Inks
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Word Count - [1844]
I Vis
Vivi et Evigilans
Vivi et Evigilans
Lambda drew in a deep, gasping breath, then choked on it. He startled to consciousness face-down and coughing up snow.
Wha--?
The spurii’s eyes shot open, and he instinctively shoved himself onto his side, sucking in a sharp, gasping breath. Pain lanced up his right arm. With a choked-off cry, he jolted upright, panting out bursts of foggy breath. The icy-cold air burned in his lungs, setting him off coughing again while melted snow ran down the side of his nose and dripped from his chin, his feathered cheekbones, and the damp tangle of his bangs.
What? Where…?
The disorientation was only momentary, though.
Cave-in, Lamb thought distantly. Cave-in. There was a cave-in. Then the full weight of that memory hit him – Mam, Taa! – and he shot to his feet.
They didn’t hold, and he collapsed back down just as fast, head pounding and arm throbbing anew with pain. “Bell-damn it,” he gasped, curling over the limb.
It wasn’t just the arm, either. His entire body was sore, as though someone had gone and systematically bruised every inch of him, and he had a splitting headache originating high on left temple.
Heart hammering in his chest, Lamb looked down at his arm. No horrible angles or protruding bone greeted him, but then, dressed in several layers of thick, fur-lined animal hide, it was hard to really tell. Next he reached up, tentative, and touched at the side of his head.
Pain blossomed from the point of contact, leaving him moaning, winded, and fighting to keep his injured arm still. His keratin-covered fingertips came away spotted bright-red. He wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. Either he was bleeding badly, or he hadn’t been unconscious long.
So. A fracture somewhere on his arm. Possibly (probably) a concussion. And he was trapped…
…where was he trapped, exactly?
When the cave-in had started, he’d made a run for Site 14, trying to find his parents before the whole of the damn glacial ruins came down on top of them. The rock beneath his feet had given way before he got there. He’d fallen. He remembered catching a hold on something – an outcropping of ice or rock, maybe – fighting for a better grip – then falling again. Striking something else, rolling, scrambling to hold on, and falling some more before finally landing on (and bouncing his skull off of) a surface that held. After that, his memory was mostly scattered, but he was pretty sure he’d slid and rolled his way down a steep incline before being ejected out into open space again. The ground had rushed up to meet him – he’d instinctively thrown out his arms to catch himself – and –
Well, that was probably where he broke his arm.
Lambda pulled his eyes from the blood on his fingers and looked up.
Before him was a gaping maw of a cavern, filled with glittering ice formations and rocky outcroppings white with permafrost. Light refracted off a thousand icy surfaces. Drifts of snow created a layer of white on the cavern floor and choked the crevices of the cavern’s stone formations. He could make out several openings in the cavern walls, likely leading nowhere or deeper underground. Clusters of long, wicked-looking icicles spotted the ceiling in places. The soft, faint snap-and-crack of shifting and settling ice echoed across the cavern every so often, and he could hear the whistle of wind, somewhere far, far above him.
Dozens of thin gaps in the ceiling left beams of sunlight streaming across the floor, and the snow meant that while he couldn’t see it, the cave must’ve been exposed to the sky.
Not that it meant he was getting out that way. From what he could see, the snow and light were filtering down through layers of not-quite-interlocking, ice-coated rock comprised of jigsaw-like overhangs and crevices. To say nothing of how far down he was…which, he was guessing, was pretty far.
Lambda glanced over his shoulder. The movement jostled his arm, sending another warning-bolt of pain up his shoulder and down his fingertips.
Like he thought. Behind him stood an impossibly-steep slope of ice, petering out into a jagged overhang at least ten feet up from where Lambda now sat. No going back the way he came.
Now what? he thought weakly, feeling acutely pathetic – wounded and slumped in the snow.
“Stay calm,” his muttered to himself, voice broken with shivers. “Calm, calm, calm, calm.”
He still had the backpack he’d carried into the cave with him this morning. That meant food and water, his hunting knife, a lantern with at least a couple hours’ worth of oil in it, a first aid kit, and a few other basic survival items (in addition to a few useless things – an assortment of excavation tools, a book he was halfway through reading, and his father’s reading glasses, which were almost certainly broken).
He had two working legs and one working arm. The sunlight meant he couldn’t have been unconscious for very long at all – if a rescue-effort was ongoing, they might still be able to find him. If he was concussed, it at least hadn’t left him too addled to think straight. His extremities ached with cold, but at least they hadn’t gone numb. Not yet.
