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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 157, Cool Cave
🕑 Added 2022-12-19 18:40:02 +0000 UTC~~~~
The mouth of the cave was almost wide enough that they could have maneuvered the house into it, but it narrowed quickly. Alfric slowly and carefully parked the house in a meadow just outside of the cave, then once they were out, had it rise up to its full height, almost thirty feet on its long metal legs. It looked impossibly unsteady, and swayed slightly in the wind, but Alfric thought that it was fine, and everyone trusted his judgment. Bib stayed back, to guard, but when pressed admitted that he found caves to be creepy.
They were halfway into the entrance of the cave when Mizuki came running up. She was slightly out of breath, and Verity frowned at her. She was supposed to be at wizarding school, and in fact had left shortly after breakfast, but she was here now, having returned far too early.
“So what’s the opinion on Pinion?” asked Mizuki.
“Er, I’m right here,” said Pinion.
“Is he cool, is he lame, what’s his deal?” asked Mizuki. “What dark and terrible secrets is he keeping?” She had turned to the researcher and was eyeing him carefully.
“We’ve known him for two hours or so,” said Hannah. “Not nearly enough time to uncover secrets.”
“Doesn’t someone know secret interrogation techniques?” asked Mizuki.
“Well, I do,” said Pinion. “But I don’t think that helps you.”
“Do you really?” asked Mizuki.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” asked Verity.
“Yes, well,” said Mizuki. She was slightly out of breath. “You see, there was this cool cave to explore.”
Verity frowned. “You’re skipping?”
“I got through half the class, then yeah,” said Mizuki. “Look, I’ll be back in time for the rock petting, it’s no big deal, they understand if you’ve got other things to do, and most of what we’re doing is just theory, it’s not super important.”
“You’re a teacher’s assistant?” asked Pinion.
“What?” asked Mizuki, looking at him.
“That’s your, ah, day job?” he asked.
She stared at him, then gave a quick look at Alfric. “Right,” she said, looking back at Pinion. “I’m a wizard. Who teaches wizardry in Plenarch. As an assistant.” She nodded. “Just a perfectly normal wizard.”
“Uh, okay?” asked Pinion.
“I’ve been a wizard my whole life,” said Mizuki. “Or, I guess I trained when I was younger.”
“Right,” said Pinion. “Most do.”
Verity giggled. She wondered how long Mizuki would deign to keep that up, but Mizuki had trouble with commitment, as shown by her ducking out of school to come see a cool cave. Verity had, at various points, deeply loathed the conservatory, but she had never skipped out on practice nor lessons. It was, in her opinion, one of the reasons that she was highly regarded as a bard — though there were other reasons which were far out of her control. There was a chance that she was wrong about Mizuki, and she hoped that she was, but if the past was any indication …
“So, Isra, my lady, what’s down this cool cave?” asked Mizuki. “How far are we going?”
“I don’t know,” said Isra. They hadn’t gone far, though far enough that they needed lanterns. They were doing it like the dungeons, one for Alfric, who was the leader, and one for Verity, who was brought up the rear and was the least mobile of them.
“You don’t?” asked Verity. “I’d thought you were going to be our guide?”
“I just find the places,” said Isra. “I want to go in unspoiled.”
“How are we to know which way to go?” asked Alfric.
“No turns so far, right?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Alfric. He was looking around. “So far, this is just a long tunnel.”
The walls were some kind of soft stone, shaped like a tube with occasional ridges, and by the time they had gone a hundred feet in, there was a small trickle of water that ran down the center of the place. The lanterns were of slightly different colors, Alfric’s with a slight tint of yellow, Verity’s with a slight tint of blue, which was down to defects in the ectad creation process and normally not noticeable unless they were in total darkness. Alfric had said he preferred it that way, since it helped with situational awareness.
“Is this what going into a dungeon is like?” asked Pinion.
Alfric laughed. “A bit, though we’d be better equipped, armed, and armored, and worrying that we would be attacked.” He reached out and touched the side of the wall, frowning a bit. “Isra, what kind of stone is this?”
“I have no idea,” said Isra. “Nothing that I’ve ever seen before.”
“Huh,” said Alfric. “And this cave is safe, right?”
“How can a cave be dangerous?” asked Mizuki.
“The locals said that it was an interesting cave, well worth the trip for anyone in the area,” said Isra. “I think if it were dangerous they would have warned us.”
