There was no way to tell how long the two had sat in the darkness upon the fallen stone door. What was he going to do? The rjkari was stranded on this island, in a place where the is no safety. Security maybe, but no safety. The ceratogi sitting beside him eventually stood, moving over to a corner of the room and placing the canister of light down. Lokawestin, as he now knew its name to be, lay down curled up beside the canister. Perhaps he was trying to go to sleep. Quietly as he could, Tammrit stood and moved to look out the doorway. He was going to have to keep a look out while the ceratogi slept, especially if he was going to try and ask him to return the favour.
The ceratogi knew one word in his language, ‘You’, Tammrit couldn’t help but wonder what he actually thought the word meant. There was no way he actually understood just from hearing the sailor talk. It didn’t feel like a long time before he found himself sitting in the doorway, leaning against the stone frame as he looked out of the room into the dark tunnel stretching away in both directions. His own almost imperceptible glow lit the walls for several feet away from him, but beyond, the passages were just as dark to him as they would be to the Lokawestin.
He was growing hungry, tired, thirsty. They arrived on this island and hadn’t had a moment to stop and rest. He’d seen no food since they’d arrived. Odds are, he thought, they were going to die in this cave, far from anyone who might be looking for them. Not that anyone would be looking for them anymore. Trying his best to relax, the rjkari closed his eyes, breathing slower to keep calm.
“Lo newebara.” The ceratogi’s voice invaded his ear, it was quiet and calm but seemed to call to him. “Tammrit newebara” It was at this point he became aware of the feeling of a surface against his left side and his head tilted. Opening his eyes, the rjkari sat up, looking around slowly. When had he fallen asleep? How long had Lokawestin been keeping watch? Had he kept watch, or simply woken him the moment the ceratogi woke up himself?
Standing up, Tammrit rubbed his eyes as he glanced both ways in the hallway. He couldn’t see or hear anything moving toward them, or even just moving about in the distance. As he pushed himself to his feet, the rjkari’s stomach reminded him of another problem. “I don’t know about you, but I need some food.”
Lokawestin was looking at him rather intently, as if staring into his brain. The ceratogi was kneeling beside the pit of ash with the light canister gripped tight in his arms. “Kebes te alanastin. Kebaranes lo alanastra” He had no idea what the ceratogi was saying, but the tone of the second sentence sounded almost bitter. “Tammrit-” The ceratogi patted its mouth with one hand between words “- Tekawestin” he then paused, seemingly concentrating on something in his mind before speaking again; “Tammrit-” he patted his own mouth, then repeated himself and patted his own mouth again.
Suspecting he was being asked to repeat himself, the rjkari walked over to kneel by the dust. He could see several more lines on the map, the hallway and the markings of several doors had been added since he’d last looked. “I need some food.” It was probably better to repeat his exact wording just in case.
“Need”. Lokawestin repeated, looking from Tammrit down to the map and back. “Tammrit, need, food?” The ceratogi stood up, walking to the door and looking out with the canister clutched close to his chest. “Food?”
With a groan, the rjkari pushed himself to his feet again, turning to look at Lokawestin. How would one explain food without sharing a language? His first assumption was to mime eating, but even then there would be a pile of potential misconceptions. But no matter how hard he considered the problem, he couldn’t come up with a better idea. Hoping the ceratogi ate in a similar way to himself, Tammrit mimed moving food to his mouth, the chewing motion and swallowing. “Food”
The ceratogi’s eyes seemed to bore into him, seemingly studying the motion before it finally spoke up. “Food?” It copied the motions of eating. But then pointed to one hand with the other, pointing at the imaginary food “Food?”
“Food” Smiling, Tammrit copied the positioning the ceratogi was using to ‘hold food’ and held his hand out toward the rodent person. The ceratogi looked at the hand for barely a second before turning to stick his head through the doorway to look both ways in the dark hallway. “It’d be safer on the surface.” He warned, though the ceratogi didn’t respond. Instead, the rodent stepped out into the hall, looking back at him before walking out of view into the dark hallway. Tammrit almost sprinted to the door, he knew it was dangerous out there, but Lokawestin was his only company. As he skidded to a stop in the hallway just past the door, he could see the ceratogi had stopped not far, as if he knew he would follow. “Don’t do that. If we’re leaving the room we have to stay together.”
Lokawestin smiled, turning away from the rjkari but simply standing there. The rat only started walking again when Tammrit was a stride behind him, though the rjkari was easily able to fall into step beside him. They were heading in the direction opposite most of Tammrit’s explorations the day before. It became slightly annoying, that each time the two found a door ajar or collapsed into its room, the ceratogi would stop to peer into the room for at least a minute regardless how empty it might be.
