Chapter 122: Water Curtain
Sunlight refracted through the Rift’s sheet, turning each droplet into a lens. Moving closer was like walking toward a stained-glass window alive.
Kai first prodded water temperature, cold but not glacial. He crushed a stalactite chunk to test acidity, neutral. He tossed in a shard of rope fibre, it vanished behind spray and re-emerged unsigned.
He tied a lifeline to a boulder, and led Shadeclaw through. Water pounded his body but parted easily. On the far side they emerged into twilight lit by soft cobalt glow. The clap of water muted behind as if thick drapes fell across a theatre door.
Here the tunnel sloped upward and widened. Walls pulsed with bioluminescent star-fungus, veins of lime quartz wove like ghost-rivers.
"Everything I hoped," Kai murmured. The air was warm, geothermal venting. And the faintly musical hum of that subsonic ore vein seemed to vibrate Session runes inside his own plates, promising endless reserves of rich material.
He placed Miryam the egg on the basalt floor briefly, it glowed brighter, confirming viability. Then he advanced.
Fifty metres of winding brought them to the open caldera chamber.
Even prepared, Kai stopped dead at the sheer magnitude of it.
The cavern ceiling soared maybe three hundred metres, they’d stepped inside the volcano’s ancient magma chamber, long since chilled and eroded into a domed cathedral.
But this was not a tomb. High overhead yawned a ragged aperture, jagged like cattle-teeth, revealing a circle of flawless blue daytime sky. Shafts of sunlight striped the interior in golden pillars. White birds, sky-gulls never seen so far inland, circled lazily, riding thermals then slanting back out through the distant mouth.
Pure water poured in narrow ribbons down from unseen snow channels. It splashed into crystalline pools that overflowed into braided rivulets crossing a central plateau of dark loam. Grasses grew, violet star-lilies, even sapling ironwoods rooted sideways from cliff ledges.