The Crystal Caves

by Jamie Smart

  None of them looked particularly edible.

  ‘Keeper will take us into the mines, we’ll find the Flember Stream, and then we’ll take some flember home for the Eden Tree.’ He nibbled on the flonion, and nuzzled closer into Boja’s fur. ‘And we’ll do it all together.’

  The next thing Dev knew, the skies had lightened into a bundle of delicate greys, the rain lessened to a drizzle.

  He must have fallen asleep too.

  ‘Boja …’ he mumbled. ‘Boja, wake up …’

  He shrieked. What stuck out from the wall beside him was not the Boja he knew, but a far bigger, fluffier version of Boja. A night spent outside in the drizzle had fluffed Boja’s head fur into a giant red pom-pom, his eyes, nose and mouth all buried somewhere inside it.

  Dev flattened down what he could, combing Boja’s fur with his hand, although he only ended up making him look even more ridiculous.

  Boja was too asleep to notice.

  Suddenly the front doors of the Village clanged open. A gaggle of miners stepped out onto the gangway, stretching, yawning and scratching in the bleak morning light. Sleep had calmed them a little, but they were still grumbling about Dev. And Boja. And how they’d be going hungry tonight.

  ‘Chance the sea might offer us better today,’ old Grippins remarked, tugging his hat even further down upon his head.

  ‘It hasn’t bothered with us for weeks,’ Nobbins replied. ‘Probably forgotten we’re here at all.’

  ‘Ain’t forgotten.’ Elise clipped Nobbins’s ear. ‘You want to blame someone for us going hungry, you blame Keeper.’

  They grunted in agreement.

  ‘Well, whatever we find in the waters, may Dahlia bless us,’ Nobbins said, swinging the rope ladder down the hatch.

  ‘Dahlia bless us,’ the others agreed as they each climbed down to the ground.

  ‘Dahlia!’ Dev whispered to himself. ‘I know that name. I saw it written outside the mines.’

  He crept out from the shadows, watching the miners as they disappeared into the murky drizzle.

  ‘Maybe Dahlia can help us find the Flember Stream.’ He smiled hopefully. ‘Maybe Dahlia can help us go home!’

  16

  To the Coast

  Boja grumbled, his eyelids slowly opening. ‘Breakfascht,’ he drawled through his big fluffy face.

  ‘Not yet. Can you get yourself out of this wall first?’

  Boja blinked, seemingly surprised to find himself wedged half inside the Village, half outside. He shuffled a little, his chubby body squeaking as he tried to squeeze through. Dev reached up to grip his black shiny nose and he pulled. ‘HNNNNRGHHHHH!’ They both strained, until Boja came not out of the wall, but with the wall, a ballerina skirt of crumpled, ripped metal still clamped around his waist.

  And a destroyed portrait of Albert Wilburforce collapsing around his ankles.

  Boja wriggled his metal skirt down onto the gangway. His body had been kept safe and warm inside, but since his head had been left out to the mercy of the fluff-inducing drizzle Dev couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of him.

  ‘Mmf,’ Boja sniffed, idly scratching his belly with one paw, picking lumps of dried hibbicus stew from around his mouth with the other.

  ‘It’s fine, you look fine.’ Dev chuckled, swinging down the rope ladder. ‘Now hurry up! I don’t want to lose sight of the miners!’ He landed on the muddy ground with a squelch. Boja landed with more of a SPLUTCH, the noise of a bear who’d missed the first few rungs of the ladder and tumbled down the rest. He huffed and puffed as he pushed himself onto his feet, then trudged along behind Dev.

  The two of them followed the miners from a distance, watching as they snaked over the edge of the cliff and then down the narrow path into the quarry, along the outer ring. Dev was keen to stay out of sight, ducking behind wreckage whenever he thought they might be spotted. Boja, however, was far more concerned about the hibbicus leaves sprouting around them. He clutched his tummy, and then his bottom, and groaned at the memory of what those withered old plants had done to him.

  ‘No more … stew …’ he whined.

  ‘Here.’ Dev pulled a small, tired-looking cauliflower from his pocket. ‘Try one of these instead.’

  Boja took the cauliflower between his fingers. A gentle crackle of flember passed across it and suddenly he was holding something far thicker and riper than the vegetable Dev had offered him.

