It was a long walk in the snow, more of a trudge than a walk. Since Serenity was both the strongest and the only one of the three who wouldn’t tire, he was out front pulling a small, individual sled; either Rissa or Russ was usually on it, conserving their stamina. Two other sleds were pulled along behind it; stacked on top of them was what little additional equipment they’d brought in case they needed to actually climb the mountain.

The sleds were a compromise. Serenity had expected to walk, while Russ had suggested skiing. Unfortunately, it turned out that Russ was the only one of the three of them with experience cross-country skiing; Serenity had been on skis exactly once. It had somehow never come up for either Vengeance or the Final Reaper.

At least, not that he could remember. There were large stretches of that stretch of his life that were blurry or more often where he remembered things only as they came up. Skiing didn’t seem to be one of them; he could remember trudging through snow, though not why, and flying over it.

As he walked, Serenity watched ahead of them. The fact that the mind-creature hadn’t noticed Russ and Rissa was useful, but only if it continued to not notice them. The biggest threat was visual, so Serenity tried to watch ahead of himself as he headed towards the call and the portal.

There was nothing to be seen. Absolutely nothing. It was strange; they knew from satellite images and high-altitude photography that there wasn’t anything obvious, but they didn’t know why there was absolutely nothing. The best guess was that the portal had to be inside the mountain, in a cave or crevice. Serenity knew that it would be accessible; that seemed to be one of the Voice’s requirements when it set things up.

Serenity reached the correct height without seeing anything, including a cave entrance. He was still over a hundred feet from the portal’s probable location, deeper in the mountain. The call seemed to be coming from more or less the same place, but perhaps a bit higher?

Serenity dragged the sleds (and Russ) another twenty feet up the mountainside before he decided he was definitely farther uphill than either the portal or whatever was calling him. “We’re going to have to search. There has to be an opening somewhere, but it may be hidden by the snow.”

It wasn’t exactly hidden, but it also wasn’t all that close to the spot they’d picked to come up the mountain. It took more than two hours of searching before Rissa stopped, staring at the snow in front of her. There was a bump up; that usually meant a rock or something, but right under the bump she could actually see rock where the snow had been blown away.

Or perhaps fallen away?

Rissa walked closer, carefully watching her footing. She had to walk around part of the “bump” of rock, but once she did, it was obvious: There was a hole in the ground filled with rocks and snow.

:Dad, Serenity? I think I found it.: They were too far to simply talk to, and she didn’t want to yell, but her practice with Serenity made telepathy much easier than it was as a child.

The other two made their way over to her; Serenity even brought the sleds, which was going to be a good thing. The entrance to the cave was more than big enough, but it wasn’t at ground level. With the rocks on the ground, she wasn’t certain how they were going to deal with the ten or fifteen-foot drop. It wasn’t like there was a convenient tree or something that they could use to brace a rope.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Russ said as he looked into the hole. “There’s quite a pile of snow there but I don’t think we can trust it to break the fall.”

:Silently,: Rissa reminded her father. :They might be able to hear you in there.:

:Oops.: Russ didn’t turn to look at his daughter. :I should have thought of that. So how do you think we can get down?:

:I’ll lower the two of you.: Serenity sounded confident, and when Rissa looked at him he was already unloading some of what they’d packed on the sled. The rope was near the top, but the harnesses were a little buried. :Then I’ll anchor the rope and slide down it myself. With the rope, I shouldn’t even need to alter the local gravity level. Might have to on the way back up, but probably not.:

Sometimes Serenity was positively annoying. The way he was casually speaking about locally altering gravity brought home just how different he was from Thomas. Most of the time it was fine, but every now and then she still tripped over it.

Rissa shook herself and reminded herself that this was a good thing. Serenity was still Thomas where it was important, he was simply older and more adapted to the world they were in now than she was. She needed to catch up, not drag him backwards.

She didn’t say anything as he handed her the harness, then helped her with the last few adjustments before connecting it to the rope he was going to use to lower her down. She considered it a compliment that she was sent down first; both her fiancee and her father considered her capable enough to defend herself if something was down there they hadn’t noticed.

Fortunately, nothing was down there other than rocks and snow. She didn’t have to show off her competence.

Once they were all in the cave, Serenity took a good look around. They’d come in from the top, but the cave itself extended in two directions - uphill and downhill. It seemed to be a surprisingly circular tube that obviously ran down the slope. It wasn’t perfectly straight, but it was close.

They were almost exactly at the same elevation as the portal, now. Serenity checked the map, and it looked like they were closer to it than when he’d stopped the first time. That was probably a hint from the Voice that he’d completely missed; it had set the portal close to the actual opening in the side of the mountain.

