Meeting with the Goddess

This is one of the images I have for the first book of Deepvault. The seer doesn't have a name yet, nor do his parents so there are some square brackets where I need to go back and update once I've fleshed out the character a bit.

I hope you enjoy this scene!

Up ahead, silver light leaked out of the passageway. Hope surged in the seer. A way out and, possibly, a way back to his traveling companions.

He scrambled over the damp rocks, clawing his way out of the darkness to the opening. Just before his head crested the lip, the seer stopped. While his companions might be on the other side, there was no telling if agents of the guard might be waiting in their place. Or wild animals, or any number of things that might wish to do him harm.

There was little he could do about any of those, but he felt that it would be foolish to walk out without something he could use to defend himself. So the seer reached for a rock, doing his best to pick one that would not knock any of its neighbors and thus alert a potential enemy of his presence. Too late he realized that his scrambling already would have alerted anyone outside, if they were, in fact, there.

The seer hesitated a moment. Fear kept him from running towards the opening. Maybe his brother would have, had he been here with him. But his brother wasn’t here and so the seer would defend himself.

He pitched himself forward, raising the rock above his head as he charged into the light. He had taken only a handful of steps before he stopped and dropped his improvised weapon in shock.

The light he had found was, in fact, from the moon. And it was shining on an opening from the system of caverns that he had fallen into. But he had not counted on the large body of water between him and it.

It hung over a large chamber of smooth, gray rock, as still as as a puddle left in the fields after a rainstorm had melted in the sunlight. Except he was looking up at it instead of down. The sensation gave him vertigo and he had to turn back to the tunnel he had come from in an attempt to right his perception. When he turned back to the floating lake, he saw dark shapes passing in front of the moon. Fish.

The seer reached up to touch the surface of the water, half fearing that if he did so the entire mass would fall in on him. He didn’t know how to swim. He would drown. And yet the strange surface of the lake invited him to touch and witness what had inverted the normal order of the world.

His fingers grazed the surface of the water and the liquid latched onto his fingers. No sooner did he feel the coolness of the lake’s water than the entire surface erupted in movement. It was as if invisible rain drops were tapping all over the surface of the water, turning it into a shimmering curtain of white. A low droning sound filled the air around him, resonating deep within his chest.

Thinking this would be the moment the lake fell on top of him, the seer turned back towards the cavern and ran. He did not think of outrunning the water, did not think of how improbable his survival. He merely ran.

His foot snagged on the rock he had brought as a weapon, sending him to the ground with a hard thud. He felt the simultaneous burning and cooling of his skin scraping against the stone as he tried to catch himself. The wind flew out of him as he made contact and he could barely lift his head to suck in air. An instant later he knew his mistake. He would die gulping water into lungs starved for air.

The thought filled him with terror and he thrashed thinking of the sensation of water filling his body. But then he drew in a breath and it was air. It took a moment for him to realize that the water had not collapsed on him and when he did he looked up.

As he watched the rippling surface, the waves coalesced above him, forming rings and obloids. As the space between them stilled, a woman’s face emerged from the chaos, formed of water and stretching out from the bottom side of the lake. The droning sound died away, until to be replaced by the sound of the woman speaking, as if a crowd of women were chanting in unison and their voices blended together as one before echoing off each other as if through an infinite canyon.

“Seer, son of [name].”

The seer could only gawk at the woman. This was magic, like the kind the Guard did. Or that they protected the peasantry from. He didn’t know who this woman was or why she had appeared to him, but the seer sensed her power as if it were a great mountain towering above him and disappearing into the clouds, or a sea that stretched to the horizon and rolled further on. He was glad he was on the ground, because he felt a strong urge to put his face against the stone and worship whatever or whomever this was.

He attempted to comply with the urge, scooting around and arranging his arms so that it would become clear that he would honor her as he would have the emblems of the Guard, but she spoke again.

“Rise, and touch the surface of the water.”

The seer still felt that he should remain on the ground. He felt it was his place before a woman capable of drowning him with what he was sure was little effort. And yet he obeyed, bringing his legs underneath him and rising to a standing position. He reached his right hand up to the water, feeling as though he ought to shrink from the woman, and touched the surface. A tendril of water ran down his hand, covering the portion of the skin that had been scraped away by the rock and continuing on down his arm. It split in three at his spine, one tendril traveling down his other arm while the remaining two wrapped around his legs to run over his knees. The water filled with a blue-green glow, and the pain the seer felt vanished.

It was as if the pain had been distracting him from something. The fear of death had vanished, in spite of the fact that he still knew that the danger was still present. But the prospect was abstract and distant. In its place was a warmth that reminded the seer of the hearth in his home growing up. And yet it was more. He found his mind filled with the image of a young child nestled atop the chest of a young woman who he recognized as his mother.

Just as quickly as the water descended, it receded up into the lake. The seer reached out into the water, not wanting to let the feeling recede. Yet, even as the glowing water vanished, he still felt the warmth of the image spreading all throughout him, accompanied waves upon waves of goose flesh, and his hair feeling as if he had stood next to a tree struck by lightning.

“Who are you?” he managed. The words were filled with wonder. Whoever she was, it was clear her power extended over his body and his spirit.

“I am Endless,” she replied.