  He plopped it into his mouth, and began crunching contentedly.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing you do that,’ Dev laughed. Then he stared wistfully at his own, rather unappetizing, withered spricket. ‘Shame I can’t share my flember too.’

  By the time they reached the craggy outer wall, the miners were already climbing the calamity of wooden planks and platforms embedded in it. Dev was quick to follow them. He could hear the roar of the sea beyond. He could feel its salty spray. He hopped excitedly from step to step, leaping up onto the glistening wet rocks at the top before stopping, stunned, to gaze out upon one of the most beautiful sights he could have imagined.

  The sea.

  It stretched as wide as his eyes could see. An ocean of waves – huge, huge waves, swirling and splitting and tearing themselves apart only to smash right back together. A great din filled his ears. The sharp spray lashed his skin. Every breath, every deep, deep breath, brought only bitter cold into his lungs.

  It was everything he’d hoped it would be.

  And it was so much more.

  And yet, from high up on the mountain, Dev had always thought the seas were blue. It darkened nearer the coastline, but that, he had assumed, was just the shadow from the rocks, the coves that curled around it, the momentous, sharp spines of the reef rising out from its waters. This close, however, he could see it more clearly.

  The water here was black.

  What, he wondered, could all the miners be looking for in a sea like this?

  ‘Come to ruin this for us too, have you?’ Nobbins glared up at Dev from one of the many wooden jetties hanging out from the rocks. ‘Brought your bear? Maybe he can fart so hard it pushes one of us into the water?’

  ‘N … no,’ Dev stammered, just as Boja’s sweaty, fluffy, bulbous head rose up behind him.

  Elise was the first to laugh. She pointed a finger up at Boja, alerting the other miners to his huge, ridiculous head, and soon they were all rolling about in hysterics.

  Boja had absolutely no idea what they were laughing at. So he laughed along too, to be polite.

  Dev started climbing down the rickety ladders. ‘Dahlia,’ he said. ‘You all mentioned Dahlia, back at the Village. I saw her name by the mines too.’

  The laughter stopped. ‘Blessed Dahlia,’ Nobbins muttered, pulling out his blackened finger and drawing a large heart onto his chest. ‘You don’t say that name, boy. You ain’t worthy to even hold it on your tongue.’

  ‘Who … who is she?’

  ‘Dahlia is the Foodbringer,’ Elise replied. ‘When she sees fit, we eat more than just filthy rotten hibbicus stew.’ A happier memory flickered across her face. ‘When Dahlia blesses us, we eat like royalty.’

  ‘But she won’t feed us nothing if we don’t pay her,’ Nobbins fussed, wrapping a length of chain around his arm. The other end had already been tied around an oil drum, which he kicked into the foaming water. ‘And we can’t pay her if nothing washes up. So if you wouldn’t mind, lad, you’re getting in our way.’ He scowled. Dev took a few steps back. ‘Pay her?’

  Grippins appeared behind him. ‘Gold,’ he hissed from beneath his floppy hat. ‘Why, you got any on you?’

  Prickles appeared on his other side. ‘Clamp his jaw open! I’m telling you, he’ll have some in his teeth!’

  ‘I … I haven’t got any gold,’ Dev stuttered. He swallowed nervously as he thought of the beautiful gold heart thumping in Boja’s chest, the gold heart he had placed there himself. ‘But if I could help you find some, some gold for Dahlia, in return would you help us get inside
the mines?’

  ‘You want … to enter the SANCTUARY?’ Prickles shrieked.

  Nobbins swung around, slapping his dirty fingers across his damp forehead and drawing on two rather fierce eyebrows. ‘You stay AWAY from the Sanctuary, lad. That’s where Dahlia LIVES. You stay away from her, you stay AWAY from our Foodbringer.’

  Elise grabbed the back of Dev’s scarf and hoiked him backwards. ‘Anyway,’ she smirked, dragging him across the jetty. ‘You won’t find any gold before we do. Not unless you’re going to dive into the sea for it.’

  ‘And you might not want to do that.’ Nobbins lifted his oil drum out from the water, its metal sides now bubbling and dissolving before Dev’s eyes. ‘Gold’s the only thing the sea don’t eat.’

