Chapter 12
Zathar
With regret, because my cock was painfully hard for my mate, I gathered her in my arms. I slung my backpack with supplies on my back and then we were off, headed for the looming mouth of the Ancestor’s cave in the distance.
I knew that Astrexa wouldn’t give up, she was going to follow us and I doubted that any superstitions would stop her from entering the cave either.
Definitely not the standing decree from the Queen that banned any Clan members from exploring them.
The Queen had previously broken her own rules after all; Astrexa would think the means justified the end result.
Our way out of this narrow valley was cut off by now too, I had no doubt that hunters were circling the place at this very moment.
The only way out was through the mountain, deeper into the caves.
Corin and I had only ever skimmed the surface, this was going to make my ever-curious friend so very jealous.
I felt better about our odds as soon as I slithered through the carved gate into the dark tunnel.
But no light was coming from the guard chamber we’d taken over as our home during our banishment.
I deflated a little, which meant Iave wasn’t here and a quick search of the place showed he hadn’t dropped by and left again.
Worried about my friend, I took a moment to set Vera down; but I left a portion of my tail wrapped around her middle.
“I need to leave a mark for Iave, so he knows where to find us if he gets here.” If, not when; I wasn’t so certain now that he’d made it and the thought made me sad.
Iave was brash, and most days he was a grumpy asshole, but he was one of my closest friends; always ready to have my back.
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Vera offered, “He seemed very big and capable.” She hesitated while she watched me scratch symbols into the stone wall with my knife. “I think Kalani might be his mate. If it’s true that a mate makes you stronger… Then that must have helped them survive.”
Her words gave me pause as I contemplated them. It was true, I had felt stronger, and she was right about Iave and Kalani too. That I’d definitely seen, even if he hadn’t touched her yet, and displayed glowing mating sigils where I could see.
During my fight with the hunters, I’d been severely outmatched.
I was a strong fighter and a good hunter, but so were Reshar and Msera.
When I told the others to flee, I’d intended to fight them for a few minutes and then run, but with Vera right there, that wasn’t an option.
Yet somehow, I’d bested them. I had escaped the fight with deep bruising along my back and a few scratches on my arms but that was it. It should have been impossible.
Finishing the last symbol for Iave, I glanced down at the pale yellow hair on top of my mate’s head. She had helped, and her aim had been good. I needed to make her a sling so she could be more effective next time.
“Thank you,” I said to her, “That helps. Iave is like a brother to me, closer even.” I laughed ruefully because Reshar was my direct kin.
And while he’d let us go, he hadn’t been on my side and I doubted he’d do it a second time.
It was his fascination for the bravery Vera had displayed that had stayed his hands, not any love for me.
“That must be nice,” she said quietly, a hint of wistfulness to her tone that I intended to investigate.
“Are we going into the caves? Down that giant tunnel?” she gestured with one hand out the chamber, deeper into the mountain and I nodded, trying to gauge her reaction to that news.
She seemed excited, curious even, which was good.
I had to remind myself that she came from the stars, with a sky-ship, she probably knew more of the technologies we scavenged than I did.
With my message scratched into the wall, it was time for us to go but I did a final sweep of the chamber just to be sure I wasn’t leaving anything useful behind. For Vera’s sake, I lit a lantern to guide her way, and then we walked into the dark tunnel gaping like the giant maw of a beast.
Since we weren’t in a rush, I let her walk, allowing my bruised body to take a break for the next while. I didn’t think Astrexa was gutsy enough to actually follow us deep into the caves, so I breathed easy as soon as the gate was just a tiny dot of light behind us.
Nothing branched off, there were no other passages for at least an hour as we walked in the dark.
Just a long narrow line down the center of the tunnel, and unlit crystals that dotted the ceiling at precise intervals.
At some point, Vera pulled me with her to the side of the tunnel to lay her hand on the wall and she grinned.
