The Scarlet Cavern

by Michael Dalton

  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I pulled out my phone. There was no signal, not that I’d expected one.

  I rubbed my eyes and then my head. A concussion seemed like the most likely explanation here. I was obviously hallucinating. That being the case, the last thing I ought to be doing was continuing my hike, since I could easily walk over a cliff if I wasn’t seeing things clearly.

  I decided to go back into the cave and sit down, away from the bewildering landscape in front of me.

  I hadn’t noticed it coming out, but there were more crystals on this end of the cave, some large enough that they protruded from the walls. I took a look at one of the crystal clusters. It was almost a foot across, part of a vein running back into the tunnel.

  That was when I got another shock. The passage I’d emerged from, the passage that, presumably, led back to where I’d fallen in, was gone. The cave now ended no more than fifteen feet inside. Where the passage had been was now a fractured wall studded with crystals. I went over and felt around. There had been no rock fall closing the passage. There was no sign the passage had ever even been there.

  I sat heavily down on a rock, bewilderment flowing through me. Hunger suddenly gnawed at my gut. I realized that no matter what I was looking at, it was well past dinner time. Maybe eating and a little rest would clear my head.

  We had divided up the food for the weekend amongst the LARP group, and I had my share of it in my backpack. I took my pack off and found something I could justify eating right now. I spent a few minutes forcing it down with some water.

  My hunger was satisfied, but my head did not clear.

  When I walked back out, I realized with a shock that the sun had actually risen in the sky. And if my bearings were not completely screwed up and this was the opposite side of the ridge I’d fallen down, I was facing roughly northwest, toward the ocean. That meant the sun was moving back over my head, in the exact opposite direction it should have been going.

  I pulled my phone out and opened the compass app. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but it got a reading on something. The compass needle spun around, indicating that north was actually off to my left.

  That made no sense. But I couldn’t get a GPS fix to figure out what was going on.

  I clearly could not go back, since the cave was closed off. Maybe I could, carefully, explore a bit and see what this area was.

  There was no path I could see, but the trees were not especially dense, so the going was easy. I was on a slope of some sort. Behind me was a hillside above the cave entrance. I decided to climb up – maybe I could get a better view of the area.

  I hadn’t gone very far before I heard something. Somewhere off to my left, behind a group of the strange glittering trees, I heard something crashing around. There were cracking and scraping noises, followed by an unmistakable growl.

  I froze. Mountain lions were the one real threat in this area when it came to wildlife, and they would definitely stalk humans if given the chance. But normally they were quite stealthy – they were ambush hunters – so whatever was going on, it was not about me.

  Then I heard a cry. I almost wasn’t sure what it was, possibly a hawk or something else. Or a rabbit the mountain lion had caught. But something about it sounded vaguely human.

  I didn’t like the feeling of being weighed down by all my gear if there really was a mountain lion nearby. I popped loose the buckles on my backpack and set it down. But unable to resist my curiosity, I stepped slowly and quietly forward into the clump of trees. After a few moments, I saw what was going on.

  The source of the growl was reasonably feline in form, but it was not a mountain lion. For one thing, it was black.

  For another, it had six legs.

  But it was angry, and it was after something up on the wall of rock above it. Huddled in a small alcove, I saw a pale blond-haired girl holding some kind of knife. She was trying to stop the creature from jumping up to get her.

  “Hold on!” I yelled. “I’ll try to draw it off!”

  A moment later, I realized the mistake I’d made. The mountain-lion thing spun around to face me. I was going to draw it off, for sure, because it was now coming in my direction with a very hungry look in its eyes.

  The girl yelled something, but I couldn’t catch it. It hadn’t even sounded like English.

  As the beast began closing in on me, I suddenly remembered that I had a weapon to defend myself – my katana.

  I reached back over my shoulder and drew it from its scabbard.

  The creature sprang at me much faster than I’d expected, and I only had time to bring up the blade in front of me. I slashed down as I tried to dodge it. There was an ear-splitting screech as the katana bit into its flesh. At the same time, I felt its claws scratching at my LARP armor.

  The breastplate held, but I felt a burning in my thigh as a claw dragged between two of the plates. We fell apart and faced each other.

  The wound I’d given it was not as serious as I hoped. I’d opened a gash across its shoulder, but it did not seem seriously injured.

  I took a moment to calm my nerves. I’d seen combat before. I had enlisted in the Marines after high school and served two tours in Iraq. So this was far from the first time I’d been face-to-face with something that wanted to kill me.

  But in Iraq I’d been part of a unit with a lot of support. I’d never had to fight a wild animal, alone, with little more than my bare hands. Granted, there was a time in my youth when I was fairly handy with a shinai – the bamboo swords used in kendo – but that was a long time ago.

  The look in the creature’s eyes told me only one of us was getting out of this alive. I thought of my kids and decided it was going to be me.

  With a shout, I lunged forward and struck at the creature. It hadn’t been expecting me to attack, but it reacted immediately, rearing back and swiping at me with its two front paws. This time I struck hard, opening a large gash down one of its forelegs. But its claws caught the edge of the greave on my left shin, nearly tearing it off.

