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“Be careful!” Sazahk rushed to his bag. “My microscope is the most important tool we have.”
“You have like four of them,” Garin scoffed. “And our most important tool is this rope or our water generator.”
“All the more reason not to throw our bags around.” Sazahk unclipped the rope from the two bags. “Alright, you?—”
A clatter and two distinct, sharp footsteps echoed on Sazahk’s left. His chest seized, and he whirled toward the sound, stumbling a few steps away from it. But again, his light landed on nothing.
Sazahk swallowed. “You should get down here now, Garin.”
“Sazahk?” Garin’s tone turned serious as he picked up on Sazahk’s tension before Sazahk had even processed it. “Sazahk, what’s wrong?”
“I think there’s something down here.” Sazahk unzipped his pack with shaking hands, looking for the combat knife Bar’in had snuck into it. He didn’t really know how to use a combat knife and he didn’t even really want to hurt or kill whatever precious living creature was down here, but he didn’t want to die a horrible, bloody death by unknown assailant in the dark either.
“Shit.” Garin’s hissed expletive only made it to Sazahk’s ears because the cavern had fallen deathly quiet again.
Sazahk strained his hearing as the rope lifted into the dark again, but all he heard were the thuds, clicks, and clips of Garin doing whatever it was he had to do up there to get himself down here.
“I’m on my way.”
Clicking that sounded nothing like Garin’s climbing gear sounded from above and a flash of movement skittered away from Sazahk’s headlamp beam.
“Garin, it’s coming to you!” Sazahk abandoned the search for his knife and jumped to his feet.
“What is it?” Garin demanded as he rappelled through the shaft and approached the pinch point.
“I don’t know, but it clicks when it moves and it runs from my light and it’s moving toward the chute,” Sazahk rattled off every observation he’d made and wished he’d had more. “Maybe you shouldn’t?—”
But Garin slipped through the pinch point without being mauled at the entrance.
“Thank the goddess. Never mind. I thought you’d—Garin!” Sazahk’s relief burst into panic when Garin jerked right, then swung left, swinging like a pendulum.
“Fucking shit!” Garin swore as he veered through the darkness. “What the hell?”
Both their headlamps darted to the entrance of the chute, where a dark shape swallowed up the rope, shaking and jerking.
Sazahk gaped at the beast, one too far and shrouded in too much darkness to make out, and remembered the creature he’d seen from a distance with Bar’in. He wished with a stinging self-loathing that he’d insisted on following it before, so he’d know what it was, so he could help Garin now as he swung through the open air.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Garin kept rappelling, dropping as the animal gave his rope another vicious yank, sending him careening to the side. “Shi?—”
Garin’s scream reverberated through the cavern when the rope snapped.
Sazahk stood, frozen and horrified, as Garin sailed through the air, the beam of his headlamp spinning wildly as he tumbled into the darkness.
He landed in a burst of light.
Sazahk recoiled and shielded his eyes with both arms as a bright green blaze burned away his night vision.
“Garin?” Sazahk squeezed his eyes shut against the dazzling afterimages. He heard gasping and coughing and stumbled toward the sound. “Garin?”
“I—” Garin devolved into a coughing fit and Sazahk pushed forward.
“Garin, are you…” Sazahk forced his eyes open and stilled in awe.
Green threads and blooms of light lit the entire cavern. Garin lay in a small copse of what looked like huge, frilly mushrooms that gave off a vibrant emerald glow. Spilling out from the mass of fungus were ropes and veins of the same color, crawling along the floor and up the wall and arching along the ceiling overhead. They encased the room like a fine, glowing net.
Sazahk followed the tangled throngs of sinewy hyphae threading across the rock with an open-mouthed gaze. Emotion choked his throat at the shocking beauty of it.
But another cough tore Sazahk out of his reverie, and he sprang forward.
