TWO

Chapter Two: Throat of Stone

The ground breaks open where the marsh forgets to hold itself. A seam of black earth, a narrow mouth. Vael lowers in on his hands, knuckles scraping root and grit, and the earth’s damp breath climbs his sleeves.

Water sounds ahead,thread-thin, insistent. The air cools, tightens. When his boots find the stone floor he is swallowed by a layered dark, not blind, just crowded. He waits until the cave’s smell finds him: wet limestone, bat musk, iron leaching from vein. The fog from outside hovers at his back like a watcher who won’t enter.

Sel: Don’t bring your sky down here.

Vael: I left it at the lip.

Sel: You keep pockets.

He moves by touch. The wall on his left is ribbed, scalloped by water that once walked here with more force. His fingertips learn it: ridge, hollow, slick film, a sudden tooth of quartz. The ceiling drops. He crouches and feels stone brush his hair, then the whole tunnel lowers again until he must crawl. Knees grind. Palms burn. The cave’s cold travels boneward.

The trickle swells to a voice. The tunnel opens at last, not wide,just enough to kneel upright. A black river threads the floor, fast but quiet, a sheet of moving skin. It reflects nothing; it absorbs. The air tastes of rust shavings and something green he can’t name.

Vael: You wanted deeper.

Sel: I wanted honest.

Vael: Outside was honest.

Sel: Outside was a mirror. This is throat.

A drip meets rock, the sharp clock of it echoing out in diminishing rings. Vael cups the river. The water bites his hands numb, then hollows to a clean ache. He drinks. It is not pleasant. It is correct.

Sel: Again.

He drinks again until his jaw tightens against the cold and his chest answers with a small shudder. The cave answers too,somewhere back in the dark, wings stir. A dry whisper. Guano dust lifts and falls.

Vael: Something lives here.

Sel: So do you.

He sets his palms flat on the floor; it’s smoother than it looks, planed by centuries of flow. Under the surface a deeper rumble thrums,a freight of pressure shouldering rock, patient and certain.

Vael: How long has it moved?

Sel: Longer than your question can hold.

The tunnel narrows along the river’s bend. He tucks his shoulders and slips sideways, rock kissing cloth, stone scraping belt, river tugging at his boot. He breathes shallow to fit the space his ribs allow. The walls crowd his ears. Every exhale returns louder, as if the cave is speaking him back.

Sel: Slow.

Vael: I’m stuck.

Sel: You’re learning your shape.

The squeeze resolves into a chamber the size of a small room,round, low, ringing with water’s speech. Stalactites hang like unspoken notes. The river veers to the left and vanishes under a fall of rock. Beside it, a narrow shelf,dry, dusted with fine silt,just enough for a body to sit.

Vael sits. The stone pushes up through him; his spine maps it without trying. He presses his forearms together to warm his hands and listens. The chamber amplifies his blood. He can hear it step by step: carotid, wrist, the small drum tucked under eardrum.

Sel: Your temple again.

Vael: Tent.

Sel: If you call it that, you can leave.

Vael: Do you want me to?

Sel: I want you to hear.

A distant clatter,pebbles surrendering to some shift. Then the slow tear of a bat unhooking itself. He smells it before he sees it: musk, fur, a faint sweetness of fruit dried to leather. The bat drops, skims the river, rights itself on sound he cannot parse.

He closes his eyes to listen harder, which is absurd here, but it helps. The cave composes itself into layers: surface water silked thin; undercurrent muscled; seepage tapping stalactite tips; distant rock moving on a time no one owns.

Vael: Say the thing you brought me for.

Sel: You keep trying to make a lesson. This is mouth. Put something in.

Vael: What?

Sel: What you don’t want to carry back.

He waits. The first offerings are easy: a thought about a face he’s been trying not to forget; a fear of dying in a place like this, found years later blue-white and neat; a stubborn wish for any voice other than his own.

Sel: Not scraps.

Vael: Then take hunger.

Sel: Hunger is structural.

Vael: Then take the need to name what I can’t hold.

The words leave him like breath aimed down a flute. They meet the cave and reassemble into something less his. The river accepts the rest.

Sel: Better.

He lies back on the shelf. The stone is impossibly cold. The ceiling sits a hand’s breadth above his nose,mineral teeth waiting, patient. He follows one tooth with his eyes until it blurs.

Vael: If this drops, that’s it.

Sel: If clouds drop, that’s it. If your throat forgets, that’s it.

Vael: You’re comforting.

Sel: I’m accurate.

The river changes pitch, barely. He sits up. A freshet sneaks through a seam in the wall and threads the main flow, brightening it a half tone. He watches the join. No clash. The water resolves difference by proceeding.

Vael: That…teach,

Sel: Don’t.