“Yeah, but how could it be dangerous?” asked Mizuki. “We just warp out if there’s anything wrong, we’ve got a cleric and a druid, there’s no danger at all.”
“I guess,” said Alfric. He rubbed his head. If Verity knew him, he was thinking that he wished there was more danger. “The house is half a mile from the hex’s warp, so I think we should plan on warping out anyway, once we’re done.”
“So far, it underwhelms,” said Hannah.
“I didn’t ask what was good about the cave,” said Isra. She was frowning.
“I think it’s nice to just all be together on an adventure again,” said Verity, perhaps a little too quickly.
“Plus Pinion,” said Mizuki.
“Thanks?” asked Pinion.
“The walls are odd,” said Alfric. He was touching them again, and looked at his fingers, rubbing them together. “I don’t think I would expect ridges to naturally form like this.”
“I was wondering about that,” said Pinion. “I had imagined that it might be something like sand bars or sand dunes, influenced by a wave motion that deposits materials, but we wouldn’t expect to see that to be on the walls and ceiling as well as the ground.”
“It’s changing,” said Mizuki as she moved ahead of Alfric. “Bumps instead of ridges. Ugh, this is going to be a pain to walk over.”
“You should have worn boots,” said Alfric.
“Yes, well, I was in class,” said Mizuki. “Boots are unfashionable for wizards.” She had put-upon air of the high and mighty, ruined only by a small giggle.
Verity wondered how much the long hair and long robes were a matter of fitting in and how much they were Mizuki playing dress up. It was hard to say. Verity had done quite a bit of work on the robes, making sure that they fit her figure, and had been quite happy with how it had turned out. Mizuki had complained that she didn’t really have much of a figure, and Verity had felt somewhat awkward about disagreeing — she was somewhat short and very slight, but Verity had found Mizuki appealing almost from the start, something that she was normally happy to forget.
The ‘bumps’ were more difficult to walk on, like cobblestones that hadn’t quite been smoothed down or fitted in properly, which Verity had only experienced in the poorest parts of Dondrian. She walked carefully, thankful that she’d worn sensible shoes for this minor expedition.
Her eyes went to Pinion, who was walking alongside Isra. She liked him more now than she had on first blush, in part because he seemed to have a natural curiosity about the world, a wealth of knowledge, and was at least humble enough to say that he wasn’t going to come in and solve all their problems. One of the things that had marked their time with Cate in the demiplane was an exposure to overwhelming hubris and grandiosity, Pinion seemed, at least, like a nice contrast to that. He was getting along with Alfric, at any rate.
The long tunnel with no side exits eventually began a sharper downward slope, and at a certain point, was so steep that they would need to slide down it.
“See, this seems dangerous,” said Mizuki. “Also creepy.”
“It’s a very long cave,” said Alfric. He was holding up his lantern to look all the way down. The light didn’t quite reach. “What causes something like this?”
“I have a theory,” said Pinion.
“Share?” asked Mizuki.
“No, I want more data,” said Pinion. “If I’m right, I can explain it.”
“Some burrowing creature?” asked Isra, looking down the tube to the depths below.
“You wouldn’t get the bumps, I don’t think,” said Alfric.
“Welp, I’m going down,” said Mizuki. She stepped forward and slid down on her butt, in the nice wizarding robes that Verity had helped to tailor, and disappeared down the cave with a subdued ‘whee!’.
Alfric was next, and Hannah after him. They didn’t know whether the tube flattened out, or whether it would turn into a vertical drop, which Verity found legitimately frightening, but a broken leg would probably be fixable by Hannah so long as it wasn’t a compound fracture, and they’d all had their own injuries in the dungeons. Surprisingly, Pinion went after Hannah, showing more daring than Verity had thought he would be capable of as a soft-handed researcher.
<It’s safe!> called Mizuki.
When Verity stepped forward, Isra put out a hand. “Are people making fun of me, when they say this is a cool cave?” she asked.
“No,” said Verity. “At least, I don’t think so. I think it’s just … a phrase that they picked up.”
“Sorry, if this isn’t what people wanted,” said Isra.
Verity put a hand on Isra’s shoulder. “It’s fine. We appreciate your scouting.”
“It was the first one,” said Isra. “I think that it was important that it was good, and this is just … a cave.”
Verity brushed a strand of hair from Isra’s face. It was perhaps a bit too tender, but Isra showed no change of expression. “We’re doing these things to break up the monotony of the road,” Verity said. “Even if this were the worst, most boring experience, no one would hold it against you. The point isn’t seeing a cool cave, it’s being together, right?”
