Clouds River Valley

Chapter 8: Butterflies

Not too soon after they started walking on the lake shore, they walked into another tunnel slowly, the tunnel was like the one when they walked out from till they found the lake. Mia started to feel tired, and she couldn't help from yawning. She turned around and looked at Sophia and noticed she also looked sleepy. She asked Leo to stop for a moment and then walked to Albert and tapped on his shoulder, she asked, "Are you guys tired yet?"

"A little bit." Leo answered.

Albert shrugged slightly; he didn't seem like he cared much.

"How long are we going to keep walking?" Sophia tried to open her eyes, standing here made her even more tired.

"Do you guys want to take a break here?" Leo asked.

"Let's keep walking and find a good spot to rest, it's still close to the lake so the ground is kind of wet and cold." Mia said, she then checked the watch on her left wrist, she could still see the needles with the light from the fluorites on the wall. "So weird, my watch stopped walking." Mia added.

"Maybe it's out of battery?" Sophia asked and poked her head over.

"No, the watch doesn't use battery." Mia answered.

"Could it because water went inside when we were by the lake?" Leo asked.

"Maybe." Mia murmured, though she couldn't remember if her arm was wet at all, maybe she was too nervous and didn't notice it.

"Who knows what time it is now." Sophia seemed like she couldn't walk any further, "Maybe everyone is already up?" She sounded worried, "What if they found we are gone?"

Albert didn't move, he didn't seem care much about their complain, Maggie was sitting quietly next to him, she also could care less about their conversation.

"So what, we can tell them our adventure, isn't that awesome?" Mia said to Sophia.

"I think so, ok, let's keep going." Sophia said a moment later. Leo looked at her surprisingly, he then looked at Mia, Mia understood what he meant, she just squinted her mouth and didn't say anything.

Not too long after they started walking again, Maggie started jogging in front of them, and soon she was gone, even Albert couldn't stop her from running. Albert was then running after her, Leo, Mia and Sophia didn't know what happened, they tried to yell at Albert but Albert couldn't hear them, so they had to run after Albert.

In a sudden, Maggie stopped and started to sniff on the ground, and then she laid down and began rolling on the ground. Finally, they found Maggie, until then they realized they were in a piece of prairie. Albert kneeled on the ground and touched it to confirm it was really grass he was touching. No wonder why Maggie was so excited. They could see the one foot tall green grass with the light from the fluorites

"Weird, it's easy to explain there is a lake in the cave, but how can the grass grow without sunshine?" Leo said.

At the moment, Maggie found something else, she was trying to catch something with her paws, they all went closer and noticed it was a butterfly that they couldn't tell the color. Soon, Sophia screamed "look!", follow her finger, there were more and more butterflies were flying in front of them. Sophia was excited to see them that she was wide awake now, just like Maggie, she started running toward these butterflies like she was so obsessed.

"Sophia, wait!" Mia and Leo tried to stop her, but she already ran away, so they had to run after her.

The further they ran, the more butterflies showed up, but they still couldn't find either Sophia or Maggie. Mia looked at those butterflies closely and found all of them were light brown color and they seemed a little bit bigger than the regular butterflies she had seen before, their wings even seemed flapping stronger. There were so many butterflies that Mia and Leo couldn't even see the road in front of them, they had to keep waving their arms to be able to find the way. But after a few more steps, the butterflies formed a wall that they had to push it to move forward, even the air was thinner that they could feel more and more difficult to breath. It was when they started feel nervous.