Fantasy

The wide opening narrowed in almost instantly, the firelight teasing from just around a corner. Guinevieve stopped short as her eyes locked with a set of warm brown ones. A small offshoot of the cave ended in a grotto padded in straw where a beige and cream speckled pegasus lay, legs folded under its body, sleepily, comfortably blinking as it stared at Guinevieve. She held her breath for a moment as the equine eyes bore into her own, noting her presence without reaction. Something human-like, wise and ancient, seemed to well in the swirl of brown and gold irises, and in the plain way its face was set, the gentle tousle of fawn colored mane streaked with aging silver. She couldn’t help but feel as though the horse had its lips pursed in a small smile, eyes gleaming with an omniscient knowing. The expression read, as clear as it would on a human’s face: Good, you’re finally here. I was expecting you.

            The pegasus didn’t move a muscle, the slow expansion of its round chest and the leisurely blinking of its kind eyes was the only sign it was alive.

            Guinevieve murmured, without knowing why, an inaudible greeting to the aged creature, inclining her head in something akin to respect, or acknowledgement of an unspoken understanding, and then waited a beat, as though the pegasus would begin to speak. As though it would suddenly explain some of the stormy disorientation in a regal, eloquent voice—tell her all of the missing pieces of Elris’ curse. Absurd, I’m being absolutely absurd.

            She hesitated, not wanting to break the connection between herself and the horse, but a slight angling of its head motioned to the forking hall, urging her forward. No words passed between them, audible or mental, but the pegasus still seemed to tell her the answers were a few dozen paces further in the cave.

            Guinevieve silently thanked the wizened being and it responded with a subtle nod of its graceful head. She forced her feet into walking, and headed left, deeper into the cave.

            The chirruping whisper of trickling water began to sound, and looking to her left, she saw the small runnel of rainwater carved into the rock, locked in by a warped wood plank. It ran alongside her, following her progression into the cave. Soon she came upon breaches in the stone, pockets caved out with varying inhabitants—the first she saw stocked with chopped wood piled neatly in the enclave, the next was carved almost as high as the ceiling which still donned a foot or two above her head—and she was unusually tall, bordering on six feet—and had, to her extreme puzzlement, a planter approximately three feet by three feet with stalks of wheat growing out of it. A series of four smaller shelves squared into the stone on her right housed smaller planters in each, and the fragrance of herbs wafted—thyme, basil, mint, sage—on the opposing wall, the same structure contained delicate white buds of chamomile, needles of rosemary, prickled burrs of a dark green she had never seen, iridescent purple flowers with spiked leaves that smelled foreign and intoxicatingly sweet.

            More and more, larger pockets surprised her with their contents—ripe, red tomatoes going golden with the subtle flickering of the firelight, a hefty planter of warty gourds lounging in spiraled vines, sprouts pushing forward from deep layers of soil hiding onions, turnips, beets, carrots. She almost jumped when a rustle of feathers flashed in a particularly large enclave, and the beady eyes of a hen blinked rapidly as it adjusted in the straw, hiding its precious eggs beneath it protectively from the stranger traipsing past its home. Guinevieve paused, awed by the small dripping of water that leaked into a miniature trough, flowing straight down in an unseen runnel from the main water supply.

            How anything was growing under here, baffled her. Xylandova was able to keep crops and greenery by some miracle of the sky—at least there was a semblance of light filtering through the fog—but here, she had no idea.

            Suddenly, rounding a corner, she stumbled into a cavern glowing and warm with a hearth against the far wall; Elris was sat at a stubby round table, and an ancient man turned from the fire with a kettle bubbling in his thin, bony hand, smiling softly at her.

            “Ah, Guinevieve, I was hoping you’d show.”

A few moments later, Guinevieve was sat, with an onslaught of paternal ushering, at the table with Elris. The pair were a touch too tall for the wooden chairs and shifted awkwardly as the old man busied about at a carved counter behind them, sifting herbs into the kettle, clattering teacups, and humming to himself. The squat chair creaked and strained with the weight of Elris’ armor. Guinevieve stared stubbornly at the tabletop, nicked and stained and etched with burn marks approximately the circumference of the kettle. A handful of times in the interim minutes the elder made tea, she threw Elris cold stares, deathly glares, which he took silently, eyes hidden, but his body angled to her signaled he was indeed watching her.

