This Isn't About Reya

Chapter Thirty-Three

When Svetlana awoke, she found that she was warm. Warm... and dry.

And that shocked her into consciousness.

She sat up with a cry, her mind still reeling from the shock of being sucked into cold, wet snow. And she looked down at herself, saw her body, her arms and hands, her legs, her twisted ankle. There was no snow. She could breathe. 

And so she sat there for awhile, breathing, running her hands vigorously up and down herself, checking for some sign of snow, but finding none. Had she imagined it?

And then she began to look around. 

Svetlana was on a hard floor, something very dark but clearly metallic. She reached down and ran her fingers along the substance. It had a swirling grain to it, and was black as night. In several places, its sheen reflected a glare of light.

She looked up from the floor and found that she was in some sort of room, the walls and ceiling all made of the same black, gleaning metal. It almost resembled a cave. There was a low, bluish-white light coming from nowhere in particular, but seeming to bathe the entire place in a low glow. 

Slowly, Svetlana rose to her feet. With surprise, she found that her ankle no longer hurt to put weight on. She tested it briefly, taking several steps in a circle. The floor was a mess of crags and outcroppings, some small, some rising almost to her knee. It dipped and rose in no apparent pattern throughout the room. She navigated her way over to one of the walls, through a path of strangely-twisted, stalagmite-like structures, all the same black metal. The wall, too, was a pattern of curving, edged shards that stuck out harshly from it. There was no clear separation between the floor and the walls, or the walls and the ceiling; everything blended together, so that the room was more of a flattened dome than anything else. Svetlana looked up at the ceiling and found that it was very high, but smoother than the floor - more like the walls, without any particularly large stalactite structures. 

She turned a full circle, taking in the expanse of the room. Despite its height, it was not exceptionally wide, perhaps only about twenty feet across. The ceiling was at least thirty feet tall, however. As she turned, Svetlana found a single doorway set into the curving wall across from her - not a doorway as much as an opening, as though the wall merged into an archway. The opening was easily seven or eight feet wide.

Cautiously, she made her way towards it. As she approached, she saw that the bluish-white light intensified in the chamber that the archway led to. Perhaps its source could be found within.

Svetlana placed her hand carefully on the wall the arch melded into, and as she stepped into the second chamber, her fingers slid along the wall, following the grain of the metal. 

This new room was much, much larger, the ceilings another thirty feet higher, the floor still a mess of black, frozen waves of metal but far wider across in every direction. The curving stalagmites melded into the walls and curled up towards the ceiling. To her left, Svetlana saw that the walls funneled slightly and then opened again into another wide section of the chamber, and beyond that, more and more black, metal caverns. It was clearly all one room, but almost organized into sub-chambers. Svetlana looked to her right, and she saw that the light was indeed brighter further along the chamber. And there was something more.

Puzzled, she made her way slowly out from under the archway and into the larger room, edging around the crescent metal talons rising from the floor, towards the source of the light. Along the walls, almost pressed into them and partially enclosed by the twisting metal grooves, large, translucent bulbs emanated a soft glow. There were hundreds at least, stretching into the distance and following the curves of the walls as the chamber opened up into more sub-chambers. They were ten or twelve feet apart from each other, each a slightly different shape, embraced by the black metal of the walls in a different way. The walls reached around them, some only slightly, creeping along the edges of the bulb, while other bulbs were almost totally encased, with only slivers or jagged holes of light showing through.