[Solo] Recollections (Nahm)

[prolixity]

[Nahm deVarr, 9 years old]

The clan's catacombs were considerably larger than the central area that the families themselves lived in. Large as the clan was, the network of caverns and tombs was a necropolis grand enough to make the clanhold feel small. One of the elders had told the creche that this was a good lesson for little grues to learn; no matter how important you felt or how big you thought you were, there was always something larger, always something greater that you had not taken in.

Most of the scarelings had either misunderstood or ignored that. Ahm and Nahm had looked sideways at each other in a quick darting look that meant is that a pile of crap? I think that's a pile of crap.

Nahm wasn't so sure anymore. He was lost. Very lost. Spectacularly and thoroughly lost. Hide-and-seek had become creep-and-panic - in a literal sense, rather than the game they sometimes played. The dim, cool corners of the tunnels and tombs and vaults, outlined in the not-colors of the infrared, all looked the same right now. "Calm down," he whispered to himself, stopping in an alcove lined with skulls and fidgeting with the end of his scarf. "Pay attention."

His anxiety was heightened several notches by the fact that he was alone. if Ahm had been with him, he was sure, he'd be fine. Together they could take on anything. By himself, he wasn't so sure. Ahm was the smart one, really. He was a little weird sometimes, and Nahm was better at talking to other creeple, but Ahm had a better memory for locations and he was the one who worked out plans and ultimately decided what the twins were going to do. Nahm just helped carry it out and talked other gruelings into helping or getting out of their way. Or, if necessary, made their excuses to the adults.

Now, though, the usual plan wouldn't work, because he was on his own. He disconsolately poked the eye socket of one of the skulls in the alcove. A centipede scuttled out, and he occupied himself for a few moments in catching the bug and eating it. He was hungry, too. He guessed he could eat the bones, but bones were dry and kind of tasteless when they were this old, and anyway he was pretty sure if he pulled any of the skulls out of the carefully constructed wall, the rest of them would come tumbling down on top of him.

He could get unlost by making himself dissipate, maybe. He'd reform in the clan sickroom. No, okay, no, he wasn't really sure how to do that and it would hurt. And if he messed up - could you mess up? Like, enough to really die dead, enough to not come back? The small grue whined slightly. He wasn't making himself feel any better with this idea. It sounded like a very bad idea.

He wasn't going to get un-lost if he just sat here and had awful thoughts about dissipating himself, either. He picked himself up, peeked out of the alcove, picked a direction at random, and started off down the tunnel again.

Ten minutes later, he was colder and hungrier and he had found a labyrinthine section of catacombs where all the walls were packed with bones and the tunnels were barely wide enough for a grue scareling to squeeze through. He probably wasn't supposed to be here, but he didn't know how to get back, and the thought of retracing his steps made him feel kind of angry anyway. So he kept going, taking turns where the tunnel felt like it sloped upwards.

Somehow, this strategy brought him to a dead end. Well, sort of a dead end. It was a narrow, arched doorway that led to a tightly curved spiral staircase that led deeper downward. It definitely wasn't the way back to the clanhold. But the alternative was turning around, and anyway, he reasoned stubbornly, maybe it would take him back towards the main area and then he could climb another set of stairs right back up to home.

He hesitated before heading down anyway. Should he really be doing this? Why had he let the other scarelings pick Ahm to be the seeker in hide-and-seek and not insisted on staying with his twin? He wanted Ahm to be here. Ahm would know what to do. But Ahm wasn't here.

Nahm started slowly and carefully down the staircase, his oversized robes dragging and flopping on the stairs behind him as he descended.  

[prolixity]

The stairs wound onwards, down and down and down and down in a plunging spiral. Nahm didn't know how long he'd been climbing down. His legs were tired. He sat down on the stairs to rest. The problem with spiral staircases was that there was no telling how much longer they were, because you couldn't see past the curve, so they could be just a little longer or they could be a lot longer. He looked back up to the footprints he'd left in body heat on the steps above him, watching them fade as the residual warmth dissipated into the air. For hide and seek, you had to count to 100; that was because if you waited a shorter time, the footprints would still be bright and obvious, and while tracking someone by their residual heat trail was fun too, that wasn't the point of hide and seek. But that meant that Nahm couldn't follow his own trail back, nor could Ahm find him that way.

Ahm would find him if he didn't get back soon. He was sure of it. Even if Ahm had to go get the adults. But it would be better if the adults didn't have to know that he'd gotten lost while they played. Adults had weird priorities, and they might forbid hide and seek, and then everyone would be mad at Nahm, like it was his fault. Nahm got back to his feet. If he wanted to get found, he should do something about getting back toward the clanhold, and he'd decided to try finding stairs back up, so the first order of business was obviously to finish climbing down this staircase so that he could try to find the way up and out.

The staircase was already way longer than he'd thought it would be, and it was longer than he thought it would be before it ended. But it ended eventually. Nahm slipped out of the narrow arch into a small, round room lined with tiny arched alcoves. Each alcove held a skull, and each skull had a candle places atop it. The candles were not lit, of course, which was a relief. He didn't like candles. They weren't like corpselight; they hurt. He tiptoed over to one of the alcoves and pried the candle off its skull. It was difficult to pull off. There were layers on layers of dripping wax holding the candle down to the bone, but with some patient wiggling and pulling, the candle came loose with a soft pop. He sniffed it; it smelled like tallow and soot. It tasted like tallow and soot, too, and like dust, and a little like bone at the bottom end of it.

The big wooden door on the other side of the round room was heavy and difficult to push. As Nahm pushed it, its hinges shrilled a high screeching note, rust grinding on rust, and he wanted to stop and cover his ears, but if he did he thought the door might swing shut. He set his shoulder against it and used his footclaws to dig into the cracks in the stone floor and shove, and when the door opened enough for him to slide through, he darted through the opening. He'd been right. The door swung shut with a hollow boom that echoed down the natural tunnel outside it, and when he turned to tug at the heavy metal ring set into the door, it didn't budge. He swallowed hard and turned around again. He was good and stuck now, and he could only keep going forward, wherever that went.