Moss Moon and the Lunar Spring, Part 8

Cold rock.  Stale air.  Darkness.

You are Moss Moon, and you are terrified.

Down here within the mountain, your night vision is useless.  You can see nothing at all.  Your heart pounds in your chest, blood pulsing in your ears.

“Anon!” you cry.  “Anonymous!”

There is no reply.

You scrabble to your hooves, righting yourself from where you landed.  Nothing seems broken.  Your left flank throbs with pain, but the tougher parts of you must’ve absorbed most of the impact.

With dismay you realize that one of your saddlebags is missing.

A sniff of the air and a burst of echolocation pick it up immediately.  It’s lying smashed on the ground nearby, its contents a fuming mess.  Half of your supplies have been destroyed.

You pray that Anon fared better.

You curse yourself for your foolishness.  You had been so busy going on and on about Grandmother’s books that you’d forgotten to echolocate the tunnel.  Just one burst would’ve revealed a variance in density in the air above the ceiling.  You would’ve known about the gas; you would’ve been able to warn Anon.

This wasn’t some jaunt through the wilderness.  This journey was life and death.  You knew this, and yet you allowed yourself to be distracted.  Anon was just starting to feel like a friend, like someone you could trust – and now he might be dead, because of you.

You feel heat and helplessness rising in your chest, but you shake it off.  No.  You have to find him.  And the both of you are getting out of here.

A small blessing: the earth is no longer shaking, and you can’t hear the movement of any earthcrawlers.  You start echolocating, trying to figure out just where you are.

The fractured images of sound reveal that you are standing on some kind of ledge within a deep shaft.  The exit is high above you, too far for your sound bursts to give you a clear picture.  There is a hole nearby, leading deeper into the mountain.

Anon isn’t on the ledge.  He either landed somewhere above you, or he fell down this hole.  The stumps of your wings flex on your back, as for a moment you wish you could fly.  You push the thought from your head.  There’s only one way to go, and that is down.


A pulse of echolocation down the hole tells you that the drop is only about ten feet.  Steeling yourself for the landing, you drop through.

A jolt runs through your body as you hit the hard stone below, but your powerful legs absorb the force of the jump.  Immediately you start sending out sound, and a picture forms in your mind.

You stand now in a long, flat chamber, with a floor that slopes gently downward.  Stalactites hang from the ceiling, suggesting that this cavern is natural, and not formed by the tremors and tunneling of the earthcrawlers.  The chamber goes on for quite some distance, further than your echolocation can discern from here.

You detect something lying on the ground a little ways down the slope.

Numbness creeps into your limbs.  You feel your heart fluttering as you dash to Anon’s side.

You can’t see him, but he’s warm to the touch.  You breathe a gasp of relief when you hear his slow breathing.

He’s lying on his arm.  You cautiously move him onto his back, and he grunts in pain.

“Anon,” you say, touching his face with your hoof.  “Can you hear me?”

You hear his breathing quicken as he seems to waken.  He shifts under you, as if trying to get up, then relaxes.

“What… what happened?”

Your answer comes out in a rush.  “There was gas in the tunnel, up top, where you were breathing it, I’m sorry I didn’t notice, I…” You break off, realizing that you are shaking.  You take a deep breath.  “I’m sorry, Anonymous.”

He’s quiet for a moment, but when you feel a reassuring pat on your leg, you realize that he was reaching out, trying to find you.  “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.  I landed further up, so I didn’t fall as far as you.”

Anon shifts again, and he groans as he sits up.  “Where are we now?”

“An earthcrawler must’ve dug up near us.  We fell into the hole it left behind.  We’re out of it now, though.  This is some kind of cavern.”

He’s quiet again, this time pensive.  You hear him moving around.

“I think my arm’s broken.”

Tentatively you reach toward him with your hoof.  “Let me look,” you say.  “Er… feel.”

Anon laughs, a quiet sound in the darkness.  “Go ahead.”

You find his side, then his shoulder, and with care you feel down his arm, palpating the bone.  He lets out a hiss of pain when you reach the forearm, where you feel a distinct give in the ulna.

“It’s cracked, but I don’t think it’s severed,” you say.  “Does it hurt to hold it across your chest?”

When he affirms that it does not, you set about making a sling for him out of some of your remaining bandages.  You’ve done it so many times that even blind you can tie it with ease.  When you get outside, you can bind his wrist and elbow to a piece of wood from the forest.

“You’re pretty good at this,” he says, when you finish.  “Did you learn how to do this from your Grandmother?”

She’s not your actual Grandmother, but you decide not to correct him.  You shake your head, then remember that he can’t see you.

“Sometimes the orphans hurt themselves playing.  I taught myself how to take care of the basic stuff.  It’s enough that some of the poorer bats come to see me, if they can’t get the doctor.”

“That’s... very kind of you, Moss Moon.”

He says this simply, as if stating a fact.  A compliment, you realize.  He’s complimenting you.  You don't know why, but you feel heat in your face.

“Thank… thank you.”