  I fell back. It sprang at me again. I wasn’t ready to strike, and I could only block it with the end of my katana. I fell over and managed to avoid being pinned, but it was on me immediately, snarling and snapping its jaws at my face.

  I kicked out at it, trying to get away. I realized that as fearsome as it looked, it was not that big. The average mountain lion weighs about 150 pounds, and this thing seemed lighter. I was six-two and almost 200 pounds, which meant I had a size advantage I needed to use.

  I wedged a foot under it and shoved, pushing it off of me and over to the side. It landed on its wounded foreleg and let out a yelp. That was enough time to get me back on my feet.

  It sprang again, but this time instead of striking with my katana, I kicked out at its face, connecting my hiking boot squarely with its jaw. It let out another yelp and fell to the ground, staggering backward and regarding me murderously.

  The beast’s jaw was now crooked and uneven, and it opened and closed its mouth as if I’d broken it.

  Not waiting for it to make a decision, I lunged forward again, striking down at its head. Still stunned from my kick and with a wounded leg, it couldn’t dodge me fast enough, and my blade bit deeply into its neck. The beast let out a scream and fell to the side, kicking and lurching with its good legs to try to get away.

  I struck again, kneeling as I did, and nearly severed its head. It jerked and was still.

  I tried to catch my breath as the adrenaline began to subside. My heart was hammering in my chest. I wiped the blood off my katana using the creature’s fur and sheathed it. Then I sat down to assess my injuries, trying to get my mind around the absurdity of having come up here to role-play only to end up actually fighting for my life.

  As it turned out, my fake dragon-scale LARP armor had held up pretty well. There were four not-terribly-deep scratches across the breastplate, and my greave just needed to be strapped back down. The scratch on my thigh was nowhere near as bad as I feared. Th
e creature’s claw had torn my hiking pants underneath but the bleeding was already starting to stop.

  That was when I remembered the girl.

  Chapter 3

  She was still squeezed into the hollow in the rock wall.

  “Are you okay?”

  She yelled something at me, but again I didn’t understand it. She was speaking some language I didn’t know, or maybe just babbling. I walked over to the bottom of the cliffside. She was about ten feet up, having clearly scrambled up to avoid the mountain lion–thing.

  She yelled again.

  “What are you?”

  Several things struck me at once. First, what. Not who. What. The second was that, though her voice and speech sounded the same as it had before, I understood her now, in a way that made the bump on my head throb.

  “Uh, my name’s Will. I’m kind of lost.”

  She looked down at me, not responding right away. I got a better look at her now, and my forehead wrinkled in confusion. For a moment, I wondered if she was part of some other LARP group that had gotten lost like I did.

  For one, her hair wasn’t exactly blonde. It appeared to be dyed or tinted in some way that made it appear like long strands of silver and gold, which shimmered in the sunlight over our heads. She was wearing purple costume contact lenses, and she’d put some kind of fake points on her ears.

  She was pretty, beautiful even, with fine features and sculpted cheekbones, though I couldn’t quite tell how old she was. Anywhere from eighteen to thirty.

  “Do you need help getting down? That . . . thing is dead.”

  She shifted her feet, not moving to come down. She still held tightly onto her knife, which also looked like a costume piece. Not metal – more like a strip of plastic.

  “Thank you. The busang found me by the river. I only just reached this cliff in time.”

  Again, her words made no sense to my ears, but somehow my head still understood them. Even the meaning of busang, though it had no English analog in my brain, was clear – a fierce, flesh-eating cat, albeit one with six legs.

  “What are you?” she asked again.

  “I . . . I’m not sure how to answer that. What are you?”

  “I am Ayarala, of the dwenda. My tsulygoi died several sampars ago. I have mated. What can you tell me of you?”

  Again, some of her words were clear; others were just wrapped in connotations I somehow understood. Dwenda was her people, apparently. Sampar was a period of time that seemed like several days, maybe eight to twelve. Tsulygoi gave me an array of connotations – master, mate, father, and some others I didn’t quite catch.

  How was all this getting into my head?

  This girl was not a LARPer. Either I was still hallucinating, or something else was going on here.

  “Uh, I’m Will Hawthorne. I’m a financial analyst. I’m not from around here, I think.” Then I added, “I have mated, but I guess I’m not mated anymore. I have two kids.”

  Her purple eyes widened.

  “You have fathered children?”

  The amazed look on her face, as preposterous as it seemed, appeared totally genuine. I pushed the painful truth down in my head and answered her.

  “Uh, yeah. Cassie is six. Hunter is three. My wife and I are divorced. We share custody.”

  Ayarala slid out of the alcove and climbed down to the ground. Standing in front of her, I realized she was quite short, maybe five-two at best. Her body was athletic and toned, and she wore a simple form-fitting top and leggings that were dirty and torn. A bag I hadn’t seen was on a strap over her shoulder.

