near the entrance. I supposed that it must have been carried downstream by the water and deposited there. It looked to come from a different region.
There was enough light to illuminate more of the beautiful fossils that studded the cave here and there. I saw a flash of color underfoot and pushed away some sand to find myself looking at the remains of a beaver-like animal. It had a broad, flat tail that had been filled in with a sheet of bright yellow opal in one stunning, unbroken piece. Like with the feathered creature, the body only had a few spots of color among the bones, but the tail was magnificent.
Even better was a clutch of eggs I discovered in a corner. I did not know if they came from a lizard or a bird, but they were three times as large as a chicken’s. Protected inside the cave, the shells had survived, but had cracked at some point through the millennia. And inside had formed perfectly egg-shaped opals, one the same blue-green as the creature near the entrance, one a deep, rich red, and one solid black with flecks of seemingly every color in the rainbow.
I looked at them for a long time before finally moving on.
The light dimmed as I went deeper, becoming murky. Especially once I found a narrow area, like a tunnel, branching off from the main cave. But that was easily remedied.
I switched to night vision, and everything abruptly brightened.
Now I could see glints of crystal throughout the stone, white bits that sparkled like ice. And small, furry creatures, looking more like voles than rats, which scurried into their hiding places as I passed, only to peer out at me with bright, black eyes. There was also a surprising amount of driftwood, with its smooth, silvery fingers stretching toward the ceiling in a great mound.
There were no more spectacular, opal-like fossils. In fact, I almost turned back, because there did not appear to be anything of interest down here at all. It was more like a cave I would have expected to find on Earth, with a faint smell of mildew, a fainter odor of mineral water, and the distant but sharp reek of guano, or something very like it.
The voles weren’t the only things that lived in this cave, it seemed.
But something kept me going. Perhaps it was just the contrast: the outer cave so flamboyant and interesting, almost as if designed to make this little detour seemed drab by comparison. I’d seen spells on Earth that functioned much the same way, wards created to hide something, not by making it invisible, but by making it seem so boring that people automatically turned away.
There was no magic here, or if there was, it was of a kind I could not detect.
But my instincts told me there was something.
I pressed on.
It was another few minutes before I saw anything of interest, and even then, I wasn’t sure what it was. It was more than half buried in the dirt, but what I could see looked man made. Fey-made, I corrected myself, and squatted down to dig it up.
It wasn’t easy. It separated from the ground reluctantly, as if it had been there for a while, with limestone-like secretions having all but glued it in place. But it finally came free, and after brushing off the sand and knocking away the limestone by smacking it on a rock, I found myself holding something strangely familiar.
It was a wrench.
I frowned in puzzlement at it. It looked a little different than Earth wrenches, being longer and heavier, I supposed to fit the feys’ bigger hands. But it was recognizable nonetheless.
I liked the heft of it. It would make a good cudgel. I decided to keep it.
And then I wondered the obvious question.
Why was there a wrench in the cave?
There were a few other items scattered about that could have been flotsam, washed here during a flood: part of an old wooden bucket, fuzzy with black mold and serving as a house for a vole; a tattered bit of cloth that might once have been part of a sail; and some bones that could have come in on a flood or been brought here, still struggling, by a predator. But they were lighter in weight. I did not see how—
I had managed to miss that, I thought, staring at something right in front of my face.
I had been pushing through the enormous pile of driftwood, to see if there