Pilgrimage

[Foxglove]

With his path set, it was easy to overlook the sheer vastness of the place. The fact that he was able to breathe did not rightly occur to him, considering that he was multiple hundred metres beneath the ground at this point. It should be way thinner than it was right now. Looking up, he was that many more openings like the one he had slid out of were adorning the walls, though many of which smaller, and some of them actually let water flow into the lake below, making it a quasi underground basin. Where did the water go, though? The waterlevel should rise like this. Looking back at the 'shore', he figured that the chamber was simply so big that he'd not notice it even if he watched for hours. It made him wonder how deep this actually was. Given that most of these tunnels did not lead into the water like the one he'd emerged from, it was more than possible that the water had been slowly flooding the chamber up until this point.

Now, however, drenched as he was, it started to become rather chilly. The draft he'd felt earlier was quite profound down here, and although it did not impede his process in any way, it did enough to discomfort him, leaving him clammy from the water. His destination lay only a little while ahead, though it required a degree of climbing to get there. It was rather obvious that this maze of corridors had not been intended for humans, if it even followed any logic or plan at all. It all seemed so asymmetrical, at least, and considering the stone seemed slippery enough, as if water had eroded it, it was quite possible that the water from the surface had stimply started trickling through the cracks in the surface into repositories like these here. Given the sheer vastness of the dried land outside, it seemed like a rather logical explanation.

Ascending the last ledge, he had to shield his eyes from the light of the opening in front of him. It wasn't really big, now that he was directly in front of it, and it didn't even look like it was here intentionally. A pile of rocks at the foot of the opening told him that it had probably broken away at some point. Still, the rather harsh difference of the obscure twilight below and this almost normal lighting that was coming out of the opening disoriented him at first, but his stance was firm, and so it only needed a few moments for his eyes to get used to the lighting to make out what lay beyond — and it was breathtaking.

The chamber was so humongous that all sense of scale was completely thrown off. He could feel the moisture in the air, and occasionally, drops of water would rain from the ceiling and patter down onto the stone, together with the glowing crystalline formations creating the illusion of a tinted nebula of the same color as she crystal's shine. There was movement in the distance, though it was hard to really make out what it was. Occasionally, there was a small flash of light in the distance and a rumble, as though an assortment of rocks was plunging into the distance, although that might just be the wind howling in his ears as well.