Faithful Pebble
Part Thirty
The light was shaking, shivering. Swaying steadily left, right, then left again, it trailed him as he ambled on, the wanderer. Meandering down that stout, narrow path, he followed the light's leading in an uncertain silence endeavoring to reign in thoughts that rambled, that shifted, swayed and blurred like the light that steadily penetrated the darkness. Her darkness choked the air around them. It encompassed the two travelers like a velvet glove, an infinite nest of molten arms dripping in liquid silk and ink. Cutting those grasping, gripping, gruesome fingers with silver and warmth, the light drifted from the watch, the watch from two clawed dirt crusted hands, those hands from chocolate-brown fabric woven around arms that coarsely embraced his neck. They hugged him calmly from behind. Torpidly. Tightly. Timorously. The wanderer shuttered his eyes, halted mid step and took a breath. He needed to focus, to restrain his mind and daydreaming heart. After a moment, though, he unveiled his gaze. Those glittering blue rimmed pupils slit open and drifted left as the light guided them, as she guided them in the dark, in the silence that only seemed to smother the air around them. He suddenly stopped.
Seeing in the shaking light emerging from her hand, the wanderer marveled finding a rough carved set of stone work steps. Made purely out of massive buried boulders, the man blinked up gawking as awe caused his jaw to drip, to hang loosely like a high swung sack. He could barely see the top. "Did… did you make these?" he asked.
Again, somewhere behind him a hood slowly swayed tickling his neck, catching his breath unexpectedly. "You didn't?"
"The rocks were there," she explained softly. "I dug around them until I reached the top."
The wanderer began to climb, his breath puffing in his exertion. He was getting tired.
"There should be fifty steps up and then forty even steps to the left leading to a wall. It feels like stone."
"Fifty? Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty—"
"You can see in the dark?"
"You can't?" the man asked suddenly, genuinely curious. "If you can't see in the dark, then how did you—"
"Sound, touch, atmosphere… memory. I have been down here a very long time and the darkness has forced me to adapt."
"Forty, forty-three… Yes, I know." He paused at the top a moment feeling her slip off his shoulders. "What you've built here. It's quite amazing."
"I didn't build it," she interrupted moving around him, leading him further down the newly found tunnel. "Apart from a tunnel here or there, all the others, I found those."
"Found?" The man watched her. "Who… what would make—"
"You mean, you don't know?" She looked back at him, her hood tilted.
Sorry for the late chapter. I'm in a show pretending that I can sing, act and dance. Between that and a car accident, life is about as hectic as it gets right now. But don't worry. I will endeavor to keep posting weekly as regular. The plan is to get another chapter up in a day or two to make up for being behind the last two weeks. So, keep an eye out. - Calla