Plainly, Ayensha didn’t like the idea of trusting herself to a servant girl from the capital and her idea of luck. Just as plainly, she understood the need. She slipped into the cave, keeping still in the shadows, so quiet Kerian couldn’t hear her breathing.

Swiftly, her heart racing, Kerian cleaned the area before the cave of bones and any track they had made. They’d had no fire this night, there was no ash or cinder or smoking wood to betray them. She brushed the dirt with pine boughs, scattered forest debris before the entrance. She could do no more, and she sat just inside the cave’s dark mouth, hidden and watching.

They came, four of them, skin the green of tarnished copper, wings wide.

“Kapak,” Ayensha muttered.

The draconians marched upon the lip of the glen, their harsh voices echoing from one stony wall to the other. They spoke in roughly accented Common, each word coming out of thick throats like a curse. Their laughter raked Kerian’s ears like claws. Not one of them stood less than six feet tall, and starlight glinted on their fangs, on their talons.

One, the largest, turned and spread its wings wide, roaring. The bellow lifted the hair on the back of her neck. The roar echoed from wall to wall. Kerian’s fingers tightened round the hone grip of her knife. Her only weapon, it would do her no good if these creatures came her way. In a world where magic leaked away like water from a sieve, Kerian wished for a talisman, a charm, something to make her and her companion invisible.

Not moving, not breathing, she saw the sudden flash of steel, heard a high, rageful death-scream. The smallest of the draconians fell, tumbling over the edge of the gorge, hitting the side, hitting stone, dead of a sword in the gut before it ever hit the ground.

None of the luckless creature’s savage companions even looked twice. One wiped a sword on the ragged hem of a tunic and absently sheathed it, the blade’s work done. Another laughed, a third snarled, and the three were gone while dark blood poured out of their companion. The blood changed to acid, and soon the corpse itself melted into a dark and deadly pool.

“Let’s move,” Ayensha said, low.

“Where-?”

Ayensha snorted. “To a safe enough place, for now. You can follow me, or not. That’s up to you.”

“But my brother-”

Ayensha pulled a humorless smile. “Your brother has managed without you this long.”

The reek of acid fouled the air, stinging their eyes, burning their nostrils and throats. Kerian didn’t argue further, and they left the cave to find another place to pass the night.

The two elves traveled in the opposite direction from the draconians, back tracking and confident that the Kapaks would not do the same. Walking, Kerian breathed the night, the cleaner air. She listened to the hush and sigh of pines over head. When they found another cave, a quieter place, she turned the watch over to Ayensha and settled to sleep. Drifting in the place between waking and sleeping she felt a great satisfaction, for her weary muscles again knew how to find rest upon beds made of fragrant houghs and leaves whose perfume was that of eternal autumn.

They slept only until the sky began to grow light. Outside the cave, Ayensha leaned on her staff, more from comfortable habit now than from need. Four days into their travels, she’d begun to regain strength. Since they had left the Hare and Hound, she’d eaten well of what Kerian snared and the fishes she caught in the streams. She drank the cold, clear water and slept long and deeply at night. Sun had warmed the pallor from her cheek.

Over hours of walking, Ayensha brought them into a maze of gorges, winding and zigzagged, and all the while the walls grew higher. In some places they could not go dry-shod for there was room only for water, and they had to hold on to the damp stony sides for balance. A deep, distant roaring came to them from ahead.

The walls of the gorge grew closer, stone reaching for them, and the sides grew higher as the floor dropped. The two women came to the font of the water running through the gorge, a sudden spring burbling up from a crack in the stony floor.

Ayensha dipped up a handful of water and then another. “A river racing below the ground.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve never seen it, but it’s said there are places in part of the forest where there is more water below than above.”

“Is that what we hear?”

Ayensha shook her head. “Lightning’s voice. A waterfall.”

Listening to Lightning, they walked until the passage became so narrow Kerian had to turn sideways simply to fit through. The rumbling became louder, the sky more distant, the gorge darker, the passage but a slit. Kerian’s muscles cried for rest. She had none. They ate walking, following the brightness in the distance that seemed never to come closer.

At last, the voice of the falls grew louder again, deeper. Above, the slit of blue that had been the sky suddenly widened. The brightness made Kerian squint.

“Noon-bright,” Ayensha said.

Only noon!

“Now put your back into it. We’re almost-”

The gorge turned, daylight opened up ahead. With startling suddenness, they stood at the mouth of the gorge, practically at the stony lip of a shining lake.

“-there.”

The falls known to elves as Lightning for its flash, to dwarves as Thunder for the roar of its voice, sped from such a height as to seem poured out of the sky. Silvery sheets of water flung over a cliff, headlong and heedless as a madman running. Thunder! Its voice bellowed so loudly that it pressed against Kerian’s ears as a physical weight. In the presence of the cascading brightness and the furious roar, she found it difficult to breathe.

“There,” said Ayensha, again smiling. “Nearly where we want to be.”

Blinking, Kerian said, “Where? All I see is water falling.”

Ayensha nodded. She set out around the edge of the lake, Kerian following. Little grew on that shore, only tufts of tough grass between the cracks in the stone.

“Years past count,” Ayensha said, “the world erupted in volcanoes, fire spewing up from the belly of the world. The earth cracked, and the ground dropped down right here, so hard the river that runs must fall into this pool. Under the water, there is a vast bowl of stone made from the hot lava that hardened.”

“The Cataclysm,” Kerian said, her eyes on the falling water.

“No. This was before then, before anyone started naming ages or gods had much to do with Krynn. My people-” She slid Kerian a sidelong glance. “Our people have had this legend for as long as we have been.”

Water fell roaring, and no conversation now was possible as Kerian followed Ayensha to the far edge of the lake. In silence, filled with awe before this wonder of the forest, the two stood beside the bellowing falls, soaked in mist and spray. Ayensha pointed downward, Kerian saw the rock dipping into shallow levels, like stairs. Water had done that, and water had done more. Behind the falling water she saw a depth, a passage running between the thunderous curtain of water and face of the cliff over which it raced.

Ayensha gestured. Kerian took her meaning and followed carefully down the steps, around through a cloud of spray and into sudden darkness broken by silvery bending of light through water.

Spray made the stony way slick as though it were iced. It rose by a narrow path, requiring that they hold tight to rough cracks in the stone, sometimes pulling themselves up, sometimes obliged to press themselves tight to the wall and inch along. Kerian looked once over her shoulder and froze. They were perhaps a third of the way to the cliffs height Below the water hit stone in a madness of splash and foam.

Firmly, she turned back to the climb and saw Ayensha standing above. The woman did not cling to stone but stood at perfect ease within a dark crevice carved into the face of the cliff. Laughing, she beckoned. Kerian leaned her forehead against the rock wall, breathed as well as she could, gathered wit and strength, and climbed again. Ayensha caught her by the wrist and pulled her quickly inside to bellowing darkness.