. The moss grayed. The mushrooms melted and shriveled into nothing. By the time she pulled herself onto the final ledge, she held nothing but death in her hand; it was fragile, dry, and irreversible.

She stood at the cave mouth, blinking against sunlight that felt like an assault. The sky arced overhead, streaked with a vibrant amber, purple, and rust… the same colors it had worn every day of her life.

Behind her, the garden glowed in darkness. Before her, the world died in light.

She opened her hands. The husks fell apart like ash. Much like every beautiful thing that had tried to survive here.