The lost continent

Chapter 34

Go alone, and kiss,

Get lost, become blind, see the dead,

Fear not, do not sway,

Your desires lie just ahead.

They walk into the waterfall. Even with the early schedule, they don’t make it behind the roaring spray until noon. The view beyond the grove in which they slept is obscured by trees and a haze of heat.

“I guess we wait.” Kirishima says, sitting down. Behind the waterfall is a shallow cave, no bigger than last night’s camp, straddling somewhere the line between constructed and naturally occurred.

Bakugou is running his hands along the stone, looking at notes from the crew’s musings over the poems, frowning in his thought.

“For sundown, yeah,” Mina says. “Evening light.”

And so, they wait. Kirishima scratches patterns into the dirt at his feet, which turns into a knots and crosses game with Sero. They talk, they nap, they think that the adventure should be more perilous than this, though Kirishima is happy for the slow going. He thinks that’s important, sometimes. Going slow was definitely a part of the adventure - if you do too much at once you would forget why you do it. There was always something to see and do, but sometimes closing your eyes and taking it easy was as enjoyable as anything else. Besides, whatever was yet to come could have them wishing back for this moment.

Eventually, the evening light comes. It filters orange through the waterfall, gentle at first, almost unnoticed in its subtlety. Eventually, Kirishima becomes aware of the way the water makes the sun glitter across the floor, like a gem broken into uncountable pieces, dancing first on the ground, and then sparkling its way to the uneven crags of patterned rock walls.

“There’s a pattern.” Bakugou says, standing up. He had been silent for the most of the day, stuck in thought. It wasn’t that nobody dared to interrupt, it was that they didn’t want to disturb him.

“I thought so too,” Kirishima says. “The rocks all fit into each other-”

“No, not that,” Bakugou says, stepping towards the wall. “You see where the shadows are? The light doesn’t hit them the same way.”

Kirishima stands up too, and then so do the rest of the crew, inspecting the back wall as the glittering grows more circular around the rocks, now, with the illumination, seeming more protruded than before.

Mina narrows her eyes, but doesn’t step closer. “It… it looks like it’s responding. To the light, I mean.”

Bakugou nods. “Nothing’s reflecting off this. Something is… taking in the light?”

“What do we do?” Sero asks. He reaches out above him to touch the spot, and he draws it back with a yelp. Mina screams in turn and jumps back behind Kirishima, fingers scrunching the shoulder of his shirt into her fists.

“Kidding.”

Mina shrieks again, this time at Sero, reaching out an ill-aimed fist to hit his arm. Kirishima laughs, but Bakugou is inspecting the stone Sero touched, albeit with a grin on his face.

“I think it moved,” Bakugou says. He reaches up too and gently presses the stone. It does seem to shift beneath his fingers, though not much. “How did we miss this before? Is it the light? Does it make it different?”

Kirishima goes to the one beside him and tries. It’s almost imperceptible, but the stone is definitely loose. It feels more like pressing down on a lump beneath your skin, a bruise or a healing scab, flat for a moment, only to rise up again in its healing process.