Counterclockwise

20: Thesis on the Rift

Miss Mina's grip begins to slip, and Simon feels her hand at once grip tighter. As it does he slips a little further anyway. He can't look up, can't see her.

He knows she won't listen, if she can even hear him, but he says it anyway. "Let me go."

Simon can hear shouting, can feel Miss Mina being grabbed or moved or otherwise pushed around, and before he can process anything of what's happening, whether she did so willingly or not, she does as he says.

Simon is not, in fact, in free fall, as the walls of the cave curve tightly, although not entirely smoothly, and he slides, with many painful bumps of his injured body, down to a stop on flat ground. He lays there for a moment, and stares at the roof, in a cave of ice.

Simon has fallen into the Rift.

And he isn't dead.

He isn't dead.

Suddenly, the pain of his cuts stands out to him, as does the freezing cold that infects them. He holds his injured arm- it's still bleeding, and he feels mild concern about how much, but there's nothing he can do about it at the moment.

He feels the whole place shaking, the crack he came from seeming to open wider, and looking around this cave shows him only some hole in the ground from which mist is rising, and a path, a vertical cut through the ice that light spills from. The floor seems even. The walls seem deliberate. The longer he looks, the less this seems like an ice cave, and the more it seems like a room.

His eyes shift in the darkness, and he thinks he see a shadow approaching from the hallway. He reconstructs in his mind the person he thinks he sees- a tall woman, her hair long and grey, raising a finger to her mouth in a ssh of a secret- but when he blinks, he's quite certain that nobody was ever there.

He crawls over to the hole in the ground- the remarkably circular thing- and holds his hand over the mist, feels it as just a touch warmer than he expected it to be. Almost like it's steam, cooled by rising through all these layers of ice.

He hears a little chattering sound, and from that path, that branch of this cave- the hall from this room- he sees two little arctic foxes, or at least, that's what he assumes they are. Their floppy little ears are the only thing that make him think otherwise. At least when he blinks they're still there.

"Hey," Simon mutters, and despite the pain and everything that's just happened- that's still happening above the ground, without him- he can't help but laugh. "Not so bad in here, is it?"

One sits patiently, staring at him, the larger of the two with bright blue eyes, and the other turns and runs down the hallway.

"You know, a lot of things are suddenly making sense," he tells this little fox. "You think we'll get another chance here? A new start?"

The fox doesn't answer. Simon's eyes flick over the walls, trying to find the purpose of this room. Because it's a room. It has a reason. He finds grooves in one wall, carvings almost, shapes and tiny intricate details that could even be letters- letters he's never seen in the hundred different centuries he went to, in the dozens of languages that existed in his time.

There's a shaking ground again, and Simon closes his eyes. "I just hope the Rift doesn't destroy this place," he mutters to the fox, although his eyes shoot open when he hears voices.

It's a crying out, Miss Mina's, and Simon barely gets time to sit up before she's rolling haphazardly down the sloped wall, before she crashes into him.

"What-" she begins to say, but Simon hears it happening, and knows it will happen, before she can get too comfortable, and pulls her out of the way- preparing for Lee to come crashing down, even less gracefully. He lays still for a moment, and there's a split second where Simon panics- before Lee slowly, cautiously, lifts an arm to push himself up.