Sign Of The Moon

“We can hunt later,” Blossomfall replied, her eyes sparkling. Fueled by excitement, she seemed to have thrown off her earlier exhaustion. “Let’s explore!”

While Ivypool remained standing beside the hole, fighting against the apprehension that had seized her, Blossom fall searched through the long grass and came back dragging a branch. “Help me lower it,” she puffed, pushing one end into the hole. “Then we can use it to climb.” She scrambled down as soon as she and Ivypool had maneuvered the branch into position, with the narrow end resting on the lip of the hole.

“Come on!” she called to Ivypool. “The tunnel goes on forever, all the way under the hill!”

Still reluctant, Ivypool edged her way into the hole, feeling the branch bounce beneath her paws. She dug in her claws, but the bark was dry and crumbly. She was no more than halfway to the bottom when it gave way and she felt her paws slipping from under her. Letting out a startled screech, Ivypool crashed down into the hole with the branch falling on top of her. Scrabbling her way through dry leaves and twigs, she gazed up at the ragged scrap of blue sky above her head. There was no way to climb out now.

“We’re stuck!” she whispered.

Shadows wreathed around her, and every hair on her pelt rose. She couldn’t explain it, but she was certain that there was something terribly wrong down here. Chilly darkness loomed from the mouth of the tunnel and somehow she knew that they weren’t alone.

Blossomfall’s eyes were gleaming in the half-light. “Now we have to keep going,” she mewed delightedly.

“But it’s dangerous!” Ivypool protested.

Blossomfall snorted. “What’s the worst that can happen? We might lose the use of our legs?”

They padded farther into the tunnel, with the light from the hole fading behind them. Blossomfall glanced back to where they could just make out the remains of the branch lying on the tunnel floor. “There’s no point in going back. We might wait for ages for some cat to pass by the hole,” she pointed out. “And when they do, we’ll get into major trouble. There must be another way out, right?”

As she followed her Clanmate into the darkness, Ivypool hoped that they weren’t making a huge mistake. But in spite of her misgivings, she couldn’t help beginning to share Blossomfall’s excitement. When Icecloud fell into the hole, she was hauled out right away. She had never been this far underground.

We’re the first cats to set paw down here, ever!

By now the two she-cats were padding along in complete darkness, their pelts brushing the side of the tunnel. Their path twisted and turned until Ivypool lost all sense of which way they were facing. Now and again she was aware of other tunnels leading off the main one, and she shivered at the thought of plunging even deeper into the hill.

“I can feel a tiny draft of air,” Blossomfall, in the lead, reported after a while. “That should lead us to a way out.”

They plodded on; Ivypool’s pads were aching from walking on the cold, hard rock by the time she realized that she could see her Clanmate’s head and pricked ears outlined against a pale light up ahead. “We’re getting somewhere!” she mewed.

Blossomfall picked up the pace and Ivypool bounded after her, almost bumping into her when she stopped dead. Peering around her Clanmate, Ivypool saw that the tunnel ended in a huge cave, its walls soaring far above their heads. A dark river ran through it, and on the opposite side a wide ledge was cut into the rock.

“This is the strangest place I’ve ever seen,” Blossomfall whispered, venturing a little farther in.

Light was angling down through a tiny hole in the cave roof, too high above their heads for the cats to think of climbing out that way. Padding forward cautiously, Ivypool bent her head and lapped up a mouthful of water from the river.

“That’s cold!” she exclaimed, stepping back and twitching her whiskers to shake off the drops.

Glancing around while Blossomfall drank, Ivypool felt a strong sensation of being watched, as if a cat’s gaze was boring into her back from the ledge in the cave wall. She whipped around; the ledge was empty, but the feeling wouldn’t leave her. Her pelt crawled.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she mewed, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the echoing cave.

“Why not?” Blossomfall looked up, swiping her tongue around her jaws. “There’s no cat here to tell us to go away.”

“Then who left those?” Ivypool’s voice rasped in her throat as her gaze fell on fresh paw prints dimpling the damp sand at the edge of the river, a couple of tail-lengths from where she and Blossomfall were standing. Every hair on her pelt bristled and she slid out her claws, scraping them on the rock.

“There are cats living down here!”

Chapter 17