If asked today, Caldwell couldn't reliably tell anyone, perhaps even themself, why they had left the warm embrace of their kin to enter the depths. Why does water flow downstream? It must. To do otherwise would be to defy their very nature. Perhaps that made their forebears better, somehow- their defiance of nature, seeking a life above the surface instead of succumbing to the call of the darkness below. Perhaps what is natural is simply not ubiquitous.

Perhaps curiosity could claim influence.

Their memories of what lay below the surface had been clouded, murky in the way that the earliest recollections of childhood ought to be. The existence of the dungeons had lingered at the edge of their awareness, silt stirred in still water, and at some point, understanding had swelled to meet them. A stagnant life above ground...

No. Caldwell had come into being with the sounds of running water filling their ears, echoing softly in the tranquility of a cool, quiet cavern, and they could hardly be expected to forget such music in movement. The current had only grown stronger as they grew into the length of their legs. What began as an insistent trickling, the maddening, barely audible drip of gathering moisture spilling over moss had widened, deepened, become the omnipresent, echoing rush of an energetic stream churning up foam.

Surely curiosity was too shallow a word for such a need, a compulsion erroding all else. Wanderlust, their kin had called it, with a lack of understanding that can really only be borne from understanding, however removed it may be. But even that description felt lacking to a young Caldwell. It was so much simpler, so much more complex. How could one possibly name such a fundamental concept of being?

In the end, returning to a home they both knew and didn't had been as simple as letting themself be swept up in the eddies, following the networks of paths branching like tributaries of some mighty river, paths cut by generations of wandering hooves on different journeys; the same journey, really. The journey downward.

The water flows downstream, after all. It must. There is no other way.