Traversing the caverns beneath the White Mountains was a lot less fun than I had thought it would be. Sure, we didn’t have to worry about Manticores swooping down on us from the sky and tearing us to pieces, instead the dark and narrow caverns made even me feel claustrophobic, worried that I’d suddenly get stuck. I yearned for the open skies, to feel the wind on my face and see the moon and stars above. Even the darkness around me had turned stale, the refreshing fragrance of Ice fading the deeper we got. Instead, there was an oppressive pressure and heat, trying to press in on me and suffocate me.

My mood wasn’t lifted by the fact that I had discovered one of the species native to this place, a weird cross between rat and insect, many legged with large mouths, many teeth and an affinity for darkness-magic. That affinity was what had made me notice them first, tendrils of Astral Power, brushing up on the strands I used to scout, almost blending in with the environment but not quite.

Once I knew what I was looking for, those tendrils stood out to my senses, allowing me to get an idea of their numbers and what I found was adding to my bad moon. There were many of them, individually weak but I had no doubt that they’d be fearsome foes in the dark, using the environment and the ambient Astral Power to their full advantage. So far, either my own Darkness-Magic, brushing off the tendrils that sneaked towards us or Olivia’s light that would burn them, if they got too close, had managed to ward them off, but I got the feeling that we were being constantly watched.

A part of me wondered why the caves we were in hadn’t turned into a dungeon, the environment certainly felt dungeony, with hidden pitfalls, countless monsters and an oppressive presence that threatened to swallow you whole.

We had travelled for two days below ground, without getting back to daylight even once and now, we were at what felt like a crossroad. One of the tunnels I had detected, comfortably wide, smooth but steeply going down was one option, the other was to continue crawling through narrow crevices, not completely descending into the roots of the earth. I had no longer any idea how close we actually were to the surface, it might be hundreds of meters of rock between us and the open sky, it might be just a few steps away, I didn’t know. Only Olivia’s magic that allowed her to find north, even underground, allowed us to keep going in the right direction though that didn’t help for elevation or tell us what the terrain above us looked like. In many ways, we were totally lost.

As I was considering just how deep the steep tunnel went, thinking about dropping something down there to find out, I was reminded of a famous scene in an old novel and thought better. Maybe I didn’t have to dig into each and every secret, maybe there was such a thing as digging too deep, even if I wasn’t a dwarf and these weren’t mines.

Still, even if I wasn’t quite willing to follow the tunnel, I was curious what was down there and it was a good time for a break anyway.

“How much food do we have left?” Sigmir asked, leaving her Hallow which she had used almost exclusively, Ylva’s four-legged form not as prone to hit her head, compared to her own, hulking height.

“We’ve got enough for about two weeks, luckily we mostly foraged when above ground.” Adra assured her, while I started to channel my Astral Power, in order to create a Throne of Ice. It had the added bonus that after I was done, there would be quite a bit of Ice left, which I could shatter into Diamond Dust to replenish our water-reserves.

“Let’s see where this goes.” Lenore urged me, taking up position on my shoulder, taking a few moments to simply stretch her wings. She was missing the open skies even more than I, making me reach out and gently run a finger along her spine.

Once more, the tendrils of darkness reached out, my eyes closed to allow me to see through them. It was interesting how my brain was easily able to handle two points of view, even if they moved apart but as soon as I tried to use a third, I quickly got a headache.

Down the long tunnel, I could leave them together, entwining them to give me a modicum of depth-perception, similar to the way I would have it, if my eyes were floating down the tunnel. Which, in a way, they were, though I refused to call the tendrils eye-stalks, even in the privacy of my own mind. That felt just a step too far.

“I don’t think this tunnel is natural.” I mentally admitted to Lenore, after my tendrils had stretched out for a few hundred meters of nicely smooth and mostly straight tunnel. It felt too uniform, the water-carved tunnels we had moved through earlier had been more winding, meandering as the water had carved through the softer rocks, but not this one. I couldn’t distinguish different types of rock in the walls, my vision wasn’t accurate enough for that, but I doubted there had been an almost perfectly round pillar of soft rock inserted into the mountain.

Now, I just had to decide whether I wanted to find out whatever had dug this tunnel. It was going into the right direction, which was a plus but it gave me the creeps.

Soon, after what felt like a kilometer of straight tunnel, it opened up into a wider cavern. Separating my tendrils, I started to look around, paying special attention to any unnatural feeling concentration of Darkness-Magic. If there were powerful beings down here, I was almost certain they would have some sort of Darkness-Affinity, possibly Darkness-Magic. The environment almost demanded it.

Compared to the narrow tunnels we had been moving through, I had no idea how large the cavern I now perceived was. The walls curved away and while there was another wall a few meters from the exit, almost like a T-junction, when I let a tendril slither up that wall, it quickly proved that it was just about two meters high, ending on a ledge that I couldn’t see the end of. Nor could I see the ceiling above, making me want to go there in the flesh, simply to see.

Pulling that tendril back, I decided to follow the age-old trick of simply placing your hand on one wall, to not get lost in a labyrinth, and kept one tendril close to the wall that curved away from the tunnel I had entered through on the left side, the other on the right side.

The three-dimensional nature of the caverns made my trick a little less useful, let alone the limited vision-range of my tendrils, but I was able to find a few cracks and holes that might be large enough to crawl into and on the right side, I managed to find a tunnel, similar in scale to the one I had entered through, this one leading upwards, possibly towards the surface. It still went further west, making me even more curious. If it had a similar length to the earlier tunnel, the two would almost cover the same distance we had covered in yesterday’s day of travel, but could be traversed in an hour. Just for that, it might be worthwhile to risk going further down, despite the unpleasant feelings I was having.

Letting the other tendril fade away, to conserve Astral Power, I stretched my sight into that tunnel, following it upwards. Just as the first one, it was almost perfectly straight, round and smooth, my earlier worry resurfacing. Whatever had dug these tunnels, I wasn’t sure I wanted to encounter it.

After some distance, by that point I had little idea of how long a distance, I perceived something new, as the tunnel opened up into yet another cavern. It wasn’t the dense, impenetrable feeling of rock that surrounded me, nor was it the deep darkness that I was moving through, it was somewhere in between. Freezing, I let my tendril hover as I tried to understand just what I was seeing, and after a few moments of staring, I wanted to facepalm at my obliviousness. A flowing medium, penetrable by light, and thus shadow, in the middle of a mountain, just what could that be? Likely the most prevalent liquid on the planet, and just for that I wanted to call myself a dummy. The slightly elevated concentration of Ice-Astral Power within that medium added to my conviction, but what truly stunned me was a different realization.

Unless I was totally wrong, I was looking at an underground river but the truly interesting thing wasn’t that. It was that the river was flowing westwards, in the direction we should be heading.