Weavespinner

"Then they'll be crusty and smelly," he said absently, reaching within, through the Cat, and touching his Druidic power. A small ball of faint glowing light appeared over his outstretched paw, and he held it up and surveyed the room. "There's the opening that leads down into the mountain," he said, pointing at a small, roughly triangular opening on the far side of the chamber, which was only about two spans high.

"It's pretty narrow in there," she frowned, bending down and looking across the chamber. "I hope we don't have to crawl the whole way."

"Have you ever explored a cave?"

"Not really, why?"

"Because we just might have to crawl the whole way," he said. "Cave tu

"You're making this trip better and better," she said acidly as she padded over towards the opening. "First you freeze my tail off, now you want me to be an earthworm."

"Hold on, we have to deal with the light situation," he called.

"Why not use that?"

"Because I have to work to keep it going," he said. "I have a better idea."

His idea was two little balls of light that were created by Sorcery, not Druidic magic. He wove the very simple spells, some of the very first spells that Initiates learned, and set them in a way so that they couldn't unravel when he stopped concentrating on them. The flows would pull against each other in a delicate knot of sorts, and that would keep the spells going for quite a while after he stopped maintaining them. Since they were such simple spells, he figured that they would last for six or seven hours before the flows of Fire and Air finally worked themselves free of one another and disrupted the spell. It was the trick that the Sha'Kar had taught him, a trick that he'd been very hard on himself for not figuring out on his own. Tarrin cleverly set one over each of their heads, hovering just over and between the tips of their ears, so its light didn't shine right in their eyes, and they would also serve a vital purpose in warning them when their heads were getting too close to the ceiling. The lights would go up into the ceiling and wink out when they were very close to it, and the sudden darkness was a warning they were about to bang their heads.

"Cute," Jesmind said, trying to look up to see the ball of light, which only dipped back with her head as she moved it. It would stay firmly where it was set in relation to her body, just over and between her two white-furred ears, illuminating everything around her without a part of her body getting in its way. It did create two dim spots to each side of her head, shadows from her ears, but the ball of light was so close to them that it diffused light into those shadows well before it reached the walls. The white fur of her ears served to reflect the light as well, much better than his black ones, which made the area of light surrounding Jesmind much brighter than the one surrounding him.

"Now that we have that fixed," he said, rolling the fur coat into a bundle and tying it onto his back, a possible cushion should he rise up and into a ceiling, "let's go find a clean place to rest a while, then we'll set out."

They moved just beyond the constricting tu

The passage through the caves was much warmer than travelling the mountains above, but that lack of cold was countered by the sheer effort of travelling like that. True to his observation about caves, the tu

"T-This was a b-b-bloody b-b-bad id-d-d-dea," Jesmind said, her teeth clicking as she hugged her arms to her sides.

"That wasn't very pleasant," he agreed with a shiver, then he used Sorcery to strip the water off of them, then warmed them with a gentle weave of Fire and Air, warming the air around them. "But at least we didn't have to go totally under the water."

"Oh, that's a relief," she snapped shortly, then she sighed as the warmth of his spell started seeping into her cold skin. "You're a handy fellow to have around," she smiled as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the warmth.

"Thank you. Someday I aspire to be more than your slave."

"Don't count on it," she winked.

Though the effort was exhausting, neither of them wanted to stop. They both seemed not willing to stop until they got so deeply into the mountain that neither the Demons nor the blizzard could find any way to reach them. They continued on, steadily descending deeper and deeper, and Tarrin noticed that the properties of the tu

It was about then that he noticed the peculiarities of a deep underground passage. It was pitch black, which was normal for such a place, but the air and the rock almost seemed to swallow the light. The little dim lights he made only illuminated a very small area around them, but their night-sighted eyes let them penetrate deeply into the gloom beyond that light, but even that wasn't a tremendous distance. Tarrin found the idea of having the range of his vision impaired extremely irritating, and not a little unsettling. He was a creature heavily grounded in his senses, and a limitation on one of those senses made him jumpy and nervous. The air, though fresh, still had a strange stagnant quality to it. It did move and it was fresh, but it moved in and out of caves that all had the same musty smell, making the air heavy with dull scents that were hard to make out, since the same scents had been drifting around down here for years. Smells of rock and dust and dirt, and also strange plant-like smells like mold, lichen, and fungus. Rare, strange plants that could survive in a world without light. And sound was very curious. They moved quietly, as was only their habit, but ever whisper of sound they made echoed and re-echoed up and down the passage, and the sound of dripping water carried down the passages for longspans. A loud noise would carry for a long way and echo for a long time, and if there was anything down there with them, it wouldn't take it long to find them if they made alot of noise. The sound was trapped, bouncing endlessly off the walls, and he realized that a sound could linger down here in these tu