The cold draft led them out of the pinching crack onto a broad, wet shelf of dark slate above an underground river.
Here the vault arched high enough that Lilt could finally unroll her cramped wings, give them a single grateful shake that showered Chaska with cave droplets, and settle them comfortably along her flanks. The air smelled of clean snowmelt rather than sulfur, cool enough that the hundreds of fine filaments along Pip’s shell stopped twitching and lay down in a smooth, pale fringe along the seam.
Below the slate ledge, however, the water was neither quiet nor low.
Opening the blocked vent in the breath-eel chamber had shifted the pressure across the lower springs; warm overflow from the deep basins was pouring into the snowmelt river, raising the black current in foaming surges along the wall. A shallow side-channel just below their ledge was already half-submerged, its gravel bars vanishing inch by inch under swirling brown water.
Chaska held the small lamp high, squinting down the main river gallery where the ledge climbed toward a series of broken chimneys. “There’s a dry goat-track along the upper wall there. If Ysabet and Ashaun took the high bypass around the rockfall, that’s where our tunnels have to meet.”
