“Don’t be so frightened, Macedon; there’s something up ahead.  I know you can’t smell it, but I can.” 

Macedon’s creaky complaint trailed after Charentais nevertheless.  He suppressed laughter as he stretched out, the careful deliberation of his pace extending to the luxury of a trot, and heard the toad splat faithfully in his wake. 

They had left behind the known extent of the Overgrown Caverns some time ago.  Charen’s maps had been cultivated from Crispin’s libraries of them, earmarked and notated by generations of Coursers, but even so, they failed at places — the edges, mostly.  The frayed parts of the dungeons where the tunnels carved themselves deeper, where the knots of vines yielded to caverns and corridors that had not existed there before.

When Charen stopped to listen, here, he could almost hear the low, resonant groan of their motion.  Bedrock and magic, grinding together, gnawing through earth. 

Macedon croaked miserably.  

“A little longer, my friend, and then we shall return and update the maps.” 

There had been a cavern they had passed in which the vines had slithered like snakes together at the sound of Charen’s hooves against the stone.  Their thorn-tipped ends had lifted and turned blindly towards him, their leaves fluttering with phantom inhalation.  Around them, plant matter lay in brown discard — the shedding of chlorophyll-filled skins. 

Lonicera would like that one, Charen thought, although perhaps it was not as spectacular as the paintings they had found before. 

Now, he turned through an archway, crumbling already at the base.  

Ahead of him, water shimmered — a clear moving stream that glittered with rainbows, alight as if by a contained sun beneath the surface. 

“Ahh, you see, Macedon?” 

The toad wheezed by his hooves.  The black, bright beads of his eyes blinked up at Charentais. 

“Not all magic is malicious, you know, even in the dungeon.” 

Macedon’s motionless regard suggested he was not keen to try it. 

Despite the shine of the water, Charen was not inclined to drink blindly, either.  He paced meditatively along the lip of the stream, watching it move not entirely like a liquid, drawing the clean smell of it across his tongue.  Its tides implied a unity between the drops, a viscous returning to a whole.  Its brightness felt like that of a lure. 

No matter the angle of his approach, he could not see the bottom. 

“Loni will know what to make of it,” Charen said at last to Macedon, leaving behind the yielding shore to return to his waiting pet.  “Come along, Macedon.  I know you’ve been itching to get home.” 

Macedon’s subsequent splat was, to Charen’s practiced ear, considerably happier.