“I suppose,” said Isra. “Thanks.”
Verity got down on her butt and slid down the tube, which was essentially just a large slide, though very slightly wet. She was going to have to change into different clothes when they were finished, they probably all were, but that was a relatively small price to pay.
When she reached the bottom, the rest of the party was standing around in a large chamber, which arched nearly twenty feet overhead. Alfric had his lantern, but it was outshone by something in the center of the cave, a ten-foot high growth that protruded from the ground. It shone and shimmered, looking like a glob of glass studded with stars and black ink. Verity felt the urge to touch it, but held back. This place had lots of different ways to go, other tunnels of varying sizes.
“What is it?” asked Isra once she was down.
“That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said Alfric.
Mizuki snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it. We’re in the belly of an enormous beast. What happened was, we came right down his stony gullet, and this is his heart.” She reached out and touched the iridescent lump, which reacted to her touch with a pulse of light. She poked it a few more times, but the effect was lesser each time. “Weird.” She looked at the others. “Anyway, the villagers that pointed Isra in this direction were probably under its control.”
“I really doubt this is a creature,” said Alfric.
“Actually,” said Pinion. “That was going to be my guess, though without the villagers. There was a historical creature, a cavermunk, that lived in these parts, one that burrowed deep underground and sent up appendages — a combination of feelers, arms, and mouths — up the surface to eat.” He looked around at their expressions. “Er, to clarify, they’re all long dead, and this would be a corpse.”
“Dead?” asked Isra. She was looking around the chamber. “I would have liked to see one.”
“During the Clearance,” said Pinion. “When the lands were being tamed.” He looked more closely at the glob of shimmering stone. “As a researcher I’m duty-bound to say that I’m not sure that this is what it is. It might be a different sort of thing altogether. Maybe that’s a dungeon escape that generates tunnels away from it, it really could be anything … but I think it’s the cavermunk.”
“You know a lot about long-dead creatures?” asked Mizuki.
“I came into the study of dungeons sideways,” said Pinion. “I was, ah, quite interested in biology from a young age, especially creatures.” He cleared his throat. “I was a difficult birth, and sickly as a child, which might be where the fascination comes from.”
“I’d wondered why you were short,” said Mizuki. “Also you have weird eyes, is that part of it?”
“Mizuki,” said Alfric with a sigh.
“What?” asked Mizuki. “He was the one who brought it up, I don’t like people calling me short, I wasn’t going to say anything, but if he’s saying ‘oh, this is why I look like this’ then yeah, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t notice.”
Verity let out a little sigh. Pinion was practically crimson, and Verity was feeling secondhand embarrassment.
“I hadn’t realized either of those things,” said Isra. “Can I see your eyes?”
Pinion was still looking like he would rather die, but he moved toward Isra, and she stared at his eyes for a moment. It was, in truth, fairly subtle, the sort of thing that you would never pay attention to if you passed him on the street. Verity had only noticed because she had a habit of studying new faces, a relic of her time as a socialite, when knowing a person’s face was of prime importance. His eyes were slightly larger than average, the color not seeming human, and it gave him an odd look that Verity found somewhat alluring, truth be told. She was, as a rule, not attracted to men, but the more she looked into his eyes the more she felt like there was something a bit fetching about him. That wasn’t nearly enough, of course, and she didn’t want to give him the wrong impression, but if he was self-conscious about his appearance, she didn’t think that he should be.
“You’re very pretty,” said Isra. She was still staring into Pinion’s eyes, but when she spoke, he turned away.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Shouldn’t matter whether he’s pretty or not,” said Hannah, folding her arms across her chest. “Too much a focus on looks, in my opinion, a person’s self worth bein’ decided by whether they look good or like a hideous beast — better to not let it have such impact, ay? Which starts with not makin’ the boy feel self-conscious about his eyes or his height or what have you.”
“He brought it up,” said Mizuki. “I probably wouldn’t have said ‘hey you look funny’ until I’d gotten to know him a lot better.”
“But you would have asked?” asked Alfric.
“I mean, yeah,” said Mizuki. “Because I was curious.”
Pinion looked like he had meant to back away, but he was standing tall anyhow.
“Sorry if you I wasn’t being kind,” said Mizuki after an elbow in the ribs from Alfric.
“It’s fine,” said Pinion. He let out a breath. “It went better than I’d expected.” He cast a glance at Isra, and she gave him a slight nod.
