Something was wrong. She knew it, but not until it was far too late to just turn back. It went too far. It went too deep. In the blackness under the earth, she turned in a slow circle, always mindful of where she’d come from, but now much too intrigued by where she had yet to go.
Even if it led to oblivion itself.
—
At that memory, she scoffed. If her younger self could have seen the future, she would have had a fit from sheer joy. It made her wish that she could connect again with that sort of naivete, if only to bask in the unrestrained excitement that only seemed to exist in childhood. There was nothing worse – adulthood coming along and making reality sink in, explaining away all of the mysteries and sucking the wonder out of every interaction with the world. What did it matter, she thought, if there were unseen worlds beneath their own? What did the undiscovered really matter if it was all on land owned by people like the Priestesses, who only permitted certain people at certain times for not too long to traverse the spaces that they themselves had no idea of the contexts of?
Closed off behind heavy doors, bolts and locks, and the complete lack of a sense of adventure and curiosity.
Pausing in her descent, she leaned over to the railing and gazed into the abyss. She’d never seen the bottom. It made her think of that childhood fantasty, entertained while she crouched in a tunnel beneath a crushing weight of earth and with the rest of the world heavy beneath her feet.
The bottom of the world. The bottom of everything. How would one even know it had been reached? There was more dirt at the bottom of the bay. The deepest parts of it were just deep water and beyond that was silt and stone for who knew how long.
This was the deepest cavern she knew. She’d gone far, far down, but there was further still to go and maybe somewhere in that blackness was a tunnel that led to a tunnel that led to the perfect place, where the weight of all was above her head and no one else had ever seen or been.
She still entertained that wonder – was there anywhere that went that deep? What would even be down there? More darkness, she assumed, and maybe peace.
She shone her flashlight ahead along the path. It forked left and right, but she had a feeling that she’d have to explore both. Flicking the light back and forth for a time, she muttered an old nursery rhyme under her breath, stopping the light where she stopped the words.
Left. It was left.
She adjusted her supplies, shuffling them to a more sturdy position on her back, and then took a few steps left to press her shoulder to the wall. She flicked her flashlight off again, and then proceeded in comfortable darkness down towards the first chamber.