            The man-below didn’t speak while he doctored a fresh herbal tea, only hummed a jovial tune intoned with a strange, haunting layer beneath the overtly contented melody. With shuffling steps, he crossed back to the table, and set the kettle down followed by two teacups of a thick, terracotta colored ceramic, lumpy and clearly hand-crafted. He had finished his song and lowered himself in the chair across from Guinevieve and Elris, grunting slightly as he did so. His grimace worked its way to a smile, and he stared at the pair with a kind expression, one of an eccentric, slightly deranged, but overall good-natured grandfather. The decades had stooped his posture and shrunken his bones, but it was clear in his elderly stature he must’ve once been a tall, strapping man. The grey that had taken over whatever color had once pigmented his hair was seeping into a milky white at the roots, and a coarse, wiry beard muddled the lower half of his face, coming to a thin, scraggly point somewhere near his chest. His eyes, lined with webs of thin wrinkles, were a piercing icy blue, but shockingly small in comparison to Guinevieve, who possessed the eyes of a native cloud-dweller, overtly massive and suited for the dim, opaque atmosphere of Xylandova. A round, slightly mottled nose stuck out over the haze of his moustache, and his cheeks were ruddy and porous, weathered and tanned from a sun she never saw unless she deigned to climb the highest tower in the castle, where the king’s chamber and the royal parlor peeked out above the apex of the cloud. She had no interest in seeing the fierce, burning cerulean of the sky, though, and even dreaded the family gatherings her father would mandate in that chamber, despite the sheer curtains they would draw during the brightest, sunlit hours, the light gave her a headache, and the open sky unsettled something in her.

            The man’s hands that poked out from a vast, shapeless black robe were pocked with weather spots and thinned to a papery skin, with green veins protruding alongside the bone. He clasped his hands together in front of him and rested his arms on the table.

            “My name is Henrich,” he said in a slightly foreign accent that cut through the lyrical, fluid speech of the cloud-dwellers with a humbling bluntness, “I’m pleased to finally meet you, child, I was expecting you’d find me about this time.”

            Guinevieve’s mouth opened in response to the oddly omniscient introduction, but nothing came out, she only sat slightly gaping at the man called Henrich.

            “Sir Elris informed me of your contact with Eva,” he continued, “and I will say, I was awfully surprised to hear from her.”

            “Eva?” Guinevieve asked suddenly, furrowing her brow at the man.

            “The lovely sorceress who contacted you through the ring—she was always creative, hiding clues in such unique places. She must’ve foreseen this matrimony, as they often do, and felt there was no better place to leave a gem of such information than in a prophetic token of love, I will say, she was always delightfully witty like that.”

            Elris stayed silent through the onset of Henrich’s rambling, shifting in the dwarfed stool in chimes of clanking metal.

            “I am indeed, as she so basely named me, the man below the land that she speaks of.” Henrich smiled, thin lips spreading widely in what looked like delight. He sniffed the air in an exaggerated display, and then plucked the top of the kettle and glanced analytically at the steeping herbs, waving a hand to send a waft of the scent—sweet and heady and comforting—before lifting it warily, and pouring two cups, sliding one across the table to Guinevieve. “Drink, it's fine tea. I dry it myself,” he said, and then chuckled at the obviousness of the remark.

            Guinevieve did, hesitantly, for she had not smelled such a concoction nor seen the herbs and blossoms he had put in it before. She took only a small sip, fragrant floral notes and rich undertones bloomed on her tongue. Henrich winked, and drank deeply from the teacup, smacking his lips in satisfaction before he continued.

            “This is quite a puzzle, and my dears, it is lovely to have such a conundrum walk through my front door. Many years have passed since I’ve had company other than my beloved mare, Buggy, let alone visitors with such an interesting knot to untangle.” He sipped his tea, and then looked to Guinevieve and Elris with a harder gleam in his eye, a shadowed edge crossing his features. “You see,” he continued, his voice morphing with his expression from jovial to quite grave, “my dear Eva is dead.”

            A wash of cold shock passed through Guinevieve, and she heard Elris take in a sharp inhalation—the sorceress, his only lead for breaking the curse, was dead.