“Does it go poorly sometimes?” asked Hannah.
“Awkward, usually,” said Pinion. “People want to know what exactly was wrong with me, what was done to fix it — these are things that I’m happy to talk about, they’re interesting, but sometimes the way that people want to talk to them is a bit too much like I’m a curiosity.”
“Rather than the curiosity bein’ somethin’ apart from you,” said Hannah with a nod.
“I really didn’t mean anything by it,” said Mizuki. “I mean, I’m half-Kiromon, some people think I look weird, I’d rather we talk about it than them just sitting there wondering and not paying attention because there’s this thing on their mind.”
“Is that what you were doing?” asked Alfric.
“No, but, you know, hypothetically someone might do that,” said Mizuki. “Anyway, this ‘Clearance’, it’s the first I’m hearing about it, people just came in and killed a bunch of monsters?”
“The Clearance was a decades long project to claim more arable land, which was limited in those days,” said Pinion, who seemed relieved to have something else to talk about. Most of the area that’s now ‘Central Inter’ had a specific set of conditions that left it ripe for particular types of very large and somewhat dangerous creatures. The thing we’re probably standing inside was one of them, not all that dangerous if you knew where it was, but it would extend one of those tubes — like the kind we walked through — up through the floor of a house and killed everyone inside in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t even understand how you’d kill a thing like this,” said Mizuki. She had turned back to look at the shimmering rock. “And what is this? The heart?”
“It’s hard to say,” said Pinion. “Sorry, I’m obliged to do the scholar’s thing and hedge three times in a row before giving you a guess.”
“Or you could skip that,” said Hannah.
“Well, I think it’s more like a tooth,” said Pinion. “So this room would be the mouth.” He reached forward and touched the rock in the center. “This would have been possessed of magic, before the creature was killed, pulverizing everything into a mash before it moved down, uh,” he paused, looking around the room. “That tunnel?” he asked.
“It’s too small to move down,” said Alfric.
“It would go deeper into the bowels,” said Pinion. “But it’s like the human circulatory system, right? The heart is the largest piece of it, then it gets smaller as it goes, as the arteries and veins branch off.”
“Why hasn’t anyone taken a piece of this?” asked Mizuki, pressing her hand against the glowing rock again.
“Maybe they were leaving it here for others to enjoy,” said Alfric.
“More likely it can’t be moved,” said Pinion. “Most of what we know of the Clearance was that it was a time when people were very concerned with killing everything that was dangerous or that could be dangerous. Some of these creatures we only know because there were books of instruction on how to murder them.”
“That’s sad,” said Isra. She was staring at the rock. Verity reminded herself that it wasn’t a heart, but a tooth, which seemed less poetic.
“It is,” said Pinion. “Things lost, things forgotten, things dead because no one could see the value in them. I wouldn’t want a thing like this eating sheep or invading houses, but … all the same.” He pursed his lips. “Sorry, I’m talking too much, I think I was meant as more of an observer.”
“Right,” said Mizuki. “But if you weren’t here we’d be saying ‘oh, cool rock, what’s it do, I don’t know’ and then moving on, which seems less fun. Granted, that’s how it goes in the dungeons more often than not.”
“Which is lonely in its own way,” said Isra.
“Lonely?” asked Mizuki. “I mean … sure, I guess.”
“I think bereft of meanin’ is more like it,” said Hannah. “I’ve been doin’ my dungeon book, and sometimes it feels as though the randomness of it makes sayin’ anythin’ at all a bit suspect. It’s paint splashed on a canvas, rather than applied with a careful hand. And ay, sometimes we shrug and move on.”
“That makes more sense,” said Alfric. He stepped forward and touched the oversized, singular tooth. It glowed fiercely at his touch, then settled down. It seemed to react strongly the first time someone touched it, then less so every time after that, like it was sensing them.
“Can you feel anything from it?” Verity asked Isra.
“No,” said Isra. She frowned. “It has all the life of a bone.”
“I’m … not sure what that means,” said Verity.
“There’s a faint impression of something that was once living,” said Isra. “A shell.” She pursed her lips. “Literally like a shell, which is a discarded piece of a living thing.”
“Is it?” asked Verity.
Isra nodded. Verity didn’t know enough about shells to dispute it, but something about the comparison, or possibly the metaphor, felt off to her. If it had been a line in a song, she’d have second-guessed it.
