A smudge of colour caught Chord's eye from the cold floor. A note, lying damply across stones unmoved for years - although this was something that Chord disagreed with. He had a theory that stones move when nobody is paying attention to them.
"Look." He said, bending down. His voice echoed about the cavern, turning inside out and back and forth before circling back to his ears. And also to Serena's, his partner for this expedition.
"What is it? Do you think a fairy wrote it?" Replied Serena with all the misfiring confidence of someone who would enter a cave marked as 'Dangerous' with only a lamp and a man who believed rocks moved when you weren't looking. It was a theory she intended to test someday.
That's not to say that fairies didn't write letters - they did, all the time, in fact. But they generally didn't then place those letters in moss-crawling dampness in the bottom of a hole a hundred miles from the closest fairy sighting.
Chord bent down, gingerly grabbing the letter with a gloved hand lest it be enchanted with some fairy magic that, he was absolutely sure, only activated if touched with skin. Almost disappointingly, nothing happened.
Serena held the lamp up, allowing the light to splay over the page. Their eyes flicked left and right as they both read in silence.
She loves to make a quip
That to drip is to trip
And before you know to stall
You've already begun to fall
The glint makes you wet
As per wonderful bet
#################
#################
The final two lines were illegibly smudged by water slowly seeping along the parchment, save for the letter 'f'. After some inevitable conversing about how that proved a fairy wrote it, they both came to the realisation that finding a letter, untouched for weeks at least, in the middle of a damp cave, with nothing else nearby, was probably not a good sign. Whoever wrote it was probably not forgotten by some, but was also equally unknown to them, so they quickly decided that it was okay.
"Come on!" Beckoned Serena with excitement at what could be to come. Chord followed her as she galloped away, rays of light revealing the secrets of the cavern as they continued forth. The note floated back down to the cavern floor, where it found another friendly puddle to bathe in.
Some twists and turns later (which was alright, because they were laying a trail of brightly coloured stones - the kind that don't move - behind them as they went), they emerged into a great cavern. A smoothly arched ceiling rose tall, propped up by walls littered in shiny geodes that glimmered as they reflected the lamplight.
They stood on a platform at one side of the room, and the rest of the floor was submerged. Water that was bluer than water should be rippled gently to some unknown force.
"Wow!" Serena called, loudly, enjoying the echo.
"This is gorgeous..." Chord observed the shimmering walls in breathless wonder.
"And we're the only ones to see this..."
"Yeah, why
is
it all blocked off?"
"Must be the fairies. Maybe they don't like having too many visitors so they made that sign."
"Yeah, or maybe somebody else found this and wanted it all to themselves so-"
Another voice, chuckling, interrupted Chord. "Fairies?" It was a voice that stroked over them, massaging their very beings, pleasant and relaxing. The two amateur adventurers turned toward the voice in synchrony.
There, spouting from the water, leaning languidly on the stone platform they stood on, was a woman. A kind of woman, anyway. She was blue in her entirety, and the surface of her skin rippled just like the waters. Her body was see-through, but not completely, as if crafted to be exactly as transparent as she wanted them to see.
Long hair cascaded down her form, lounging along her plentiful curves - and plentiful they were. Chord's mouth immediately dried, for she was entirely nude. He admired in silence while Serena took the lead.
"Hey -
you're
no fairy." She scoffed, seemingly a little disappointed. In fact, Serena wasn't too sure what the watery girl was. She wasn't a slime - the two of them had faced enough slimes to know - but also wasn't solid enough to be anything else she knew of.
Chord's gaze perfectly tracked the bounce of the woman's breasts, little stars of reflected light appearing and vanishing in a shimmer, as she giggled. "No, my sweets, I am no fairy." And the soothe of her voice carried away with it all the worries in Chord's simple world.
"Some call me Dyne. Others forget under the influence of my presence."
"Why would they forget? That's silly. I don't forget names." Serena frowned, but Chord had already forgotten - or perhaps the knowledge had never entered his mind and instead slipped over it entirely.
A sharp elbow to the side brought his trance to collapse around him. He blinked, shaking his head. "What's with you, Chord?" Serena tutted. "Pay attention. If we forget her name too, we're no better than anyone else."
"Right, umm... yeah. Sorry..." Chord mumbled more to himself than to anyone else.
"I never said I found it insulting." Dyne continued to sing. "Quite the opposite. It shows their enamour, their transfixion on me." For the meantime, Chord managed to keep his eyes away from her body and on her face, not that it was any less entrancing. A gorgeous oval shape, with distinctly dark features that dripped with beauty. Eyes, black all the way through, sparkled with little white stars.
"Well, we won't forget anyway, right Chord?" Chord nodded along with Serena. Dyne's lips - full, soft, shiny, the darkest of dark cobalt blues, Chord noted - tilted into a smirking smile. "Are you sure, sweet? Well then, why don't we play a game."
"I like games!" Serena innocently chirped and, for once, Chord had the capacity to verbally agree. "Yeah. Um. What game?"
Dyne's eyes glinted as she raised two small items out of the water. The liquid flowed smoothly, tantalisingly, over her body. It fell from her arm as she rose it up to her face, and fell down onto her generous, squishy chest. From there, Chord followed it down her waist, watching it flow around a wide hip before trailing away down a long, plump thigh into the waters below.
"The game uses these two stones." Chord brought his attention back to the items Dyne was delicately holding between her fingers - two stones, or perhaps pearls, ever so ocean-blue and shiny and round. But not quite spherical. Slightly squished, slightly ovular.
With a quiet flick of her fingers, they launched into the air, and scattered across the floor. They rolled, and rolled, slightly off-balance, and began to circle round and round as they reached the two adventurers. Round, and round, and round, and then with a click as they fell onto their side, they came to rest on the ground.
One was engraved with a symbol of a cloud - pale etchings made in smooth, curved motions. The other, with a depiction of an eye. "These stones have two sides, as you can see." Dyne hummed against the gentle lapping of the waves as she brought herself a little further out of the lake. "One side shows a cloud, the other an eye."