As the two turned a corner, they found one wall give way to some cavernous space. The rjkari’s light was insufficient for him to see any boundaries of the space beside them. The explorers stood on a stone bridge, suspended in darkness. Again he could hear the sounds of movement deep in the darkness beyond. The sound of wings both above and below them, echoing off unseeable walls in the depths. He didn’t want to remain in the open like this. Grabbing the ceratogi’s shoulder, Tammrit hurried the two along the bridge in hopes of reaching the other side. Ahead the ground spread out away from the bridge, but no walls could be seen.
“Tammrit” the ceratogi’s voice, despite being whispered, echoed into the rjkari’s ears several times over until he looked down at Lokawestin. The ceratogi, holding the canister in one hand, tapped his ear with the other. Listen? What for? All he could hear was the fading sound of wings in the dark. But there was another sound that echoed weakly around the cave, the slow rhythmic striking of water into water. The plink was quiet and sharp; repeats of the sound seemed to cut into the echo’s of the prior splashes. “Food” The rjkari sighed as the ceratogi whispered a word once it had become clear he too could hear the noise.
“Water.” Tammrit made a specifically drinking motion. “Food” he then repeated his previous eating motion.
“Food, water, food” He would be amazed at how fast Lokawestin was explaining his ideas, if he wasn’t distracted by hunger. Water is needed, food grows near water. It made sense to him.
The difficulty now would be in trying to find where the water was, and making their way to it. Backing onto the bridge, Tammrit drew the gaspeite blade as his eyes focused on the end of the bridge. Sweeping his gaze from side to side, he could only just make out the strange cliff edge of the area Lokawestin stood. The ceratogi simply remained put, head tilted as he watched the rjkari examining the cliffs. “The cliff looks natural and fairly sturdy. There should be a passage down.” returning to solid ground, he moved to the cliffside that had been outside the range of his sight when on the bridge. He was kneeling at the edge as he peered over. Still the ground was too far down for his light to see properly. There were many clear ways down, but only one seemed to be safe enough to climb back up when they want to return. “I beg for passage, food moves in the darkness.” He whispered to the gaspeite blade, moving to hold the hilt in his mouth when it warmed slightly in response.
After taking a deep breath around the blade, the rjkari swung his feet over the edge of the cliff and lowered himself onto a small ledge from which a rough natural path extended down the rock wall into the darkness. As he looked down, he could see a shape move at the edge of his vision. Something quick in the darkness, almost glittering in his natural luminescence. It was at this point he made the concious effort to minimise his noise. Looking back up to the cliff edge, he held his arms out to help the ceratogi down. Lokawestin seemed reticent but handed him the canister he did not want to hold before swinging his own legs over the cliff and climbing down the rock.
Somewhere in the darkness, the rjkari sailor could hear something. It wasn’t movement, he couldn’t tell what it was, he’d never heard anything like it before. His attention was dragged back to Lokawestin as the ceratogi gingerly took the ancient canister away from him and began slowly inching down the natural slope. Placing his right hand against the wall and removing the gaspeite blade from his mouth with his left, Tammrit followed. There was no point trying to tell the ceratogi what he could see at times moving in the darkness. It would be too difficult to get the point across, and would distract him from keeping an eye out for further movement.
He was surprised at how ‘comfortable’ a walk down the cliffside it actually was. He had expected missing sections of stone, or sudden steep areas or even for the path to end completely. But it didn’t, in fact at two places the stone actually extended so the path could wrap back almost under itself. Eventually they found the ground. In the low light, it looked at first like the rock was moving ahead of them. Just the slight shifting from side to side kept them on the path until the splash of a single drop of water preceded a clear ripple. Lokawestin was the first to step foot into the water, the surface being no higher than the ceratogi’s ankles as he strode off into the darkness.
“Hey!” Tammrit splashed noisily off the path to follow him. “We don’t know if it’s all the same depth. Or if there’s anything in the water.” His right hand fell on the ceratogi’s shoulder to stop him. The rat man turned in place to look up at him for several seconds before pointing at the water and smiling, before pointing up into the air and frowning.
Not letting the ceratogi pass him, Tammrit checked the water ahead of them step by step for any changes in depth. Annoyingly he found the ceratogi to have been correct, at no point did it fall away to a deep sink hole. In fact the water remained at the ceratogi’s ankle depth as they crossed the strange surface in search of food. He could start to smell something as they neared a bank that rose from the still water. The tell tale stench of rot worming into his skin the closer they drew to the shoreline. Eventually, despite the ‘darkness’, both could make out a shape laying upon the shore, a pool of liquids around it.