  17

  Along the Coast

  Dev climbed the ladders back to the higher line of rocks, then sat down next to Boja and his huge head.

  Together they stared out across the black, rolling seas.

  ‘They said she lives inside the mines,’ Dev muttered. ‘Dahlia – they said she lives down there. That’s why they won’t let us in. But if someone does live down there, then there must still be flember down there with them. And if there is flember, then it could lead us straight to the Flember Stream! Boja, we HAVE to get inside those mines.’

  ‘You found the sea, then,’ Priest hissed in Dev’s ear.

  ‘NYARGH!’ Dev’s heart jumped inside his chest.

  ‘YARGHHHH!’ Boja bellowed.

  ‘My apologies. I didn’t mean to … sssscare you,’ Priest smirked, as his long, spindly limbs pulled the rest of his body down between them. He took a deep intake of breath and savoured the salty air. ‘Isn’t it … majestic?’

  ‘It’s black.’ Dev tried to shuffle away. ‘The water, it’s as black as ink.’

  ‘It is boundless,’ Priest exhaled. ‘Just like the night sky itself.’

  ‘I saw Nobbins put an oil drum in the water,’ Dev said. ‘It came out full of holes! He said the sea ate it. That it eats everything except gold!’

  Priest’s eye glinted. ‘I did warn you to stay away.’ He wrapped a robed arm around Dev’s shoulders. ‘We don’t want you or your … friend … to be falling beneath the waves, do we?’

  Dev started to feel woozy again. He gazed at the glowing crystals clinking around Priest’s neck. ‘Your … your flemberthysts,’ he mumbled. ‘Where did you find them?’

  Priest looked down to his necklace. Then, with a loud heave and the pop-pop-pop of cracking bones, he unfolded his limbs and stood back up. ‘I have more,’ he said. ‘Come away from the water, and I’ll show you.’

  Before Dev could even reply, Priest had started dragging his robes across the rocks of the coastline, his spindly shadow shuffling along towards a tall cove of sharpened rocks. Then he reached up, and started to climb. One crag to the next, to the next, hauling his ghoulish, black body up inside a hollow.

  A hollow so dark and so scary-looking it made Dev’s stomach bubble.

  ‘I’m not keen on following him up there,’ Dev said to Boja, nervously tugging his boots up. ‘But if Priest has more flemberthysts, then maybe he knows how to get us into the mines. Anything which brings us closer to the Flember Stream, which will bring us home, has to be worth the risk.’

  From somewhere inside the fluff, Boja whimpered.

  ‘We’ll be quick,’ Dev insisted. ‘I promise.’

  He pulled Boja upright, and together they edged along the coastline between Darkwater and the sea. With the incessant drizzle, and now the spray from the waves, the rest of Boja’s fur was floofing up too. Walking was quite difficult, so much so that Dev was rather concerned his big, floofy friend might tread a big, floofy foot too close to the rocky edge, and then tumble down into the sea.

  As they neared the hollow, the rocks became even more difficult. They jutted out from the ground like a cavalcade of jagged, twisting spears, almost impossible to walk through were it not for Boja’s excessively floofy feet. He sque-e-e-ezed his body between the spikes, picked up Dev and carried him in his arms like he was a precious new-born waffle.

  ‘Boja, lift me higher!’

  Boja gripped both paws around Dev’s waist and hauled him up as high as he could reach. Dev scrambled onto a ledge of flatter ground, pulling himself up in front of the wide-open mouth of the hollow.

  Boja whimpered again, as if it might make Dev change his mind and turn round.

  ‘Just wait for me out here.’ Dev smiled. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’

  Then he stepped into the darkness, and disappeared completely.

  18

  The Hollow

  It felt deathly cold inside the hollow.

  A panic slithered through Dev’s bones.

  ‘Priest?’ His voice echoed out around him. ‘Priest, are you in here?’

  His eyes caught sight of something glowing in the darkness. It was a faint light, but it was moving, wisping between a few loose lumps of crystal lying on the ground.

  ‘Flember.’ Dev gasped. ‘And … flemberthysts!’

