Chapter 21
XIRAXIS IS CALMER NOW (FOR FIVE MINUTES)
MIKAELA
The mountain swallows us again.
Our little crew moves single-file through the tightest stretches, baskets and tools bumping the walls, breath fogging in the cool air. Behind us, the echoes of the clan’s bustle fade, replaced by dripping rock and the soft scrape of feet.
Sarven leads, glow turned low so it doesn’t blind anyone in the dark, but bright enough to paint his shoulders in dim gold ahead of me. I’m close behind, Erika at my back, then Rok, Tharn, Vorn, Keth, and the others stretching out into the tunnel.
No one talks much.
Work hums ahead of us like a pressure front. So does the memory of what waits at the end of this walk.
The first hint is the humidity.
The air temperature rises another few degrees, the damp, rotting heat of the bloom pressing against us.
My stride stutters.
The tunnel opens suddenly, and we spill out onto the ledge that rims the heart-cavern.
The pool lies below us, dark and glassy, steaming in the humidity. The leaping column of light from the shaft above looks almost exactly as it did before.
My body remembers faster than my mind. That instance of weightlessness as my foot slipped, the impact, the suffocating heat of the surface slime, then the shock of the freezing deep.
For a second, the cavern doubles.
I stop dead at the edge of the drop.
My fingers curl into fists. My heart jackhammers against my ribs so hard it hurts. I am standing solidly on rock, and my stupid brain is screaming, ‘Don’t fall again’.
The spike of panic blasts through the mindspace before I can stop it.
Sarven’s glow flares.
He’s at my side almost before I finish gasping, one big hand warm and solid between my shoulder blades, the other lightly catching my forearm as if any second I’ll bolt or tumble.
“Alive, little dra-kir,” his voice says in my mind. “You are here. Rock under your feet. Here with me.”
I swallow hard and taste minerals and phantom water.
“I’m okay,” I say, half to him, half to the part of me that clearly needs an update memo.
He doesn’t move his hand.
“You do not have to go closer,” he offers quietly, the thought like a door he’s willing to open if I want to bolt. “I can do the work. You stay on the ledge. Watch.”
The idea tempts for one hot, weak second.
But that’s not why I came.
If I leave this cavern as only the place I almost died, it’s going to own a piece of me forever. Every time someone mentions the spring, my body will do this stupid adrenaline trick. Every time I see a pool, I’ll see the wrong one.
I hate that idea more than I hate being scared right now.
Slowly, I make myself uncurl my fists.
Sarven watches me, the question hanging between us.
I step forward.
One pace. Two. Close enough that the lip of the rock falls away in front of my toes, and the mist dampens my shins.
My stomach swoops. My breath hitches again.
But I don’t stop.
I look down at the water.
It looks…exactly the same as before. Dark. Deep. That faint reddish sheen of algae tendrils swirling just above the spot where the current wells up from the crack in the rock.
My heart thuds so hard I can hear it in my ears.
I let it.
This place tried to kill me. Now I’m back on my own feet.
“Hi,” I whisper under my breath, feeling faintly ridiculous and not caring. “We’re doing this my way now.”
I reach down and skim my fingers through the surface.
The water is warm to the touch, slick with the bloom, but I pull my hand back. Wet, trembling, but mine.
Something in my chest unlocks.
Okay.
I can do this.
Behind us, Erika clears her throat gently. “We’re on a timeline here, boss lady, or are you communing with the water for a while longer?”
“Multitasking,” I say, voice steadier. I step back from the very edge, giving the rock enough respect to not tempt fate. “We stick to the plan. Quick in, quick out.”
Sarven squeezes my shoulder once, then turns to the rest of the crew.
He starts giving instructions in the mindspace, gesturing to the cleaner side of the pool. Erika adds a few clipped comments in English about load-bearing and not undermining the wrong part of the ledge.
Over the next few hours, they do exactly what we agreed. We haul rock. A lot of rock.
It’s sweaty, repetitive work rather than delicate engineering.
Vorn and Keth pry stone slabs free from the cavern wall with grunts and mindspace curses, Rok and Tharn wrestle them into place near the outflow channel.
Sarven moves as if he was born to rearrange mountains, shouldering blocks twice my size, feeling for the places where the rock wants to lock together.
But his eyes never stop scanning the high shadows.
Every ten minutes, he pauses, listening for something I can’t hear.