He didn’t need the ability to make out the colour or texture of the liquids to know what they were. The rjkari stopped several strides from the edges of the pool, a pain ripping through his chest and up his spine as he looked at the pools. “I’m so sorry.” he whispered, taking a single step backward and gripping the gaspeite blade in his fist. “What kind of sick place is this?”
The ceratogi turned the corpse over. It was some strange animal with ten legs and a head somewhere between a bear and a shark but smaller. The body was covered in a weird kind of scales, they glittered in his light. It had wings of some description, which glittered as well but more cautiously than the rest of the beat. “Food” The ceratogi seemed to whisper as he grabbed one of the creature’s legs to attempt to pull it toward the rjkari. The pools of liquid rushed as the weight was pulled through them. He wasn’t going to be able to avoid touching the pools, so resigned himself to grabbing another of the creature’s legs and pulling it toward him. The beast was somewhere between the size of the ceratogi, and himself.
“Grant me the strength of the mountains. And the confidence of the caverns.” He groaned, heaving the beast up onto his shoulders to carry back the way they came. He didn’t want to try and cook this thing in the open, not with the movement in the darkness around them. The safest place was still the room they had been staying in. At least until something discovers the open door and comes visit.
Cook it. It occurred to him halfway up the rocky path that they had no way of making a fire. Even should they get this thing to secrecy, there was no way they could cook it. So what was the point in getting meat? They may as well have gone to the surface and stolen sticks first. It would have been just as dangerous. He was surprised to realise however, that he wasn’t carrying the weight of this creature alone. Lokawestin, walking behind him, was supporting one end of the mass, taking at least some of the weight for him.
Pushing the mass up onto the cliff was possibly the only difficult part of moving it. Tammrit was the second up, and he helped the ceratogi up with one arm while watching the darkness for anything coming to attack them. But nothing did. That was the most unsettling thing, he knew there were things still in the darkness out there. But nothing came to punish their taking the body. If this was a predator’s kill, wouldn’t it want to protect it? If this was something’s kin that died of old age, wouldn’t they want to guard it from predators? Lokawestin pulled his attention back to the moment as he attempted to lift the creature on his own.
After Tammrit hoisted the creature up onto his shoulder Lokawestin remained behind him, lifting the heavy end dangling behind the rjkari. Even with the aid of the gaspeite blade, the creature was almost too heavy to carry alone. He wanted to use the body to bash down a door and just take security in a different room. But then there’s the chance something would hear the new door falling. They were lucky nothing investigated the first one. The rjkari groaned upon entering ‘their room’, depositing the corpse as gently as he could on the floor and slumping to a sitting position on the collapsed door.
He watched as the ceratogi scurried past to the small ash pit. “Hey, we need to find some way to cook this thing.” But Lokawestin ignored him, instead very carefully adjusting his map in the dirt. The vast cavernous room wasn’t finished, likely because he could not have seen the edges. But as the ceratogi began scribbling text beside the map, he paused and adjusted the cave to finish its shape before returning to the foreign text. “Did you just want to leave to get more information for the map?”
Lokawestin shifted his weight so he was sitting on his heels as he knelt at the edge of the fire pit. His head sat tilted to the left for several minuted before he finally stood again and moved to the wall. Slowly, the ceratogi began feeling its way around the wall of the room, making sure to check as high as his hands could reach. About three strides to the left of the doorframe and at the top of his reach, the ceratogi’s hand visibly brushed against something. It was some protrusion from the rock; “Rembos te nata”
Standing at the tip of his toes, Lokawestin’s hand moved across the protrusion. As his hand passed it, the light grew in the room, a large fire crackling into existence from the ash alone of the pit where he’d been scribbling. Tammrit wanted to leap up. He wanted to slap the ceratogi. How long had he known about this? Why hadn’t he done it sooner so he wouldn’t have to go searching for a light source. But just as he opened his mouth to begin his tirade, the rjkari watched as the ceratogi turned over the body in the room and begin his measuring of its limbs.
Pushing himself to his feet, Tammrit strode over to look at the creature as well. The creature’s wings were bizarre. A membrane spread between ‘fingers’ like the wings of a bat, but this membrane was strangely transparent and he could see thick winding veins in them. The veins didn’t even seem to lead anywhere in particular, simply spiralled over and among themselves. The creature’s whole body was covered with a thicker form of this strange membrane; winding veins included. The ceratogi’s finger was tracing the paths of the veins of one wing, turning the wing over to repeat on the other side. He seemed to be growing more and more anxious the more he studied these strange veins
“What’s wrong?”
"Kemza igronis" the ceratogi looked up at him, visibly shaken and apparently confused as he repeated himself. "Kemza igronis"