Oath Keeper

The blackness of the cave was total, and the roaring hiss that filled his ears had not abated for even a heartbeat in all the time he’d been here. He couldn’t hear himself talk, he couldn’t hear himself shout, he couldn’t even hear the quiet clicking of his back when he stretched. So with no eyes and no ears to help in his task, he’d been forced to explore with nothing but his fingers.

When Shondu had first brought him to these strange, dark caverns with his stupid Brownie prank, Elicand had made a game of his investigations, giving names to every feature and every half-dreamed avenue of escape. That first cavern he had christened Ouchyville, in commemoration of the numerous minor injuries that had plagued his blind explorations. Although, in full honesty, those injuries had probably saved his life, forcing him to be more cautious than was his normal habit. But in this cavern, without even his ears to aid him, his fingertips had proven much less effective. Not that there was much for them to see.

He knew he was on a shelf of rock, perhaps five body-lengths long and three wide that hung out over, well, nothing. The air around him was the same cool dampness it had always been, and just the tiniest bit… oily, although none of that oiliness seemed to linger on his fingers at all. It was more an idea of filminess than an actual feeling of it, which made no sense, but that’s how it felt. There was nothing but this flat jut of stone and the empty space around it.

Like a tree branch with a flattened top, jutting out from the trunk and broken off cleanly at the end, the rock he stood on was a long and narrow platform that seemed to have no purpose other than to delay his eventual plunge into oblivion. Emerging from a tall, impassible wall of stone at one end, and surrounded by a leap into the dark unknown on the other three sides, it was as much a prison as anything else. A tabletop with no way down, and no sign that there was anything below him except air to plummet through.

Continuing with his practice from Ouchyville, Elicand had given names to all the features he discovered. At the end of his prison was the flat, cold face he called the Unclimbable Wall, for what should be obvious reasons. Opposite that, perhaps ten long strides away, the rocky floor just stopped. This was the furthest extent of the Featureless Lip of Plunging—a smooth edge that ran from the Wall, out into the darkness, and then back to join the Wall again. All of it utterly without crack, bump or crevice. Well, almost utterly. There was one particular section, right at the tip, that had been drawing him back like a tongue drawn to a sore tooth. The Slightly Not Completely Featureless Feature of the Featureless Lip. He could always come up with a better name for it later, if he survived.

The Featureless Feature was a single knobbly bump on the face of the Lip, perhaps half an arm’s length below where he knelt. It wasn’t knobbly enough to provide any actual support, but pressing his fingertips against its slippery hump, he could almost convince himself that it would serve as a brace, allowing him to reach out just a little further. There was something out there, in the damp and empty air beyond the Lip. He had been over every inch of this jutting prison of stone, and aside from a few loose pebbles and a crumbly patch of dust—all that remained of the protective cocoon that had healed him—there was just nothing else left to try. It was either the almost-knob or wait for starvation to claim him.

Elicand knelt once more at the Lip and eased his hand down its slick face, feeling around for the bump. When he found it, he took a deep breath and then tried to will the ridges of his fingertips to bite as he pressed them against the smooth stone. Carefully, he reached forward with his other hand, probing outward, stretching, until he felt himself on the very verge of tipping. There it was again. He could sense a changing in the air around his wavering hand. Gingerly, he shifted his left foot, spreading his toes out just a tiny bit wider, and then he stretched forward again, maintaining his precarious balance with nothing more than wishful thinking in his fingertips, and waved again. There! It was—

(aloneness negation question)

A wall of water grabbed at Elicand’s fingertips and yanked his whole hand downward. It would have jerked him into the abyss—it should have jerked him into the abyss—but the downward movement broke his contact with the raging torrent. Elicand shot his legs quickly back behind him as the lower half of his stomach crashed onto the rocky floor, leaving his head and chest and the upper span of his tummy projecting out over the not-floor, held there, defying gravity by the sheer willpower of his fingerprints on the wet… slippery… The fingerprints let go of the bump, skidding down over it, and Elicand could feel his body beginning to shift forward. If he’d had anything to eat lately, anything at all, he would have been that much more top-heavy and probably would have plunged headlong into death. But the palm of his hand ground onto that vaguest of bumps…

