CHERNOBYL

Outside of the stone caverns the winds howls like wolves after their quick-footed quarry. Her skin prickles with a shiver even though she's deep within the heart of the hollow halls and cannot feel the outside temperature. She doubts that it is the feeling that sends a shiver down her spine, but rather the baritone voice of the ripping night winds. It's colder now, out there, than when she first descended into these caves. She realizes now that she has not departed the darkness or the pulse of magma through her ears for a few weeks. She survives off of the crystalline waters, healing and full of almost addictive minerals and the delectable mushrooms and foliage aplenty in the atrium room of lush plant life. Her belly is swollen with her health, her fur thick and oil slick, glowing against the lava's orange shine. She does not need the world above to thrive, but instead she needs to be below – living just fine without the upper levels, just like the perfectly content plant life down here.

She relishes in the idea of becoming some sort of underground creature.
Home is where the heart is, right? She grins with the lingering thought.

Footfall snaps her from her self-to-self conversation and suddenly she thanks herself for not doing such a thing aloud (this time). She contemplates casually turning away and moving in the opposite direction. She's in the open hall just outside of the room where the strange is having some intimate moments with the drawings. She loves this room, studies this room, and  abruptly ignores her typical anti-social urge to move away to be alone and walks slowly through the arch of stone and into room of pulsating carvings.

Her solid feet click and tap like pebbles against the humid floor and she moves to stand some feet off from him, admiring a different section of lines and symbols and such. He seems familiar with these hieroglyphs, she muses. The historical tales alone are commonly decipherable, most in Helovia have come across them and learned about them before – but the various 'glyphs woven in and out of the carvings are mysterious to most that she's met (and herself). The compass on the floor she unveiled some months ago with a few other curious Helovians is now covered with vines and roots again, as well as the strange map of Helovia on the eastern wall in the corner. She leaves it veiled instead of reintroducing it and turns to the stranger with a rather prying but otherwise emotionless stare with her black eyes. “What do you know about these?” Her voice is gritty as always, her delivery smooth and her tone non-threatening; as is her slumped, ear propped posture.



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if i had a heart i could love you,
if i had a voice i would sing.