felt bad for that door.
The next room was even larger than the last, and appeared to have been carved out of the mountain itself. For a moment I could not see anything beyond, and then a flash from my right nearly blinded me. I yelled something incoherent.
When the spots before my eyes dimmed, I could see the dragon-kin holding a lit torch, looking at me as if I had just grown a second head. I frowned. Of course, I had forgotten that dragon-kin had a natural association with fire just like I did with plant life. Lighting a torch without warning was probably something they did not think twice about.
I walked away from the kin and continued to explore the chamber. It seemed that half of it seemed to have suffered the effects of a landslide – the floor was covered with rocks and dirt to the point that a large tree had grown in it. The tree was strange, and gave me chills to look at. Though it had obviously found enough water and soil to grow, it had no leaves and was completely white for lack of sunlight. I had never known anything to grow under such conditions. I was tempted to examine it further, but the dragon-kin was heading in the opposite direction with my only light source, and I was not willing to stand around in the dark.
The dragon-kin was standing before a mouth of a cave when I caught up to him. Though the kin still had not acknowledged my existence, he waited until I had caught my breath before he continued into the cavern. I followed, following the rough path that led into the mountain.
I had never even seen a cave before, let alone been in one. I once would have thought that a place without sunlight would be disgustingly abhorrent to me, but I found myself fascinated by this foreign place as I followed the kin through the small cavern. A few times, the kin had to duck around rocky spikes that protruded from the ceiling. One released a drop of cold water that hit my head and made me jump. I found myself staring as the torchlight glimmered off small pools of clear water and smooth pillars that looked like golden waterfalls, frozen in time. The alien beauty around me distracted me so much that when the dragon stopped again, I very nearly ran into him.
The cave opened up into a chamber here, and for a moment I thought the floor was made of a giant mirror. It was another minute before I realized it was just the stillest pool of water I had ever seen. The liquid was incredibly clear, and, as we approached, the first ripple that had disturbed its tranquility in hundreds of years