I can handle this. Lambda exhaled sharply through his nose and dragged his hand through his hair, sweeping the damp dark-and-gold mess away from his face. Just…just one thing at a time.
Lamb shrugged the knapsack from his good shoulder. Then he moved in slow, careful increments, working the strap off his injured arm. It screamed at the movement regardless, and he lost a couple minutes gasping for breath. Once the pain had ebbed enough to allow for conscious thought again, Lamb dragged his bag into his lap and worked the ties loose. He dug around, carefully thinking only about what he was doing. Nothing else. If he started thinking about anything else, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop.
Don’t think about the cold. He drew an insulated flask from his bag, and sighed softly in relief – the container hadn’t ruptured. He uncapped it one-handed and took a generous swallow of the hot spice tea within – shivering at the warmth of it.
Don’t think about Mam or Taa. He stared thoughtfully at the pages of his book as he set it aside. He had a bit of flint and steel in his bag, but how long would a book really burn? Best to keep it as a last resort.
One thing at a time. He fumbled around until he found what he’d really been hunting for – the rudimentary first aid kit his mother had put together – what seemed like ages ago. He worked the small satchel open with clumsy fingers and teeth. “Please,” he whispered under his breath, pulling supplies out of the little leather bag a handful at a time. “C’mon, where are you…?” Bandages, a few ointments, a tiny box with several needles and a spool of thread, and, finally, wrapped in linen: three thin, compact vials, each filled with a different-colored potion.
Lamb’s breath escaped him in a rush of intense relief. They were intact. After all that falling and rolling…he could barely believe it.
Three vials, the memory of his mother’s voice reminded him. Make sure you remember which is which, and don’t break a seal unless you’re going to use it.
Three vials for three basic Castus spells. Lambda put the vial full of deep-green potion away – the other two he took in-hand. He pulled the cork from the first with his teeth and upended the potion into his mouth. The golden liquid inside barely accounted for a single swallow, but the mixture left his tongue and mouth feeling strangely numb – tingly, almost – and the effect was instantaneous.
A soft, glowing gold light bathed over his right arm, immobilizing the limb in a cast of magic. He wasn’t sure how long the fracture would take to fully mend – a few minutes? An hour? Regardless, his prospects were already starting to look better.
How long was he supposed to wait between potions, though? Thirty seconds? A minute? Wistfully, Lamb wished he’d paid more attention to his mother when she’d been lecturing him on this stuff.
He studied the contours of the cavern as he counted, silently, to himself. The glittering ice formations and snow-coated rocks; the layers of pure white snow, crystals shimmering in the thin lines of sunlight – in any other situation, Lambda would be admiring the aesthetic beauty of it.
Right now, he just wanted a way out.
“Okay,” Lambda said after he’d counted his way to sixty twice and the pain in his arm had been replaced with a distinct numbness instead. “Okay, now you.”
The second potion – deep, ruby-red in color, and far more viscous than the first – left a bitter and unpleasantly cloying sort of medicinal taste in his mouth…but the stabbing pain in his head began to ebb, which more than made up for it.
Lamb spent the next couple of minutes returning everything to his knapsack, rinsing the taste of potion from his mouth with another sip of hot tea, and thinking.
Which was more likely: that he’d be able to hear rescue efforts if they ventured close enough, and be able to alert them to his position…or that one of the openings in the cavern would lead, if not to the surface, then close enough to give him better odds? Which was the better idea: staying where he was in hopes of being saved, or spelunking in hopes of saving himself?
Lambda groped at his coat with his good arm. He found nothing in his left pocket, but his fingers wrapped around a tiny source of heat nestled at the bottom of the right – a smooth, rounded stone, currently black as jet. He transferred it to his other pocket and left his hand curled around the warmth. Some of the archaeologists at the site used the term ‘thermal stone’, but his family had always called them ‘sunstones’ – smallish rocks that retained heat for extended periods of time. The stones turned white as they lost heat and black as they grew hotter, and they made for ideal hand warmers.
He usually kept one in each pocket (at his parents’ behest), but he must have lost one while he was smashing into various hard surfaces on his way down here. The one he had might last through the night – he wasn’t sure. They usually left the stones in the hearth to heat at night.
Still, between the tea and the stone, Lambda felt a little less frozen. And with his mother’s Castus potions working their magic, he…well, he still felt like he’d been used as a punching bag, but the most debilitating pains were gone.
He could handle this. He could handle this.
“Okay,” he said aloud, mostly just to break the silence. He reached back and pulled the hood of his thick outer coat over his head. “What next?”
.
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