With his heart screaming an ancient curse at him that he could not hear, but could only feel, throbbing at his temples and pounding in his chest, Elicand, managed to wriggle one foot ever so slightly further back, away from the edge. And then the other. Maybe. He wasn’t sure if it had actually moved, or if he’d only hoped it had moved. The wild card was his free hand. It still dangled below him, limp against the featureless face of the rock. If he pressed it against the Lip as he so desperately wanted to do, the pressure would only thrust his upper body further out into the air, beyond his precarious balance point, and that would be all. But there was nothing for him to brace it against either. What he needed was to get that arm back up onto the floor without toppling himself in the process.

Slowly, in what might very well be the slowest of panicky movements ever made by a Wasketchin at any time in history, Elicand curled his free arm upward toward his stomach, keeping his hand and forearm as close to the rock as he could. When his elbow was above the edge of the Lip, he began to unfold it again, drawing first the elbow and then the forearm back and then at last turning his hand palm down to grab at the dusty rock floor beside his hip. It wasn’t much. It felt like nothing at all. It had taken him a hundred heartbeats. A thousand. But it was enough. The grip of his palm on the floor was enough to allow him to wriggle his body back from the edge, until at last, with a whoosh of released air that he had not realized he’d been holding, Elicand withdrew his other palm from the Featureless Feature bump and rolled away from death.

It was almost an hour later, after the jubilant pounding of his life against the walls of his body had slowed to a more decorous tempo, that a curious thought echoed in his mind: (aloneness negation question)

The voice had been Shondu’s.

His experience with the Featureless Lip had taught Elicand three things. First, that he was not alone—Shondu was somehow, miraculously, gloriously still here. Somewhere. That knowledge was useless however, until he was able to find a way out of his current predicament and then go find the little guy. Second, he was only going to be able to do that by taking chances. They would be carefully weighed and considered chances, of course, but there simply was no safe route off this rock. And third? Elicand was now certain that his end, whenever it might come to seek him, would do so after a terrifying plunge into an abyss. But strangely, all three of these revelations were comforting to him.

As with all education however, his new knowledge left him with new questions. Which of the pointless, clueless, featureless directions available to him would lead to an escape? Would he be able to reestablish contact with Shondu? And if not, would he ever find the little guy? Somehow, his furry little friend had spoken to him when his own hand had touched the water. There was no way he was going to try that experiment again, but was there some other way to make the connection? Or somewhere else where he could reach the river without risking his life?

It all came down to a single puzzle that taunted him for hours. If he could find a way to communicate with Shondu again, then he might learn of a way off this rock, or, if he could somehow get off this rock, he might be able to find Shondu again. Each solution seemed to require the other one to happen first.

Elicand had been over each and every inch of the stone platform, and in all of his searching he hadn’t found even a hint of a way off, nor any other access to the sky river. All he had was the general clamminess of the air and the thin sheen of wetness that coated everything he touched. It hadn’t been until his almost death, when he’d made fleeting contact with the torrent of water thundering past him in the darkness, just beyond his reach, that he had even known there was any water nearby. Of course, now he felt stupid. The roaring and raging of water crashing all around him should have been his first clue. But it had surrounded him since before he had first regained consciousness here however many days or maybe weeks ago that had been. It was so loud, so penetrating, that it had numbed the parts of his brain that might have wondered more about it, just as it had numbed his hearing. It wasn’t a sound, it was a thing, physical and suffocating, crowding him out from the center of his own mind. And such a thing had no connections to those happier, everyday ideas like rivers.

Contact with the film of water that coated his current world did nothing to reestablish contact with Shondu. He had tried several times now. Clearly, communication would require touching the flow itself again, so that was out. At least until he found another river, or a less death-causing way to touch the one he already had.

Once again, in a sort of ritualized refusal to give up, Elicand tried to invoke the charm for light, but as before, it simply refused to catch. The vim had never been particularly strong for Elicand—it was one of the reasons his family had always chosen lives of service, because their vim was not usually strong enough to contribute in more conspicuous ways—but it wasn’t like they were dead to it either. Still, no matter what pleas he sang, nor how convincingly he sang them, Elicand couldn’t muster up so much as the glowing nose that he had often used to entertain the little ones.

