I slipped beneath the shuttered doors and found myself upon a wet stone floor, and with each clatter of my feet against the stone I could hear the echoes down in the darkness, thick and ichorous with mystery. Light shone in through an eek above me and did not go further than a few yards, but once my eyes adjusted I noted a faint amber light that brightened as I followed the pull of gravity down the slope.
The damp filled my mouth and my nose and oppressed my senses as the cold began to grip me by the fingers and toes. I must have been no more than fifteen steps down before I had no light before me and was navigating by the suggestion of the amber glow before me. I could hear the stirring of sleeping waters, and before long I was touching them. My shoes were soaked cold, but this was as deep as I needed to be.
I cast my hand across the waters to feel for something—anything. Smooth glass rolled into my palm, and pushed itself up towards me. I was holding a carafe now.
Just then, my eyes caught a field of brilliance emerge beneath me, made of tiny marbles which came to the very top like wisps of the first light of dawn. Soon followed dimmer stones, and then ones as dark as the crawl down here. These were the minor secrets of every valence. I dipped the carafe into the waters and watched it fill. This wasn’t something you drank, but it looked tempting.
As I made to leave, I felt a deep rumble and lost all sense of the light from above. Something massive and putrid had risen up from the waters, and it was soon evident I was at the shore of a large lake within a cavern. By the light of the brightest secrets I started to make out the image—the pickled skull of some great dragon. It put terror into me, so I waded away from it, and tried to climb back up the way I came, but my feet were too wet and my hands found no purchase. I slid back down in the waters, towards the fetid skull, again and again.
“You,” it said in a voice like steel drums, “you know better than to take from here.”
I gave up trying to climb away. I could only follow the edge of the stone now, further out into the distant edge of the lake. The head was turning now to watch me, and its empty eyes followed mine.
“These are not things to be taken back,” it said in a voice like bleating horns.
It was some time before I turned back to face the skull, but when I did, I noticed it had grown eyes and sprouted a second mouth in the terrible shape of a man’s.
“Are you ready to reckon with your spoils?” it asked in a voice like a failing radio.
I was moving as fast as I could. In time, it found a neck, and a trunk, and a whole body. It was rearing itself above me, and it snorted flames by which I could see the rotting flesh hang off its bones.
“There are no ungoings, now,” it declared finally, in a whisper that sounded like the whistle of a door in a hurricane. I could hear its stride in the waters, and felt the waves crash me forward along my way. I finally reached a gritty shore, and found footing there.
“There will be no recanting,” I felt myself say. I ran blindly in the uncomfortable soil and ran into slick walls, and followed those until I breached fresh air again, and I was on a dark shore of glass, under an empty sky.