“I want to see the rest of the cave,” said Alfric. “It’s a shame we’re on the inside of the creature, rather than the outside, but I want to see as much as we can before going back. This is just the digestive system, if Pinion is right.”
“And if I’m not, then there’s more to look at,” said Pinion. “Sorry I didn’t get through my three disclaimers about uncertainty.” He smiled.
They spent another hour in the ‘cave’, following the tubes that led out from the mouth as much as they could. Mizuki at one point got stuck in a tube that was clearly too small for a person, even a short one, and had to be hauled out by the ankles by Alfric. Another of the tunnels was flooded, the ultimate destination of the trickle of water they’d seen, and Isra had briefly entertained the notion of going for a swim before feeling just how cold the water was.
They got out of the cave by warp, with Alfric going last as a matter of habit, though not being able to warp out would have been quite surprising.
It took another fifteen minutes or so to return to where the house was, though Mizuki exploded into starlight and returned to Plenarch. Along the way, they talked.
“Alfric, it always surprises me that you didn’t take to magic, nor to religion,” said Hannah.
“I tried,” said Alfric. “I conclusively don’t have the talent for magic, and religion … is hard to grind out, if you don’t feel it.”
“Cultivated mindset,” said Hannah. “Ay.”
“I washed out of the seminary,” said Pinion. “But you never got that far?”
“No,” said Alfric. “I did go for introductions and consultation when I was twelve — to all of them — but nothing felt right to me, not like the sort of thing I would want to devote myself to.”
“Twelve seems young,” said Isra.
“It’s normal, more or less,” said Hannah. “I was near that age. Hard to be away from family, though not that hard if you’re stubborn and independent, ay?”
“You don’t talk about your family much,” said Isra.
“I see them seldom,” said Hannah. “I returned home for a week after I was through with the seminary, but they’re strangers, more or less.”
“Which is as the church wants it,” said Verity.
“Och,” said Hannah. “Anti-religious sentiment?”
Verity shrugged. “You’ve said yourself that the churches have aims and goals of their own. Being able to mold their clerics without parents and siblings getting in the way is … not even bad, necessarily, but it’s certainly by design. There was a reason that I never went to seminary.”
“Which is?” asked Pinion.
“Oh, my mother never would have had it,” said Verity. “Even the seminary in Dondrian, where I would have been nearby, would have had too much distance. The conservatory was different, easier for her to access, to interfere.”
“Ah,” said Pinion. “And which seminary would you have gone to?”
Verity blinked at that. “I’m … a Chosen of Xuphin.”
“Oh, I know that, of course,” said Pinion. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an affection for Xuphin, nor that you feel the closest connection with her. I wasn’t sure whether it was a given.”
“The clerics would have been extremely put out if I’d heard the words of their god and then elected to go elsewhere,” said Verity with a little laugh.
“So what?” asked Isra.
Verity spent some time thinking about that, and they walked in silence, making their way back. She still didn’t have a proper response by the time they reached the house again.
“How was the cool cave?” asked Bib, who rose from where he’d been laying on a blanket to greet them. “Cool?” He was, as always, shirtless.
“It was actually a horrible monster,” said Alfric. “We descended down into his mouth, and touched his tooth, which glowed with ancient power.”
“You made that up,” said Bib, putting his hands on his hips.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Alfric. “How’s your bird been?”
“He’s a bird,” said Bib. “He doesn’t really do much.”
“Nonsense,” said Isra. She went over and stroked the oversized bird’s head for a bit. “You know, you’re riding him hard. It’s good for him to have a rest. We could bring him inside for today, let him ride with the house instead of ahead of it.”
“Birds aren’t allowed indoors,” said Bib. He watched carefully as the house lowered, which was happening by Alfric’s will. “They poop.”
“I’m a druid,” said Isra. “I’d just ask the bird not to poop.”
“Does the bird not have a name?” asked Pinion.
“What kind of bird has a name?” asked Bib. “Names are for dogs, and maybe cats.”
“I wasn’t aware,” said Pinion. He smiled at the boy, who didn’t smile back.
There was something surly and independent about Bib that Verity quite liked. He slept outside almost every night, and didn’t hang around with them, sometimes taking his meal to go, often racing off on his bird only to return hours later having had some adventure of his own. Bib was, in many ways, who Verity wanted to be when she grew up. He was also allowed to go on extended adventures with strangers, which was a shocking way to raise a child, at least so far as she was concerned. Alfric had gone so far as to have a meeting with Bib’s mother and father to make sure that it was okay with them, and they’d expressed to him in no uncertain terms that either Bib could take care of himself, or he could come home, and they expected that he would figure things out himself.