He closes his mouth. He feels foolish and, somehow, right-sized. The drip continues its metronome. He times his breath to a count he doesn’t announce.

The chamber’s dryness is a deception; moisture wicks into his clothes, finds the warm at his chest and draws it out. He shivers, teeth prepped to chatter. He clamps the hinge and breathes deeper instead. The cold maps him again, and where it runs, it shows edges he didn’t know.

Sel: Now you hear me.

Vael: I hear rocks.

Sel: Same family.

He laughs once, a low bark that startles the bats into a soft flurry. He raises a hand in apology to the dark. Silence settles; not absence,attention.

He crawls to the river and plunges his hands until the ache clarifies into something almost clean. He cups water and pours it over his head. It needles his scalp, then runs down the back of his neck and under the collar, a single thread plotting spine to tailbone. For a second, fur rises in him that he does not have.

Sel: Careful.

Vael: You feel it too.

Sel: I feel what you insist on not naming.

Vael: The old story.

Sel: Older than story.

The way back will be harder. Stones always change when you’ve crossed them once. He stands and the chamber tilts, though it’s his blood, not the room. He places his palm on the wall to steady. The wall weeps. The weeping coats his skin in a film that tastes of chalk when he licks it without thinking.

Sel: You don’t have to prove you’re here by eating it.

Vael: How else?

Sel: By not leaving.

He settles onto the shelf again. He chooses stillness like a task. Minutes, then more. The cave teaches the body how not to demand.

At some point the river’s song lowers another fraction, as if a valve in the earth turned. The drip misses a beat; resumes. A filament of light creeps along the ceiling,no, not light: a line of blind shrimp, pale as milk, drifting near the surface, their bodies gathering what the cave affords.

Vael: They live on almost.

Sel: So do you.

Vael: Not forever.

Sel: Nothing does. That’s why “almost” matters.

He thinks of the flats above,fog closing, moon returning, the tide’s pause. He feels the two places stack, water on water, silence on silence, as if this chamber were the throat of that breath.

Vael: Say it, then. The thing you keep coiling around.

Sel: You want the world to explain itself because you confuse explanation with safety.

Vael: Safety is not the point.

Sel: No. The point is contact. And contact rarely explains.

He lets that stand. The river speaks forward. The bats rustle. A hairline crack in the wall ticks with expansion. His jaw unclenches.

Vael: You asked me to shed something.

Sel: I did.

He grips the cord at his wrist,a thin leather loop, a habit more than meaning. He unties it and lays it on the shelf. The gesture feels childish, then necessary.

Sel: Keep shedding.

Vael: There’s not much else I can afford to lose.

Sel: Start with the part of you that thinks you’ll be finished.

He smiles without showing it to anyone. The cave doesn’t care for performances. He lies back again. The stone learns his weight.

He breathes,not to warm himself, not to count, but to stay stitched to the moving dark. Each inhale scrapes raw places, then smooths them. Each exhale carries grit he didn’t know he held. The cave keeps none of it that he can see.

Sel: When you leave, you’ll think you’ve learned something.

Vael: I already do.

Sel: Later, you’ll realize the cave doesn’t teach. It eats and allows.

Vael: And me?

Sel: You are allowed.

A hush. The river’s tone settles into one he recognizes from earlier,the outside hum, translated. He sits up. The chamber seems smaller now, or he has grown inside it; hard to tell.

He rises. The squeeze passage waits,a stone throat, greedy and exact. He trails his fingers along the wet wall, finding the same quartz tooth, the same slicks. As he enters the narrow, he turns his head to spare his nose and the rock nicks his cheek anyway. The sting is sharp; the smell of iron blooms. He tastes it on his lip.

Sel: Marked.

Vael: I was leaving, remember?

Sel: Some marks don’t ask.

The tunnel tightens again. He empties his breath to fit, ribs knitting around less. For a moment he stalls, a pinned animal. Panic presses in with the rock.

Sel: Don’t push.

Vael: I can’t move.

Sel: Then be moved.

He stills. The body solves the inch the mind could not; he slides, a slow release, and the stone lets him through with a sound like a long-held word finally spoken.

At the mouth, the outside fog has waited in place, faithful to its own breathing. The marsh’s smell,salt, rot, reed,returns at full strength. The sky is the pale of a coin rubbed thin. He climbs out, knees black with cave, cheek marked, chest open.

He does not say what he feels. He stands in the seam air and lets the cave’s cold keep a hand on his spine while the wet world warms his face.

Sel: Well?

Vael: I didn’t learn.

Sel: Good.

Vael: I heard.

Sel: Better.

He doesn’t turn back. He doesn’t promise return. The hole in the earth holds its own vow. He walks toward the tidal flats, the mud making soft sounds that mean nothing and everything, and the day not yet agreeing to begin.

• UN