Grunk Mossbeard's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Grunk found where the water surfaced. A crack split the rock at the foot of his ridge. Cold air breathed out of it, and far below he heard water lapping in the dark. He raised his shovel to dig it wider. Then he stopped. Morna's warning rang in his head. Something drinks there. It won't share. He did not know what waited in that black water. If he dug blind, he might wake it, and it might drown him before he saw it. So he wrapped a stick in glowing moss and lit it. The moss burned green and steady, a cold light that threw no smoke. He lowered the torch into the crack and pressed his face to the cold stone. The light showed a pool below, black and still. Then the water rippled. A small blue figure rose from it, no taller than Grunk's arm. Mud caked its skin. Thin wings dripped behind its shoulders, and a twig with two green leaves stuck up from its wet hair. It blinked up at the green light with huge eyes. "You're the digger," the sprite said. Its voice was thin and wet. "I felt your feet stomping up there for days. I'm Mirk. I live here. So does the thing you're about to wake." Grunk's grip tightened on the torch. "Then tell me what it is." Mirk floated closer to the light. "Old. Big. It sleeps at the bottom. It doesn't mind me because I take only a sip. But you? You want to crack the whole roof open." Mirk pointed a muddy finger at the shovel. "Do that and it wakes hungry. It'll pull you down and hold you under." Grunk thought of his bare rock, his dead acorns, the creatures with nowhere to go. He would not turn back. But he would not dig blind either. "How do I take water without waking it?" Mirk tilted its head. "You don't take. You ask. Leave it something sweet. Keep it dreaming." Grunk climbed back down the ridge and returned with a shallow bowl. Golden mead filled it, thick and glowing. He had traded three days of labor for it at a farmstead. He set the bowl on a flat stone beside the crack and slid it down on a plank until it rested at the water's edge. The pool stirred. Something vast shifted far below, and a slow current pulled the bowl under. The mead vanished. Then the water went calm again. It did not rise. It did not reach for Grunk. Mirk grinned, teeth small and white in the mud. "It took the offering. It's dreaming now. Dig slow, digger, and keep the sweet coming, or it stops dreaming for good." Grunk knew his enemy at last, and he knew its price. He lifted his shovel and broke the first stone. Water trickled up toward his dead ridge. Now he had to keep a sleeping giant fed, and the mead was already gone.