The Firmament Saga: Book I: The Rains of Sorrow

Chapter 16: Yet the Waters Ever Change

Chapter 16: Yet the Waters Ever Change (Eri)

Around 8 days after entering the tunnels

The silence of the tunnel was more deafening than any roar. The absence of sound assaulted her ears, and the pangs of hunger assaulted her stomach as she rubbed it. She hadn't eaten for at least two weeks. While she knew that that was far from true starvation, it was the longest she had been without food. She drunk water from the bottom of the tunnel, but it was disguisting and bitter.

"Man, I'm hungry," Kane said, putting one foot in front of the other.

"Me too," Eri grunted, running her hand through her hair. "I've never been without food this long."

"I have," Kane said. "When I was in prison awaiting trial, the guards forgot to feed me for thirteen days straight. Having experienced it doesn't make it any better."

"Thirteen days!" Eri exclaimed. "That sounds painful."

"It was," Kane sighed. "It was."

"How are we gonna find food?" Eri asked.

"Good question," Kane said. "We're just randomly walking in a line."

Indeed, they had walked down the tunnel in a straight line. It just kept going on and on and on into the distance. The Lux-lamps and the silence were the things Eri had come to know in her travels. It had been only a week, yet the monotonous nature of the environment made it hard to keep track of time.

"Maybe we'll find food at some point," Eri said. "This tunnel can't go on forever."

"What even is this place?" Kane asked. "I wasn't expecting an artificial structure this big to be located beneath the world's surface."

"It's so alien," Eri mused. "There's nothing like this."

"I've been to a lot of places," Kane said. "Almost everything on the surface is constructed out of stone. Granted, the buildings and such are large and intricate, but there was hardly any metal. Metal is such a rare commodity, that we mostly used it to make coins. It's amazing that the beings who built this tunnel had enough resources to construct it entirely out of metal."

"It's certainly not a natural phenomenon," Eri said. "Nothing in nature has so many straight lines and curated repetitiveness."

"I hope that whoever built this anticipated that there would be travelers without food," Kane said. "Aside from the entrance in Mossflower Hold, there's no in or out."

"We can't go back; it'll take days," Eri said. "The only way is forward."

And forward they did walk, placing one determined foot in front of the other for hours on end.

2 days later

Eri smelled it before it came into view. A salty, pungent smell that reminded her of the sea flooded into her nostrils. The silence of the tunnel was broken up by the echoing sound of running water gradually getting louder. She looked down, for no apparent reason. She swore that the water level at the bottom of the tunnel was higher than it had been before...

Indeed it was. After another quarter hour of walking, the water level had doubled. The smell was positively overbearing, clinging to her nose like an overprotective parent. The sound became noticeable on its own, not just for being simple sound in a practical void. And then it came into view.

"What is that?" Kane exclaimed.

A few hundred feet ahead of them, there was a great hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. Countless gallons of seawater spilled into the hole and down the tunnel, creating a raging curtain of deep, dark blue. The water level shrunk as it flowed away from the breach, but the sheer might of the ocean kept pouring in through the hole.