If Verity had been raised like that, she had no idea what she might have turned out like. She didn’t think that she would have been nearly so accomplished as a musician, but it was impossible to say. She would never force expectations and labor on her own children as much as her mother did, but she thought it possible that those expectations and the relentless work she’d had to put in really did have material benefits. It was a scary thought, in a way.
Verity went to the living room and began to practice as the house rose once more and sprang into motion. She had an audience, of a sort, Isra and Pinion sitting down on the couch together, and she tried out a song about a creature whose corpse was a cave, a song of the Clearance, of monsters or ‘monsters’ being killed for the sake of settling. It was a wandering thing, lines repeated a few times because she was working on it, trying to make the lyrics have a better flow, but what she needed was a better historical grounding. She knew almost nothing about the Clearance, and knew that she would need to speak to Pinion in order to have a firmer grasp on it. For all that time, effort, and presumably lives had been spent on the endeavor, Central Inter was relatively unpopulated, with large forests, sprawling meadows, and areas that were untouched by the hands of humans, save perhaps for a road here or there.
“Here,” said Isra once Verity was finished. She had been writing something on a piece of paper, and it was only once she handed it over that Verity realized that it was, in fact, a drawing. “It’s the creature.”
Isra didn’t have the best artistic ability — Verity was probably the most skilled among them — and the moving house had done her no favors, but she’d made a rendering of the creature. It looks a bit like a squid to Verity’s eyes, and showed a bulbous end that they hadn’t actually been in. They’d seen only a fraction of the thing, if the drawing was accurate, which made sense, as they’d mostly been inside its mouth and fingers.
“I think that’s close,” said Isra. “It’s hard to tell what it once was.”
“This is your guess?” asked Pinion, who’d moved over to Verity to look at the drawing.
“No,” said Isra. “There are things in the ground. I can sense through them. I moved worms and moles while we were in there, trying to get some sense of it, but there were roots that had grown around the tubes.” She frowned. “I apologize for the drawing.”
“It’s good,” said Pinion, too quickly.
“It’s not good,” said Isra. “Verity’s the artist.”
“I’d find it hard to paint while we’re moving,” said Verity. “And I can’t do animals or people very well.” She looked at Pinion. “I do flowers, mostly, and music is where most of my creative impulse goes.”
“You did the paintings on the walls?” asked Pinion. “They’re nice.”
“They’re sparse,” said Verity. “Also, as Isra pointed out, inaccurate.”
“Ah, I do love accuracy,” said Pinion.
“I offered to consult,” said Isra. “She said she didn’t want to get bogged down in the details.”
Verity shrugged. It was hard to explain. She’d run into the exact same problem with the song about the Clearance, the need to be accurate to what had actually happened warring with a desire to go with the flow, to invent, to be free with her lyrics. She’d run into Pinion’s type before, the kind who liked to point out ‘errors’ in plays and operas, but she’d always found it tiresome.
“I’m going to get some rest,” said Verity. She looked at the drawing again. “Maybe the song should have focused on this thing. The cavermunk, you called it?”
“Possibly,” said Pinion. “I’m ninety percent sure, but I’ve been in the field of dungeons for quite some time now, and left historical creatures behind.”
“Don’t nap too long,” said Isra. “You were going to do a show tonight, if our schedule holds.”
“I’m going to nap because I have a show,” said Verity. “I’ll need my energy, and some tea, and I’d like to finish that song so it’s ready for the stage.” There was something about the movement of the house that made falling asleep incredibly easy for Verity, like she was a baby being rocked in a crib.
“Is it alright if I come to see the performance tonight?” asked Pinion.
Verity laughed, though he was serious. “You’ve heard songs in progress, even the lewd song, I think I would be fine with you being in the crowd.”
“We’ll make a night of it,” said Isra. “I think I’ll go fetch Mizuki once she’s done with her classes, unless she wants to spend the night in Plenarch.”
“Later then,” said Verity. She reached for the drawing, almost by instinct. “Can I keep this?”
“It’s terrible,” said Isra.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Verity. She looked the drawing over. It had nice lines to it, even if it was lacking in aesthetic.
She felt awkward leaving Isra alone with Pinion, but they fell into easy conversation almost at once, a discussion of the Clearance.
Comments
L
Maybe the real cool cave was the friends we made along the way.