  As I looked closely at her face, I realized she was not wearing contacts, at least no costume contacts I’d ever seen before. Her big eyes looked genuinely purple. There was none of the opacity you saw in colored contacts.

  And her hair truly looked like spun gold. Not a dye – metal. The luster of it in the sunlight was nothing you could achieve with a tint.

  But the real kicker was her skin, which I hadn’t noticed up in the alcove. It was pale to the point of being translucent, almost crystalline. And her ears – I saw nothing at all that looked fake. They were pointed slightly but noticeably. No sign of makeup or a prosthesis. In fact, I could almost see through them.

  She was definitely beautiful, by human standards. But she was not human. Close, but not quite, which I found rather odd if I was somehow on an alien world.

  Yeah, this had to be a concussion. Best to ride it out.

  Ayarala was sizing me up too, looking me up and down repeatedly, and not quite believing what she saw either.

  “You are not from here? Where did you come from?”

  “I fell down into a cave. I hit my head. I followed the cave and came out here. But the cave is closed now.” I motioned around us. “This place is not like my home, wherever it is.”

  “Taitala.”

  “What?”

  “Our world. What is the name of yours?”

  “California. Earth.”

  Ayarala nodded. Then she looked over at the busang I had killed.

  “You are a strong fighter. Very few males are.”

  She knelt down and began carving up the beast with her knife. It wasn’t plastic, or even fake at all. It sliced through the flesh almost effortlessly. It had to be glass, or crystal.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have not eaten today. This is a young busang, so the meat should be tender. Are you able to make a fire?”

  That I could. As Ayarala carved out a large muscle from the beast’s mid-leg, I gathered up some fallen branches and twigs. The wood was different from anything I was familiar with, but the basic approach seemed to be the same. I set up a neat pile of wood with enough kindling under it to get going. But when I drew my lighter out of my pack, she looked over at me.

  “What is that?”

  “It will light the fire.” I drew a flame and set it to the kindling. In a minute or two the fire was stable and growing.

  “May I see?” she asked.

  I handed it to her. She turned it over in her hands a few times. I showed her how to light the flame.

  “Interesting. I have something similar.”

  Ayarala drew a small crystalline cylinder from her bag. There was a slide on it. When she pushed it forward, a stream of sparks shot out of the front. She let me look at it, though its workings were a mystery.

  “Can I see your knife?” I asked.

  She handed it to me. It had a hilt and cross-guard made of some kind of resin, and the blade was definitely crystal, harder and heavier than glass. The luster was different, glossier. But contrary to what I had expected, it wasn’t just a shard, like some prehistoric obsidian blade, chipped to a useable shape. It was a symmetrical blade with a straight, even edge that was so fine my eyes could barely even focus on it. This was a finished, manufactured knife, not a primitive handmade tool. And as I looked closer, I realized there was some kind of core to it, something opaque inside the crystal. It looked as if the crystal had grown around it.

  “The weaponsmiths in our village make them.”

  “Do they polish these from raw crystals?”

  She gave me a mildly confused look.

  “No, they make the crystals. A natural crystal would be too brittle. They grow them around a core. Then it is strong.”

  I passed it back to her, trying to remember if I’d heard of anything like that before. I’d seen ceramic knives, but nothing like hers.

  We set up a spit to roast the meat once the fire got going.

  “What happened to your wife?” she asked a few minutes later. “She left you once she was with child?”

  “Uh, not quite. After our kids were born . . . I found out she was more interested in another man. Then she left.”

  Ayarala nodded. “I see. This other tsulygoi took her away? He must have been a great warrior to take a wife from you.”

  That was not exactly how I would have described Richard, who was a lawyer who worked for Jacqueline’s company
, unless you defined “great warrior” as “having twice my annual income.” But that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with this girl.

  “Something like that.”

  “You have no other wives?”

  I looked up.

  “What? Is that how it works here?”

  “A strong tsulygoi has many wives. But there are not many strong tsulygoi anymore. Mine was old and weak. His other wives left because he would not mate with them. I stayed, but he died before I could conceive a child.”

  I nodded. The smell of the cooking busang was like a mix of deer and chicken. I realized I was still hungry, as I hadn’t eaten much of the food I’d packed out of fear I would need it.

  “Are you planning to find another – ” I struggled with the pronunciation “ – tsulygoi?”

  “No. It is very unlikely. There is only one other in this area, and he refused me when I came to his home. It was foolish of me to even ask.”

  “Is this area that sparsely settled?”

  “There are many females. But only that one tsulygoi.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “So, there are many females here, but only a few males?”

  “Yes. Is it not so in your land?”

  “Not really.”

  She looked at me.

  “You have no wife now? For a male such as you, that seems very strange to me.”

  I laughed weakly. “It seems strange to me too.” I definitely wasn’t looking to get married again any time soon, but I understood her point.

  “You should claim a wife.”

  I laughed again.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Is it not?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “What?”

  “Did you not claim your wife on Earth? How did you find her?”