Adrenaline shot through her body, her mind bubbling in panic. Think, Nara! She chided herself. There is air here, and light. And no matter where this is, you are very much alive. That small sliver of logic calmed her panic. She blinked dirt from her eyes and forced herself to think through what had happened and where she could possibly be.
She could see she was, in fact, in a tomb, but she did not allow the terror of it to swallow her mind. She rolled to her hands and knees and crawled to the lantern. Next to it was a clay bowl full of water and a modest meal—corn, a handful of pi?ons, and roasted cacao laid out on an oversized leaf.
She recognized the food. It was a spirit meal, something Dry Earth relatives left for the deceased to feed them on their journey to the ancestors, for while the Sky Made burned their dead with star maps in their hands, the Dry Earth buried theirs in the endless catacombs deep below the Maw. She laughed, and the sound that came from her mouth was a dry cackle that echoed deranged in her ears.
She ate the spirit meal, even the dry, rubbery leaf. Perhaps it was sacrilegious, but she was the one it was meant for, after all, and she was starving. She wasn’t sure how long she had been in this place, but the gnawing pit in her stomach told her that her last meal had been long ago. After she was sated, or at least had had enough to clear her mind and soothe her parched throat, she sat back to assess her situation.
“Where are you, Nara?” she said aloud. There was an exit to her right, a gaping mouth of a hole that she would have to crawl through to leave. The thought of dragging herself into the dark sent a shudder down her spine, but what choice did she have? Did it matter that she could not see the path forward when her only other option was to stay and perish? She could wait for someone to come back and find her, but how long would that be? Hours? Weeks? Never? Once before, she had put her faith in rescue, and no one had come. She would not make that mistake again.
She looked around the room for anything else she might use. There was the ever-diminishing light of the lantern, the blanket she had been wrapped in, and the now-empty water bowl. Very little to free her from this hell. But there was nothing to be done about it, and nothing else to do, so she gathered her meager items and crawled on her hands and knees into the darkness.
Her journey was awkward. She wore the blanket as a dress, tucked under one arm and knotted on the opposite shoulder. She slipped the bowl into a makeshift pouch at her shoulder, and she used one hand to hold the lantern. Her progress was slow but always forward. Once she passed a deep black hole of darkness on her left, the sudden lack of a wall enough to make her yelp in fear. She shone her lantern into the gaping mouth of earth. Light bounced off bare dirt walls, illuminating nothing but more dirt. She kept going.
She stopped once and fell into an exhausted sleep. She woke, forgetting where she was, her resin light extinguished. The dark was heavy around her, palpable.
“Help me!” she cried, to whom or what she had no idea. But to her surprise, something answered her.
Her chest burned, and a strange glow emanated from her palms. Her eyes brightened with their own light. At first, she did not believe it. It was, after all, impossible. But she was alive, and that was impossible, too. Bewildered but too grateful to question this blessing, she lifted a hand. The glow illuminated the path in front of her for a dozen paces. It was not much, but it was good enough.
She crawled.
Time stretched beneath the earth, long and endless, fifteen minutes indistinguishable from fifteen hours. Once she hit a dead end, and terror clutched at her throat, but a hand against the blockage proved the wall to be soft, and she used the old water bowl as a shovel and dug it out enough to squeeze through.
Her knees were rubbed raw, her palms scraped and began to bleed. The food she had eaten had long ago passed through her body, and her belly was taut with hunger yet again. She was exhausted, and hopelessness threatened to bury her, as sure as the earth around her. But she kept going, warmed by the unnatural heat in her chest and hands. She would not die here and prove right that voice in her dream. She would not.
She wasn’t sure how long she crawled through the darkness, holding back her fear, trying not to think of how stale the air felt or how far she might have to continue with only the thinnest filament of hope, when she heard it. Rushing water. The sound of a river through deep canyons. The Tovasheh.
A low, keening wail escaped her lips, a noise that she would not have recognized as her own voice had she not been the only living thing in this never-ending night. Relief threatened to break her open.
She had already determined that she must be deep in the Maw, in the catacombs that dotted the bottomless crevices far from the city proper. How she had gotten here, and why, was still a mystery, but it was enough now to know she could hear the river. All Maw children were taught that if they ever got lost, they were to listen for the river. She knew that if she followed the sound of the water, she would eventually find a way out. She was bleeding and filthy, and her bones begged for rest, but she forced herself on, toward the source of the water, and of life.