was still chuffing. Fun. Fun. Many more than five fun!
Holy crap. Crapcrapcrap.
We dropped down and down and leaped ahead a dozen times, gaining as much as twenty feet forward with each leap. Down a crevice that had to be five hundred feet straight down. The ravine narrowed and then widened, and finally Beast stopped, her four paws smashing down, gripping a fallen tree, her weight slamming down behind. Still. Unmoving except for her breath. Twin billows in the darkness that was the artificial night.
Ahead, the ravine opened into a wider place, dark and snow sprinkled, with colossal ancient trees like out of a fairy tale. It was like a miniature old-growth forest, an oval of maybe three acres, deep with bracken and jagged fallen limbs and one ancient fir that had fallen and lay rotting. The air was warmer here, heavy with mist, a primordial place. It smelled of water, water on the trees, on the ground, hanging in the air, dripping, yet I had a feeling that rain seldom fell here. It was too isolated, cliff walls rising on every side. Water dripped, a constant patter. In the distance, an owl hooted, a plaintive sound. Magic glistened and danced on the steamy, still air.
Beast leaped and leaped from branch to branch, landing carefully on the mossy, wet bark. We were fifty feet from the forest floor and it was too dark to tell what was buried beneath the leaves and the rotting detritus of . . . centuries? The magic grew closer.
The tree branch beneath Beast’s claws changed, suddenly distinctly dissimilar. What? I thought.
Tree is not winter dead, not sleeping. Tree is true-dead. Air smells sick.
I took a sniff. And caught a whiff of sulfur. Brimstone? Be careful!
Is not same smell as Evangelina’s demon. Is different.
Crap. Be careful!
Beast is always careful.
So says the puma who just dropped several hundred feet into a crevasse.
She trotted along one limb, dropped to another, and peered around the trunk of the dead tree. Beneath us was a small blue pool of steaming water. Deep in the center of the pool was a rent, like a black crack in the skin of the earth, pointed on two ends, wider in the middle. In the center of the pool it looked strangely, menacingly, like a snake’s vertical pupil in a blue iris. It was a hot spring with a deep opening into the earth.
Steam rose from the hot spring in globes of mist that coated the trees and then fell in drops. The water bubbled, a delicious warmth if not for the faint stink of sulfur. Chemicals that were killing the trees all around.
The spring was heated and magical, and though it was beautiful, it was deadly. The hot spring was clearly part of the geology that created the microclimate, but the minerals in the water—maybe the water itself—had changed recently.
The trees were freshly dead, not rotted. The heated pool had left only a narrow ring of minerals around the edges instead of the thick crust I’d have expected. There was power in the spring, visible in Beast’s sight, power glowing through the water. Magic ascended with the hot spring, a rosy, vibrant energy visible in Beast-vision. This was . . . this was a magic heated pool.
In the deep iris of the pool something bright flashed by. Something with fins.
Or wings.
It flashed by again.
Arcenciel. That’s an arcenciel, I thought. Oh crap. This place . . . I looked around, remembering Molly’s explanation of liminal lines and ley lines. This is one of those rare places where multiple ley lines and maybe a liminal line cross over. This is a liminal opening. A rift. Holy crap. I found a rift.
Light blasted from the pupil.
Blinding.
Fast as the light, Beast whipped her body. Leaped. Flew back behind the tree trunk. At least twenty feet, into cover.
An arcenciel flashed up. Mouth open, teeth glistening. Throwing steaming water and magic. The scent was mineral and blue, if blue was a scent. The smell of arcenciel was unlike that of another creature. The smell of silk, of blue swallowtail butterflies, their wings still damp from the pupae, the scent of burned bamboo. And like the scent of nothing at all.
I/we peeked out and watched as the young one hovered in midair like a gigantic hummingbird, flinging water from her wings and tail, her entire snakelike body vibrating. She alighted on a boulder, skimmed open her diaphanous wings, like panes of purple, lavender, and black crystal set in deep gray leading.