Meg - Grass Holds Yale

“Same difference,” she said, totally stealing my line. “How much do you think those things weigh?”
“A lot.”
She seemed to run that through her mental calculator. “Okay. Get ready.”
“For what?”
“No spoilers.”
“I hate you.”
Meg thrust out her hands. All around the yales, the grass went into overdrive, braiding itself into thick green ropes that wrapped around the beasts’ legs. The creatures thrashed and bellowed like gargling foghorns, but the grass continued to grow, climbing across their flanks, entangling their massive bodies.
“Go,” Meg said.
I ran.
Thirty yards had never seemed so far.
Halfway to the rocks, I glanced back. Meg was stumbling, her face glistening with sweat. It must have been taking all her strength to keep the yales entangled. The beasts strained and spun their horns, slashing at the grass, pulling against the sod with all their might.
I reached the pile of rocks.
As I’d suspected, from side-by-side fissures in the face of one boulder, twin springs gurgled, as if Poseidon had come by and cracked the stone with his trident: I want hot water here, and cold water here. One spring bubbled diluted white, the color of nonfat milk. The other was as black as squid ink. They ran together in a mossy streak before splattering against the muddy ground.
Beyond the springs, a crevasse zigzagged between the largest boulders—a ten-foot-wide wound in the earth, leaving no doubt as to the presence of the cavern system below. At the lip of the chasm, a coil of rope was tied to an iron piton.
Meg staggered toward me. “Hurry,” she gasped. “Jump in.”
Behind her, the yales were slowly ripping through their grassy bonds.
“We have to drink,” I told her. “Mnemosyne, the Spring of Memory, is black. Lethe, the Spring of Forgetfulness, is white. If we drink both at the same time, they should counteract each other and prepare our minds—”
“Don’t care.” Meg’s face was now as white as the waters of Lethe. “You go.”
“But you have to come with me! The Oracle said so! Besides, you won’t be in any shape to defend yourself.”
“Fine,” she groaned. “Drink!”
I cupped one hand in the water of Mnemosyne, the other hand in the water of Lethe. I gulped them down simultaneously. They had no taste—just intense, numbing cold, the sort that hurts so badly you don’t feel the pain until much later.
My brain began to swivel and corkscrew like a yale horn. My feet felt like helium balloons. Meg struggled with the rope, trying to wrap it around my waist. For some reason, I found this hysterical.
“Your turn,” I giggled. “Drinkie, drinkie!”
Meg scowled. “And lose my wits? Nuh-uh.”
“Silly willy! If you don’t prepare yourself for the Oracle—”
In the meadow, the yales ripped themselves free, peeling off several square yards of turf from the ground.
“No time!” Meg lunged forward, tackling me around the waist. Like the good friend she was, she sent me tumbling over the ledge and into the black void below.

***

The Dark prophecy, Chapter 32