  These flemberthysts, however, didn’t look like the ones Ventillo had shown him in Eden’s caves. They didn’t shine with the same brilliant white light. No, these crystals murmured. They struggled. They lit for a few seconds with the weakest of lights, and then they were dark again.

  ‘I told you there were more.’ A towering shadow flickered against the wall. Dev froze, watching in horror as Priest’s long, scarred face emerged out from the darkness, his sharpened teeth grimacing into a smile.

  ‘Flember …’ Dev struggled to croak out the words. ‘There … there is flember in Darkwater after all!’

  Priest cast his beady eye over the crystals. ‘Oh, no no no, this is my flember you see before you.’ He grinned, picking one up and proudly stroking the light out from inside it. ‘Every drop of it leaving my body, flowing through these little rocks and then back again.’

  Dev stared at him in disbelief. ‘That … that’s not possible! Flember can’t just leave someone’s body like that, not unless they’re Boja!’

  ‘Sit among these crystals long enough and they start dra-w-w-wing it out of you.’ Priest took a deep, satisfied breath. The glow inside each flemberthyst breathed with him. ‘It takes a while. Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. These ones have been sucking out my flember for years. Then they pass it around, you see? One crystal … to the next … to the next, all the way back to me.’ He scuttled behind Dev and clutched his shoulders. ‘Isn’t it beautiful to watch?’ Priest whispered.

  ‘I didn’t know flemberthysts could pull your flember out.’ Dev gasped. ‘And then conduct it, like this, like electricity flowing around a circuit …’

  Suddenly Priest slipped his fingers into Dev’s backpack and pulled out a small glowing chunk of flemberthyst. ‘They can pull your flember out too, lad. I hid this piece on you when we first met,’ he hissed. ‘You’ve been charging it up ever since.’

  A weakness washed through Dev’s limbs. He stared at the glowing crystal in amazement. ‘That … that’s stolen a bit of my flember?’

  ‘A tiny amount.’ Priest grinned. ‘I hide a crystal on everyone in Darkwater, taking a little bit of flember from each. Then, when I gets my chance, I give that flember away.’

  ‘Away?’

  ‘To the SEA.’

  Suddenly Priest thrust the flemberthyst out in front of him and dropped it into a shallow puddle of water. A thick crack splintered across the crystal’s surface, a crack which then shattered it into a hundred shards. Its glow dimmed, the water bubbled, and within seconds the flemberthyst had dissolved away beneath the surface.

  Dev couldn’t quite believe what he’d just seen. His mouth flapped open, trying to form words, but only making noises.

  ‘Oh, don’t take it so personally. I give my own flember too!’ Priest lashed his foot out and kicked a stack of faintly glowing flemberthysts into the puddle. They too hissed loudly, cracking into shards before dissolving. ‘The black waters hung
er, lad. They demand flember! Better I give them a little here and there or the sea will wash right into Darkwater to eat us instead.’

  He loomed in close.

  ‘Don’t you see? I take flember to HELP us all. I’m trying to keep us all SAFE.’

  Every inch of Dev’s skin prickled with fear. He threw himself down to the ground, grabbing an armful of crystals. ‘Flemberthysts belong underground,’ he shouted. ‘Not up here. They’re not for you to use to … to steal other people’s flember!’

  ‘We dug all the crystals up.’ Priest shrugged. ‘I’ve just been picking up the leftovers. You … do know that’s my flember you’re taking?’

  The flemberthysts in Dev’s arms started to fade. Flember wafted out, sparkling across the darkness, slipping back towards Priest and then sinking inside his robes. ‘What did you call it? A circuit?’ Priest chuckled. ‘Yessss, I like that word. It’s a circuit. Flember always flows back to where it belongs, back to its warm, host body. That’s why I have to be so quick throwing these pretty little crystals into the water, or else they’d lose all that delicious flember.’

  Dev tried not to listen. He didn’t want anything more to do with Priest, didn’t want to be anywhere near him. All he could think about was getting out of here and back to Boja. Then he’d be safe. Then he could work out what to do next.

  ‘That’s it, hold those crystals tight!’ Priest called out. ‘Fill them with the rest of your lovely flember.’

  And then he laughed. A nasty, gurgling laugh, which echoed through the hollow and followed Dev all the way out into the daylight.