I spend most of my time wading knee-deep along the shallow edges, pointing out where the current curves strongest, where the water looks least slick with the contaminant.
Erika is a constant presence at my shoulder, muttering to herself, double-checking that we’re not just redirecting the poison somewhere it’ll bite us later.
My muscles burn. My lower back starts a low ache. My hands go from numb to prickling to just…there, wrinkled from the water.
Sometime in the middle of it, when the immediate edge of fear has worn down into a background hum, I tilt my head back and look up.
The shaft of light that cuts down from the high ceiling is as bright as it was that first time, a white-gold column in the mist. Droplets catch it and break it into a thousand tiny flares.
No face.
Just brightness. Mist. The distant suggestion of an opening to the outside world, far, far above, too high to reach.
I stand there, breathing hard, watching.
“You are staring at empty air,” Sarven comments in my head, and I sense his curiosity along with a faint, private worry that I might be slipping back into that fugue state.
“Just checking,” I murmur.
His hand brushes my lower back briefly as he passes with another stone.
By the time my legs and back ache in that deep, satisfied way that says, “You’re going to regret stairs tomorrow,” we’ve changed the way the mountain’s heart bleeds into the clan’s cistern.
The flow from the spring is different now. Slower, forced through the gaps between our chosen stones before it can race down the tunnel. The worst of the red film clings to the rock barrier, trapped by the charcoal and sand before it can stream into the outflow.
It’s not perfect. But it’s better.
I can feel it in the way Sarven’s shoulders don’t tense quite as much near the new path of the water.
“Good,” he says simply.
We’re all too tired for speeches.
We pack up what we brought: tools, firestones we didn’t use, a few samples of the flora Erika insisted on sampling for later analysis. My shoes squelch with every step as we file back into the tunnels, leaving the heart-cavern behind.
The bathing chamber in the main cavern smells like those strange scales we use for soap.
By the time we slog back in, limp with fatigue, Haroth and the others have been busy. Baskets are strung along the inflow channels, dark with wet firestone dust and sand.
The mental background of the clan is tense, and now, as we step out of the tunnel into the main space, that intensity spikes. Everyone turns to look, questions flaring, and then, as their eyes take in the fact that we are all upright and not dead, that tension ripples into something else.
Cautious anticipation.
Kol is already there, watching the trickle from the new arrangement of channels. Sarven and I head for the closest inflow where a basket is catching the newly diverted water.
It runs through the filter in a steady stream, clear as it falls into the stone basin below. I crouch, joints protesting, and dip the drinking ladle in.
Old instincts make me hesitate for a fraction of a second.
“Sample first,” I mutter, more to appease my inner lab tech than anything else.
We don’t have proper analyzers here, but we have enough: my body and Sarven’s nose. Between us, we’re a decent canary in a carbon-filtered coal mine.
I straighten and hold the ladle near Sarven.
He steps closer, expression going intense.
Earlier, just being close to the unfiltered water had made him bristle. Now, standing half a meter from this ladle, he closes his eyes briefly.
The bond lets a whisper of his sensory input bleed through.
“Cold.”
I nod. The heat from the source hasn’t bled down this far yet. The mountain is cooling it before it reaches us.
His jaw unclenches. “Better,” he says quietly. “Much.”
My shoulders sag in relief. “If we boil this, I think we can probably actually have drinkable water.”
Kol steps forward. “You say the water is safe?”
“Safe-ish,” I hedge, because overselling anything on this planet feels like tempting fate.
“Safe enough. Filtered and then boiled, it should be okay to drink. The worst of the bad stuff is getting stuck up there now.” I jerk my chin in the approximate direction of the heart-cavern.
“We’ll need to watch it. But…we bought some time. ”
We bought ourselves time.
Kol is quiet for a long heartbeat.
Then he looks down into the cistern, watching the water pour in.
His hand falls lightly to the rim of the stone basin, claws splayed.
In the mindspace, there’s a tremor. Not words exactly, but a shared breath that ripples through the gathered Drakav. Relief. Relief and…gratitude.
A few scattered mental voices spark brighter:
“The females will live.”
“The Daughters won’t dry out.”
Something relaxes in the lines around Kol’s eyes. “Xiraxis is calmer now,” he projects.
We leave the filter doing its work in the dark and head back to the main cavern. When we finally step into the firelight of the main gathering space, the mood shifts instantly. Heads turn. Eyes widen. The air is thick with waiting.
“Now for the hard part,” I murmur to Alex.