Drift Deeper
An a-typical rhythm sets within their stride, rocks and sticks and stones becoming variables in an otherwise stable terrain. It was black, but not entirely, speckled with mica, speckled with marble.
Their foot-falls imprinted upon an otherwise unscathed path. This path looked pushed through, ambled or stumbled within, not usually travelled, but known to the few underground.
A pony-tail swayed from one scapula to another, breezes and up-draft daring to braid the frays. Bird eyes watched along with rodent's, and some feline.
"Say something," Randa interrupted the silence.
"We're going the wrong way." Borden responded vehemently, trudging forward as quickly as the taller compainion.
"There is no 'wrong way,' you know. They're at a centralized departure zone, they can get to us just as fast as the other contestants," said Randa, cracking a limb beneath her matronly figure. "At least we're not in one of the fields."
Borden began to walk with the grain of a descending hill, which was looping up again toward a precipice of sorts. Vision beyond this was obscured, causing an aching curiosity. "That's not what I mean."
Borden absent-mindedly began to traverse the precipice scattered with melon vines and a sort of thistle. Just the theatre for leading one into temptation, only to be pricked with spite.
Their torn sack-suits were nothing against the thistle, holding together, but providing no protection, having pin-head-size holes every inch over.
No matter, Borden had fulfilled her momentary purpose, overhanging the edge of the lip of the cliff and clapping her eyes upon a cavern. It was illuminated by fleeting openings between clouds.
"And they said that luck was a disease long since cured," Borden quipped, taking a detour around the apex of the hill and down along the adjacent decline, flowing right into the four foot opening at its feet.
After scaling the eight foot drop below, disappearing into an overcast mouth, and taking a foot-hold on the slant earth beneath them; they finally took a moment to breathe deeply.
"This is smart. This is good. Where are we, though?" Randa whispered, for some reason feeling that being in the dark meant a need to hush.
"Just a place they talk about," Borden started at the sound of a nearby drip of water, echoing throughout the tubular chasm before them. The ground they stood on was weathered and smooth from decades of waterfall. "Follow the water."
Bare feet gripped the stream-basin with ease, smoothed, though still lumpy overall. Darkness was enveloping, hugging them unconditionally. Much like whispering, Randa's eyes were instinctively shut. Borden's were wide open, much more than if she were looking about in a well-lit room, trying to soak in every iota of light.
Hands on the sometimes-close walls around them, they walked for nearly ten minutes without incident, when something became visible from above.
"Do you see that?" Borden asked, turning to a blind Randa. This forced Randa to open her colorless eyes in the darkness. Her eyes immediately gravitated toward the only source of light, the slowly-increasing number of dots above them, glowing a vivid chartreuse.
Randa went toward this illumination, biological or not, she felt something about it. Around each light of green was a jacket blackness implying the jaggedness neighboring each source of light. Her hand reached upward, skyward, very slowly, expecting to come into contact with this anchoring surface within mere inches. Her perception was disappointed when her arm continued to rise skyward, never coming into contact.
Like a mirage, the glow was forever out of reach, which turned their perception round. As if their brains were compensating for the error, they gripped the walls to their sides more firmly. A sort of vertigo took over as their eyes moved along the glow.
For miles, or perhaps inches, the glow occupied space in front of them. Further steps would remove the walls on either side of them, the lack of surface suggesting the size of the cavern that they had now entered.
"Is it like... Radioactive diamonds, or worms, or... Plutonium-- I..."
Borden interrupted Rand: "There's no echo..." Still her senses wanted as much data as possible. "Are we in a small space, or a large space with sound-proofing?" She asked more to herself than Randa.
---
They had travelled for such a while, that it seemed that they should begin to worry about how many other contestants were left, uncaught. Their surroundings didn't change much, as long as they looked up, the glowing green specks and smears seemed to move as constellations would.
Their travels taught them more about the stars above:
They didn't move or turn off, the outlines around them suggesting that they were part of the rocks that must have been there in the darkness.
The darkness was unaffected, no such illumination came from the glow, perhaps due to its proximity, whatever that was.
They were unsettling.
For a rest, the two stopped, sort of feeling around beneath them to find the same lumpy stream at their cold feet. They squat, then sat, then lay back.
---
"I see rabbits, over there," one says.
"Hah, no, I see wrenches," says the other.
---
Delirium began to set in: "Do you think that this place is bigger on the inside--"
"or did we get smaller--" "I think we're in outer space now..." "If I can't see my body, do I have a body?" There was a silence.
"Are you still there?--" "Yea, I think. Where am I?" "Hello?"
"I'm so alone--" "--in here it's so dark" "--I can't land anywhere." "They were wrong--" "--about space," "--there's so much--" "--air out here."
"If you squint, you can see Earth."
"If you squint you can see the end of Time."
"Time and Space look like a doughnut."
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