The call seemed to be coming from uphill, more or less in the direction the lava tube went. That made which direction to try an easy choice. Conveniently, there also seemed to be fewer boulders in the way; it looked like most of them had fallen from the opening the three explorers used to enter.

As Serenity walked along the cylindrical cave, he watched the walls. There were a number of places where it seemed to wiggle or bend just a little, but no matter what it did it always pointed down-slope overall.

At about the time Serenity realized he was at the same height as the mental pull, he saw an opening in the side of the cave wall. It looked like a giant had simply torn the rock apart to get through. A giant with very large, flat hands. :I bet that opens into the cave with whatever we’re looking for. I’ll take the first look and tell you if we need to be careful. I’d expected to meet someone by now; where did everyone who was called before end up? I thought they were being called as workers or something.:

Serenity was beginning to doubt his earlier assumption that this was a beastmaster with a mental beast. It also didn’t feel like any mentalist Serenity had ever met; there was no thought to the call, just the pull itself.

:I assumed they were being eaten,: was Russ’s contribution. :Most things that call anyone or anything will, and we didn’t see any wildlife at all on the way up the mountain. You usually see something, though with the snow they might be out of sight.:

:Cheerful, you two.: Rissa clearly didn’t appreciate her father’s suggestion. :Now I’m going to have nightmares tonight even if we find something on the nice end. Thanks, Dad.:

Russ projected laughter at both of them. Serenity shook his head as he grinned. It was so nice not being alone.

He was still grinning when he reached the opening and waved for the other two to stop while he took a good look. It was a sharp turn, from a cave heading along the slope to a cave that seemed to spread horizontally along the side of the mountain.

The first thing he took in was the scale of the cave it opened into. It was noticeably shorter than the cave they were in, less than half the height with a roof in the center that Serenity was fairly certain he could walk under but one that would make him wonder if he was going to hit his horns with each step. It sloped down sharply on both sides, making an odd shape that looked distinctly triangular.

Despite how narrow it was, it was long, reaching past the end of Serenity’s Eyeless Sight range. He compared it to his map and knew that he’d found one of the things he was looking for: the location of the portal should be exactly in that direction. It was probably most of the way down the crack.

The mental pull wasn’t from the same direction as the portal. It seemed to come from one of the walls. Serenity scanned that wall carefully and noticed that there was an area that didn’t seem to be there; it had to be another opening, and it almost certainly led to whatever was calling. Serenity waved his fiancee and her father forward and explained what he’d seen silently as he crept forward, staying as quiet as he could manage.

When he reached the opening, he looked through it. What he saw with Eyeless Sight didn’t make any sense at all; there was a large, roughly dome-shaped bubble in the rock, but it was filled with a solid bubble that seemed almost as large. The solid bubble felt like where the call was coming from; for a moment it strengthened, trying to pull him forward to touch it, enter it.

Serenity resisted. He wasn’t going to do anything on its time, only on his own.

He still wasn’t sure it even realized he was there. He was fairly confident it still didn’t know Russ and Rissa were present.

He needed to actually see what was going on, so he pulled one of the remarkably small but extremely high-lumen flashlights they’d brought into the cave out and turned it on.

The “solid bubble” in the middle of the cave was translucent; he could see all sorts of things, mostly people, floating in it. They looked intact; even their gear looked intact. His first thought was that it reminded him of a Gelatinous Cube, only shaped like the domed room it was in instead of being cubical.

His second thought was that (as far as he knew), Gelatinous Cubes weren’t real, but there was a real creature that looked like this and had a mental attack. “Fucking hell.”

Serenity turned and waved both of the others forward. The creature wasn’t going to notice light, or even a little sound. Not if it was what he thought it was.

As they walked up, he played the light around the room, revealing just how much trouble they were in. Towards the back of the creature, Serenity could see some animals; the smaller ones were the size of large rabbits and seemed partially dissolved; anything smaller than that was already gone. The bigger ones (such as a bear that was closer to the front than most) seemed intact. That was good news, if it still needed the more complex, larger nonsapient creatures.

:What are we looking at? It sounded like you recognized it?: Rissa frowned at Serenity as she asked the question. She didn’t scold him for speaking out loud the way she had her father, but Serenity could tell she was thinking it.

:It’s called a Mind Thief. They’re nasty if they have time to grow. The one piece of good news is that I don’t think it has a controller and it’s not sapient yet. If it had a controller it wouldn’t have stopped in a cave, even in winter, and if it were sapient it would probably be starting to hunt. This one is still pretty small.: