“Wol tyne vay oxsia.” She repeated the strange words like a prayer as she rubbed her arms beneath her heavy cloak. She knew them by heart, just as she knew their meaning. You are the joy of my heart. Perhaps the words were a pretty lie, but that was the point of them—a pretty lie that served to remind her of the ephemerality of truth. Yes. That was it. Here, he was only a dream, a figment of someone long lost and faded. That was the nature of being a dream.

She missed him all the same.

For the hundred-and-first time, Elra was thankful for the thick black wool. Compared to it, she owned little of value—for in the Below, wool and warmth were in equally short supply. Sheep did not generally take well to the dark and frozen waste of the Below. Taram-Cahaya. The name made her grin, and the movement brought the cold sharp in the aching muscles of her cheek. Taram-Cahaya. It was a good name for the place—she wondered briefly, as she had many times before, if they had known the meaning of the words when they had put them to the Below.

The pale woman’s idle thoughts are interrupted by a deep vibration beneath her. And the hot, heavy hissing of gasses from deep below. It is a transformative sound. Phosphorescence fills the tightly-wound corridors of stone nearby as the mosses are woken by the new-brought heat. The vents against her back grow hot enough that, despite the thick insulation of her cloak, Elra is forced away. Her hair, as silver as the moonlight she sees only in her dreams, reflects the ghostly hues of the moss as it pools and flows down her face and chest.

She set to work quickly—prudence necessitated quickness, after all, for the thermal vents were mercurial and ill-tempered. Elra secretly suspected that they delighted in this particular cruelty, waiting until they were being collected before turning cold once more. She would not give them time to delight. In moments, she had hung the fabric which would collect moisture and had begun cutting large swathes of the glowing moss from the wall. This far from Jiwe’Mnara, there would not be another vent from which to reliably scavenge.

A sound came from the dark, just beyond the mossy illumination. The second reason for quickness. The pale woman’s eyes dart to the fabric draped carefully atop the geyser, then back out into the cavern black. Her eyes had already adjusted to the gentle glow of the moss, she may as well have been staring into the gaping abyss. Her hand moved to rest on the hilt of her weapon, her fingers twitching with unease before deciding to draw the curved blade.

It was wiser to be prepared for violence in the Taram-Cahaya.

"Is there somebody there?"