Deep, deep into the earth she went, so deep that the narrow tunnel around her started to vibrate her bones with the weight of it. She felt the fear, the knowledge that if anything shifted then it would all come down and she’d be buried, lost and never found, not even when she was only bones. She would have vanished as if she’d never been.
In those long ago days, that scared her more than it would in her future. There were others to think about, then. While the call of her curiosity was always the strongest, a small thread led back from the back of her thoughts to her home and her parents, especially her mother who had no one but the two of them. She carried that with her like a lifeline, but she’d release it indefinitely if she could, unravelling it behind her as she went, if only it meant she could go deeper and deeper down.
No tunnel went so far without purpose. There was an exit somewhere. She could sense it.
She could smell it.
That gave her pause. She *could* smell it. She stopped in the tunnel, sniffed, breathed in, and pondered what she tasted. Salt and a cool breeze mixed with the scents of earth and cold stone. The smell was familiar, like the scent of the things her father would bring back from his trips to civilization.
Now she abandoned her mental thread entirely, dropped it behind her like so much excess baggage, all with a quiet but rushed apology to her parents as she forged on ahead, her nervousness about the earth forgotten entirely. A tunnel didn’t go that deep or that far without a purpose, however forgotten it might be, and this one was about to reveal itself.
The tunnel curved suddenly, and packed earth gave way to broken stone tiles. They were old. Maybe they were ancient. She couldn’t see the details of them, but beneath her feet she felt the millions of tiny cracks that littered their surface, smoothing out gradually as she walked along. When they finally smoothed out, there was light to shine upon them. Very dim, but coming from a point far ahead. It wasn’t sunlight. It wasn’t even torchlight. This was something she hadn’t seen before – a faint blue glow that flickered and wavered in a surprisingly soothing pattern up ahead.
It was like water in a pond, but brighter and more ethereal.
She crossed the final distance and found herself, of all places, in a closet.
That was the best description she had. The walls resolved themselves at the end of the tunnel and the room was a tiny square of space. In the ceiling was a bubble of glass, or what looked like glass, and beyond was water filled with small many-legged creatures. They, she realized, were the source of the light. As they darted around, they flashed blue, filling the water with their ilumination, and filling the room with faint light.
She marvelled at them, astonished and stood beneath for a full minute before her mind slowly caught with her eyes, reminding her that she’d just crawled and stumbled through the longest tunnel that her young self had ever found, undearneath the forest, deep into the earth, all for the result of one tiny little ceiling lamp full of glowing sea creatures,
She blinked, lowered her gaze again, and began to look around.
There had to be more.