I find fish, too, or the long-dead remains of them. When my fingers touch a particularly long bone, Doscach gets very excited, pushing it toward me. It’s from an animal, and he clearly expects another reaction, snorting and dancing when I fail to leap up in astonishment.
“I can’t see, Doscach,” I say. “It’s too dark.”
Still grumbling, I carry the bone into the light. It takes time to figure out what I’m holding. It’s a large leg bone, neither particularly sturdy nor slender. I frown at it. Doscach nudges me and prances away, and I turn to glower at him. Then I see his own legs.
“It’s a ceffyl-dwr bone,” I say. “Is that what you wanted me to see? A ceffyl-dwr died here? One you knew?”
I’m not sure what to make of that. If it was part of his birth herd, then that would be a tragedy for him but, at the risk of sounding terribly callous, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.
Does he think I can do something? Heal his dead pack mate? No, he’s a monster—he’s smarter than that.
I squint up at the source of light. While the hole seems big enough to climb through, I hadn’t considered doing so because it’s at least twenty feet off the ground. Now, with my eyes better adjusted, I’d estimate it’s more like fifty feet.
No. I must be seeing wrong. The ceiling can’t be that high, or this cavern would need to be inside a mountain as big as…
As big as Mount Gaetal.
I’m inside Mount Gaetal.
If the ceiling is that high, how big is this cavern?
I begin to explore. Doscach keeps close and Jacko stays on my shoulders, alert now and audibly sniffing. As I walk, I look for another source of light and soon spot a second hole. Through it, the moon shines bright. I continue walking, only to pick up yet another, even brighter source of light. By then, I’ve walked at least a hundred feet. This cavern is immense.
I reach the brighter source of light, and I have no idea what it is. The ceiling stretches impossibly high here, and it seems as if the walls themselves glow. Some kind of phosphorescent vegetation? None of it is reachable from here, but I could get closer. To my left, there’s a slope. If it is phosphorescent vegetation, I can gather some to get a better look around the cavern.
The ascent begins easily enough, then it gets tough, and I need to set Jacko down. He begins climbing alongside me. When he disappears into a crevice, I have to laugh. Apparently, he’s recovered. Soon, though, he begins chittering.
As I peer into the crevice, he backs out, tugging a fish skeleton as long as my arm. He dives back in and returns, dragging another, the bones rattling over rock.
“Isn’t that strange,” I say. “Something must have dragged them up here. A cath palug, maybe?”
I continue climbing as Jacko hops about nimbly from ledge to ledge. As the glowing light illuminates this passage, I begin to see shells. Dozens, even hundreds of shells, apparently left by birds. Odd that there’s so many of them.
I climb another foot and give a start as I find myself staring into the eye holes of a fish head. Another skeleton, this one wedged between two rocks. In a cavern this big, with so many nooks and crannies, why would a predator drag prey so high? I hoist myself onto the next ledge and let out a yelp.
It’s another skeleton. A fish with teeth. An encantado—a monstrous river dolphin. The skeleton alone is at least six feet long. How could anything nimble enough to climb this high drag it up here?
I look up to see what appears to be another dolphin-like skull on the ledge above. I climb and suck in a breath that echoes through the cavern.
Nothing dragged them up here. Nothing could.
How would fish and aquatic mammals get up here? If the water was here, too. If they were living their lives, tucked away in their holes or swimming along and then, suddenly, the water was not there, and they were stranded.
I stare down at the lower encantado skeleton, and I shiver as I imagine its fate. The water is gone, and it flops and wriggles over the edge of its home cave…only to land on more dry rock. It dies away from its family.
I touch dried vegetation. Water plants left without water, shriveling and disintegrating.
My gaze sweeps the cavern. A cavern so big that in the dim light, I cannot even make out the whole of it.
Water. All this had been filled with water. And now all that remains is that pool below.
The pool. Doscach had swum up the small river that remained of the Michty. That’s what the pool is—the source of what is now a river a tenth the size of the original.
This cavern is the mouth of the Michty River.
So where did the water come from? Where’s the original spring—or springs—that fed it? I look up, but I’m not sure that’s the answer. It’s more likely down. Underground springs that began under the mountain. There must still be one or two flowing, but they’re minuscule compared to what had been here.
I remember the ceffyl-dwr bone. Below, Doscach paces, hooves clacking on stone above which other ceffyl-dwrs once swam.
Ceffyl-dwrs don’t live underwater, but they may have lived just outside the river and hunted in this cavern. Those bones may have come from a ceffyl-dwr who’d been injured and trapped when the water stopped flowing.
Is it possible Doscach was born to a herd that lived here? The river dried up about five years ago. If Doscach was a horse, he’d be a full adult by now, ready to fight for his own herd, but monsters mature more slowly.
He brought me here to show me something, and I may be wildly theorizing, but I think this is where