Which only left escape. And that meant taking some further risks. But instead of fearing such risks, he was surprised to discover that he felt elated by them. Perhaps it was the utter surprise—after the terror had worn off—of finding the river arcing through the air a mere finger’s-breadth beyond the world he had previously explored. It forced him to wonder. What lay just another fingernail above the highest point he had yet reached on the Unclimbable Wall? What ridge or foothold might lie just one inch further down the Featureless Lip than the furthest inch he had yet explored? Well, he wasn’t ready to think about the Featureless Lip option again. Not yet. But finding a river in the middle of the sky had been a curiously invigorating experience, so Elicand went back to the Wall with a renewed sense of hope.

Try as he might however, even with his newfound ambition, there wasn’t a crack deeper than a fingernail nor a bump thicker than an eyelid to be found on the entire expanse. Every feature that might once have been there had been worn away by untold centuries of running, dripping dampness. For hours he had been trying to reach beyond the limits of his body, running from several paces away and flinging himself up the Wall, slapping at it with outstretched fingers. He was sure that if he could just reach a tiny bit further, some finger would catch the crease of some ledge and he would have found his way out. It was the technique he had used to find the Scary Tunnel of Wind when he had first become trapped here in Shondu’s “pocket,” and even though the success of that find was still in question, it had been a find. But with no way to quiz Shondu about hidden exits, and literally no other inch of rock left unexplored, the old Leap and Slap had to work. It simply had to. So he kept at it, long after he’d lost the feeling in his fingers, and long after the repeated poundings against rock had split the skin and added the slick grease of his blood to the dampness of his prison wall.

Eventually though, his body simply gave out. Elicand launched one last, pitiful assault upon his imprisonment, and then lost consciousness when his face and chest slapped once more against the stone. It was a good thing he was not near either end of the Wall when he did so too, because an unconscious Wasketchin body is neither graceful nor particularly careful about where it sprawls—not even when it is trapped and all alone. He had tried, to the limits of his abilities, and he had failed. So it was a good thing for Elicand when, in the end, both of his problems took pity on his efforts and solved themselves.

Elicand was happy beyond stories when he heard Shondu’s voice bubble into his own thoughts like laughter.

(healing-place stay reason question)

Their previous contact had tasted to Elicand of loneliness and fear, but it had been so brief that it hadn’t even had time to register before it had disappeared. What he felt now was an impish tittering delight. It washed over him like a gentle summer breeze, and the unexpected warmth and familiarity of contact with another soul, after so much time spent alone in this crushing darkness, took Elicand completely by surprise, wrenching an unexpected sob of relief from his chest. Alone for days, blind, and deaf from the constant oppressive roar of the water echoing throughout the cavern, the feeling of proper contact was like birdsong in his skull, even if it was a trifle mocking.

“I’m stuck here statement,” Elicand said. “How do I get off this rock question?”

(tumble fall glee statement)

“Great,” Elicand replied. “I’ll tumble off this rock and fall to my death while you laugh your little laugh of glee then, shall I question?”

(correction tumble fall thou statement) (tumble thou fun play statement)

While Elicand was puzzling over how it could possibly be fun to fall to his death, he was startled by a furry touch at his elbow. Before he even knew what he was doing, Elicand had scooped Shondu up into a furious double-armed hug that threatened to overwhelm them both, and though he tried several times to put his feeling into empathought, Elicand found himself speechless. But Shondu seemed to understand and for several very satisfying moments, the two accidental adventurers simply held onto one another, communicating all that needed to be said through the warmth of their skin and the firmness of the grip with which each held the other.

“So, tumble fall not die question?” Elicand said, when he was finally ready to let go of his friend.

(follow show feel statement)

Elicand felt Shondu’s hand tug at his own and allowed himself to be led toward the Featureless Lip, although he insisted on taking the last few strides on his hands and knees. Shondu guided Elicand’s hand in the darkness, along the Featureless Lip, but Elicand could feel nothing special about the stone. Perhaps it was the tiniest bit smoother than it was elsewhere. More polished, perhaps. But the difference was too slight for him to even be sure it was real.

Chapter 15