“Woah Zathar, the walls are made of viewscreens or something. Wanna bet that during its heyday, this entire tunnel was filled with images? Maybe they made it look like you were above ground.”
I did not know what a heyday was, but I knew what she meant with a viewscreen.
The Shaman, Artek, had such viewscreens in his home, and each time I saw them, I marveled at the images they could display.
I tried to imagine it the way Vera described and it was mind-blowing to picture a ceiling like a sky and walls like the forest outside. That seemed like pure magic to me.
“Why would they do such a thing?” I asked her.
At least it was comforting to know that she could make sense of what we might discover down here.
She answered with a lot of words, about how daylight was good for people, that it might be pretty, or show the status of the world above ground.
She had lots of ideas and I liked that she was talking with so much enthusiasm the more she warmed up to the idea.
But she was flagging too, her feet dragging the further we walked.
We had to find a place to camp out for a few hours and grab some sleep, but I didn’t like how big and exposed this tunnel was.
I wanted to find us a nice secluded spot, with no draft preferably.
To boost our flagging energies I handed her a filling ration cake; she took it and immediately started nibbling as we walked.
The sight of her blunt teeth and soft lips working on the food made my blood heat and my cock grow heavy and thick in my pouch. Another reason to locate a good spot for a nest, I needed my mate in my coils as soon as possible.
It took us both by surprise when the long tunnel suddenly opened up to a steep drop.
Vera let out a shocked gasp when we reached the edge, peering over it to stare down into the deep black below.
“You know,” she mused out loud. “I don’t think this tunnel was meant to be traversed on foot.
” She glanced at my long tail and added, “Or tail.” I did not understand what other option there was, this was a tunnel underground, and it wasn’t as if a sky-ship could fit.
My eyes couldn’t make out much beyond the ledge, the place was vast and cavernous, with no light to reach the corners. I needed very little to be able to see, but our lantern light could not reach far enough to help even me.
“I think there’s a path down this way, shall we try it?
” Vera asked, pointing to my left, where the open platform we were on, curved along a smooth, round wall down into the depths.
I led the way, but since there was no railing to prevent either us from a deadly fall, I made sure to keep my body between my mate and the dark abyss.
As we walked, I started to see shapes in the dark, tall towers, and buildings with many gaping windows.
It was like my village but everything was bigger and just more, and the buildings were starting to get crowded together the further we descended.
I tried to wrap my head around what I was seeing but it baffled me how so many buildings could exist in one place, underground.
Did so many ancestors live here together?
That was more Naga than all the known Clans together.
When the path suddenly started to level off I was certain we’d reached the bottom of this giant village.
We ended up in a little square with three buildings surrounding us and the unnaturally smooth wall of the cave behind us.
The building directly across had this tunnel running through the center, a building with a path underneath it; it was absurd.
The center of the square had a round basin with several shapes curling above it. Vera laughed when she saw it in the light of the lantern. “A fountain, wow. This looks like a city Zathar. What happened to your people? Why are you no longer living in this place? I don’t understand.”
I didn’t understand it either, not really. I had a vague recollection of stories hunters told at the campfire. Ghost stories told to scare the younglings but not real history. “Some say a calamity struck our world, long ago. But I never believed it and I don’t know what.”
She slid her hand along the smooth, pale stone of the basin but her eyes were raised to the tall building beyond it.
Staring at the black holes that dotted its facade she murmured, “Well, you’ve got to believe it now, just look at this place.
” She pointed at a shape near a doorway, “There’s all kinds of technology here.
There’s another screen over there, and this place couldn’t have been built by hand. ”
I had to agree with that, I didn’t know of any Clans that built stone buildings, let alone carved them out of the mountain.
My old Clan built their homes of clay and straw, Copper Tooth did something similar out in the swamps, but on stilts, and the scattered Water Clan liked to build their wooden homes over the water.
Nobody did something like this; that was stuff the ancestors left behind.