You hear his boots scrape against the rock floor as he stands up.  “Where can we go now?” he asks.  “I can’t see a thing.”

You echolocate again.  The cavern is relatively wide, but you see no exits in the walls.  Other than the hole in the ceiling from which you came, the only way you can go is down the slope, into the earth.

One disappointing check of your remaining saddlebag later, and you realize that your extra sunroot torches were destroyed in your other bag.  You no longer have a light source.

“This way,” you say.  “Hold onto my mane so you don’t get lost.  There are stalactites in here, so keep your head down.”

Anon obliges, and you feel him grab on to your hair.  The two of you shuffle slowly down the slope.

Using your echolocation as a guide, you help your companion avoid bumping his head or tripping over rocks jutting up out of the ground.  After awhile the slope finally levels out, opening into a wide, high-ceilinged cavern in which your sound bursts echo hollowly.

The air grows steadily warmer as you progress into this new chamber.  You begin to notice large holes dotting the ceiling and floor.

“Stick close to me,” you whisper.  “Lots of earthcrawlers must come through here.  There are holes everywhere.”

You can feel the tension in him as he huddles closer.  “What do we do if we run into one?”

“Um.” You swallow.  “Be very, very quiet, and hope it doesn’t notice us.”

You’d like to be quiet now, but falling in a hole would be just as bad as attracting attention.  Sparingly you echolocate, skirting various drop-offs as you lead Anon over to the wall.  At least here you won’t be caught out in the open, should a crawler choose to rear its head.

Eventually in the wall ahead you spy a tunnel with an upward incline.  If you can get in there, it might take you back up to the road, or at least to one of the side tunnels.  The only problem is that it’s about eight feet off the ground.

“I’m not going to leave you down here,” Anon says, when you tell him to climb on your back to reach it.

You almost argue, before you realize that he’s not going to be able to pull you up there with a broken arm.

“Don’t worry,” you say.  “We’ll find a different tunnel.”

Try as you might, you can’t keep the nerves out of your voice.  Being trapped down here in the dark is starting to get to you.  Every part of you is screaming to get out of here, and it takes all your effort to quash that feeling of panic.

Anon is quiet for a moment.  “Wait,” he says.

You hear the rustle of cloth, then soft ribbons against your face.  Anon is handing you the sling.
You’re taken aback.  “Anon… no, you’ll hurt yourself,” you say.  “You could do permanent damage to the bone.”

“We need to get out of here.”

“There… there are other tunnels.  We’ll find one we can reach.”

“There might not be another one.  Let’s get in there before we wake up the locals.”

You want to argue, but you know in your gut that this is the right course of action.  You feel sick to your stomach as you pack the sling into your bag.

Anon climbs onto your back and is able to throw his arms into the tunnel.  You hear him grunting as he shimmies his way inside.

His voice is labored when he calls down to you.  “Come on.”

You stand up on your hind legs and reach up blindly with a hoof.   Eventually his hand finds it and he starts to pull you up.

Halfway through, he hisses through his teeth, his strength faltering.  Just before he drops you, you reach out wildly with your other hoof and just barely catch the lip of the tunnel.  You hang precariously until he grabs you again and pulls you all the way in.

You hear him sit down, hard.  He’s panting loudly, obviously in pain.  You want to do something, anything, but you don’t know what; you could offer him a numbing draught, but that would make him sluggish, which neither of you can afford right now.  You have no drug you can offer him, no comfort other than the sling.  There is nothing you can do.

“Anon…” you say, standing motionless beside him.

Then his good arm wraps around you, and pulls you into his embrace.

You can’t remember the last time someone hugged you.  He holds you tightly, his arm around your back.  Your head finds the empty space just below his chin.  You feel the ragged rise and fall of his chest.

Trembling a little, you awkwardly put your forelimbs around him.  He rests his head on yours, as you nuzzle into his neck.  You feel your ears burning, and your heart going strangely fast.

You feel compelled to say something, but no words come to mind.  Your thinking is suddenly a jumble.  So you shut it off.  You close your eyes, shutting out the mountain, the earthcrawlers, all of it, and focusing solely on Anon’s warmth, and the sound of his breath.  Both of you lay there, saying nothing, just holding each other in the darkness.

His breathing slowly relaxes, to the point where you wonder if he’s fallen asleep.  Then he finally breaks the silence.

“Can you put it back on?”

Wordlessly you pull around to his side, where his broken arm hangs limply.  You tie the sling back on.

After you do this, he stands up again.

“Moss Moon,” he says.

“Y… Yeah?”

“Don’t think that this was your fault.  Dangerous things happen to people like us.  That’s just the life we live.”

He can’t see it, but you swallow, and look down to the ground.  “I… I know.”

There is silence again, the silence you have come to realize occurs when Anon has something else he wishes to say, but thinks better of it.  Instead he pats you on the head, and you poke him in the foot, a gesture of camaraderie that feels more natural every time you do it.

The two of you set off up the tunnel, searching together for a way out of this hell.