The unfelt, unheard, almost tickling vibration changed, the rumbling picked back up again, and everyone looked up as the raining black swamp came to a stop. Tiny blue light illuminated the roof of the cavern enough to see the dark ground closing in on itself, sealing what’d been a giant crack over their heads. A giant crack they’d fallen through.
They stared around at the enormous cavern, walls dripping with black ooze, the tiny blue lights that pulsed near the top, and… amber flames that occasionally poked up from cracks in the ground underneath the group. The fires were tiny, seeping up along little cracks and holes in the new ground, and every so often they caught along cracks in the walls that seeped up to the cavern roof overhead. They lit blue flame, like fire hitting gas pockets, and some of the blue flame seeped up through more cracks above. That explained the bursts of blue flame above the swamp, then.
Black ooze dripped from thousands of cracks, millions of them. The group was now inside a cave, but it was raining, anyway.
No one said a thing, and from the dropped jaws, no one had seen this before. Might as well be Mia to break the silence.
“The fuck is going on?” Whining, she wiped some more muck off her body, her hair, her clothes, and kicked it off her sandals. All that time spent avoiding the muck and now she was covered in black grossness, just like everyone else.
Groaning, muscles and back aching, she slowly sat up and looked around. Everyone was here, clamoring to their feet, and standing in a foot of muck that coated the cavern floor. Mia quadruple checked her egg, and then started the rounds, checking anyone for injuries.
“Worry about yourself,” Julisa said, snarling and pushing Mia away with her tail.
Mia squeaked, again, landed on her ass, aimed an angry glare at the bitch, and gestured for Vin. Past Vin might have entertained Mia’s whining and pushed Julisa around in retribution, but ever since Kas and Adron showed up, he was being a right pain in the ass.
She joined Adron and Kas, frowned at Julisa some more, and gestured out at the surrounding cavern. It was a tunnel.
“This… can’t be happening. I just spent weeks in tunnels.”
“At least these are larger,” Gallius said, wiping some muck off his armor.
Larger was right. The cavern had to be a seventy, maybe a hundred meters high. They’d fallen far, but the momentary crack that’d opened up underneath them had brought in a literal mound of black gore for them to land on. Now that the crack was gone, the muck spread out, thinning enough for Mia to walk around.
Beyond the muck was hard ground, black stone and dirt, moist from the constant dripping of black wetness from above.
“At least we can see,” she said, gesturing towards the walls and the tiny ember flames that danced along their cracks, and the momentary blue flames they lit above.
“At least!” Julisa stomped a foot as she gestured out around them with her four arms. “Look what you have done, unmarked!”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Lies.”
“I didn’t! Playing the strings is really hard, okay? Super hard. And right now, even just thinking about trying hurts. I didn’t play any strings, and I didn’t–” She bit her lip and gulped as she looked up at the crack. “I mean, I know I didn’t make this happen, but… but I did feel the strings vibrate, right before the ground opened up.”
“What else can do that?” Adron asked.
“I don’t know. How would I know? Vinicius?”
The titan shook his head.
“I know nothing of strings.”
“The rider?” she asked.
“No.”
Well, fuck. Mia paced around in a circle, eyes on her egg, and she stroked it as she listened for the vibration again. Whatever or whoever had played the strings, it hadn’t been her. The strings didn’t vibrate anymore, either. Hell? It hadn’t felt like Hell, like with the firestorm; assuming that’d actually been Hell. So what the fuck happened?
“There might be another unmarked nearby,” she said. “But it didn’t feel like that. When I played the strings heavy enough to make Hell do stuff, Hell had mirrored what I’d played to make that happen. I think. I didn’t feel that this time. It was just some random strings that’d started vibrating, strings that were connected to the swamp. It was random!”
Adron laughed. “There’s no way it was random. Something or someone caused this”–he gestured up at the ceiling–“and sealed it up. We’re down here because someone wants us down here.”
All four incubi groaned.
“Let’s go,” Kas said, picked a direction, and got walking.
She joined him and checked his leg while she was at it. A limp, but a small one, and with an asshole like Kas it wasn’t like he’d admit to being injured anyway, even if he got it in battle with some sorta giant alien creature.
“Why this way?”
“The other direction leads back toward Death’s Grip. If we must pick a direction, let’s go in the direction we want to go, above or below ground.”
“You kept your sense of direction while drowning and falling?” Adron asked.
Kas snorted and clicked once.
Sighing, Mia patted the shark dinosaur’s shoulder, and followed. With a direction to go and nothing else to do, the rest of the group did the same, and Mia slowed down until she was in the middle of the group. The cavern tunnel was enormous, but it only had two directions, no forks that she could see. Almost as if someone had pulled them into a trap, and now they had no choice but to walk straight into it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Whoever laid the trap was taking their sweet-ass time springing it. They walked a couple hours with nothing to show for it, only more giant cavern with black ooze leaking from the ceiling and down the walls, with tiny ember flames flickering up the wall cracks. The flames lit gas pockets in the ceiling, each bursting into small blue flame, but never anything more than a tiny gasp of light. More light than they’d had on the surface, but that wasn’t saying much.