I Went Back To The Caves. This Is What I Found At The End

[Part 3]

I didn’t think this would be how it ended.

I didn’t die, if that’s what you were wondering. I’m not going to tell you the whole thing just to give a twist at the end. But yesterday morning, I completed my ninth Cave Walk. The last one.

I didn’t plan for it to be the last.

But then again, I didn’t plan for a lot of things that happened anyway. Kimber, Donovan, what might have been Sara, Petra and I if things had turned out differently. I didn’t plan for who Sara and I have become as people. It was vastly different from what I thought my life was going to look like when I started this.

I’m not going to pretend I had some grand design to this. I went back simply because I said I would. It was because the legend suggested that nine walks meant there was something at the end. I’ve talked about this before. I had eight walks, and the only three possibilities I could see were either finishing it and receiving some boon, disappearing into those caves and never coming back, or spending the rest of my life knowing I stopped one short of the one thing that might give me some answers.

Some of you will call that stubbornness, or stupidity. Maybe even both. And you’re probably right.

So I’ll tell you what happened on the ninth walk. I’ll tell you everything I can, and I’ll tell it straight. Then I’m going to close this chapter. It’s not because I’m afraid, though I am. It’s because some things deserve to be finished properly.

All I ask is for the chance to do that.

To begin with, Sara didn’t want me to go.

That’s the first thing you should know. She sat across from me the night before as she turned her coffee cup in circles on the table. She didn’t look at me for a long time. But when she finally did, she just said, “I don’t have a good feeling about this one.”

“I didn’t have a good feeling about any of them.” I answered.

She didn’t laugh. That was how I knew she meant it.

“Let me come with you,” she said.

We’d talked about this before. She’d done six walks herself over time. Not all of them were with me. We’d agreed a long time ago that whoever got to eight first would do the ninth alone. That was the shape of the legend. That was the part that every account and every survivor story we’d ever dug up seemed to agree on.

Nine. And alone.

“You know why I can’t let you do that,” I said.

She turned the cup again. “I know.”

We sat there for a while after that, not talking, doing that thing where you’re both very aware that there’s more you want to say. But you just can’t articulate it.

She drove me to the caves the next morning.

It was early. The sky was that particular shade of dark that happens before dawn, where it isn’t quite night and isn’t anywhere near daybreak. The cold had a weight to it that pressed down through the layers I’d put on. We drove without the radio on and Sara had both hands on the wheel the whole way there.

When she pulled up to the access road she didn’t turn off the engine.

I sat there for a second with my hand on the door.

“If you’re not out by dusk…” she said.

“I know.”

“Anthony.”

“I know, Sara.”

A pause. “Tell me you read the rules.”

“I have the rules memorized.”

“Tell me you read them anyway.”

So I recited them out loud, all eleven, in order, sitting in the passenger seat of her car in the dark with the heater running. She listened with her eyes on the windshield. When I finished she was quiet for a second.

Then she said, “Rule Eleven.”

“It was a person once,” I said. “Don’t forget that. Don’t let it forget that either.”

She nodded once, then leaned over in the car and pulled me into a tight hug. We held it for a long while, and I could feel her shaky breaths on my cheek.

When she finally pulled away, her eyes were wet. “If you die there Anthony, I’m going to kill you.”

I smiled. But my body couldn’t produce any sort of laugh, no matter how much I wanted to. I got out of the car.

She didn’t drive away until I was past the first marker.

The caves were different this time. I know how that sounds. Rock is rock. Dark is dark. But if you’ve spent enough time in the Therralian system you learn to read the mood of it the way you learn to read any place you’ve spent a lot of time in. It has temperatures and it has silences and it has a quality of waiting that shifts depending on the season. It happens in ways I have never been able to explain logically and have long since stopped trying to.

This time the caves seemed patient.

Not the patience of something dormant. The patience of something that has been awake and still for a very long time and has learned that there is no difference between waiting and simply existing.

I’ve thought about that a lot since.

I passed the first three markers without incident. The outer chambers were the same as they always were. Familiar in the way that a place can be even when it has never been fully safe. I had two lanterns on low, the way we’d worked out was best, and my pack, and eleven rules I’d been building and rebuilding for longer than I wanted to admit.

The silence was only broken by my footsteps and breathing, with the circle of light around me cutting through the black. Like the calm before a storm I prayed I’d stay out of.

Then came the fourth marker.

I stopped in front of it the way I always did. The crude lines that distinguished it from the other markers seemed darker as the shadows from the lanterns illuminated them. But this time I stood there a bit longer. I always did this alone or with Sara, but doing it alone felt different this time. It felt more final.

I don’t know if I said anything out loud. I might have. It doesn’t matter. I passed the fourth marker.

The cold came in the second chamber.

It wasn’t the temperature dropping. It was the other cold. The one that means something.

I’d felt it eight times before and I knew it the same way you know the smell of rain before it arrives. It moves differently from cave air. It has intention to it, or something that feels like intention, a directional quality that regular cold doesn’t have.

I stopped walking.

I put my back against the wall. Eyes down. The lantern was low.

The footsteps started somewhere in the tunnel ahead of me. I want to tell you that the ninth time it was different, or that I had grown past the fear by then.

But that would be a lie.

I told you I was going to tell you this straight. My heart rate went up the same way it always did. My mouth went dry the same way it always did. The brain does what the brain does regardless of how many times you’ve stood in a dark tunnel and told yourself to be calm.

The footsteps were slow, even, and deliberate. Then they stopped. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual. But there was something else about them that was different. Almost smaller.

It didn’t move on. It didn’t settle into the ambient chill of the cave. It just stayed, suspended, about ten feet ahead of me in the tunnel. And the silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the one I knew.

The Wanderer was waiting.

I kept my eyes down. I kept my breathing even, or at least I tried to.

One minute. Two.

Nothing.

Then the lantern directly ahead of me, the one in my right hand, began to slowly and steadily brighten. The light was more than it had been when I walked in. More than it had any reason to be.

I looked up.

I want to be careful here, because I’ve read a hundred accounts of the Therralian Caves and the Wanderer. Some of them were secondhand stories that have been told and retold until the original shape of them was barely visible underneath all the layers of fear put on it by other people.

I’ve read descriptions of what lives in those tunnels from people who understood what they saw and people who absolutely didn’t, and the one thing that’s consistent is that everyone reaches for the same vocabulary.

Enormous. Monstrous. Impossible. Petra described the same thing. But what I saw in that tunnel was not that.

What I saw was a figure.

Standing in the tunnel ahead of me. Still. Maybe eight feet away in the lantern light that had no business being that bright.

It was roughly my height. Maybe an inch or two taller. The build of someone who had once been very strong and had existed past the point of using it. It was wearing something I can’t fully describe, layers of something dark that had been there long enough that it didn’t quite look like clothing anymore. It looked like the cave itself had slowly clothed it over a very long time, the same way the cave had slowly clothed its own walls in darkness.

There was something covering the Wanderer’s face.

Sara said once that her best word for it was a mask. But even that didn’t entirely cover what she saw. I understood now what she meant. I couldn’t tell you what it was or what it looked like in full. I only saw it in pieces, and the pieces were enough to understand that it was old and that it was not going to come off.

It was looking at me.

I did not look away.

I know that goes against what I’ve told people. I know what I wrote in the rules. But I want to be honest with you about what actually happened. We stood there in that tunnel in that lantern light that was too bright and shouldn’t have existed, and after a long moment I said the only thing I could think of.

“I’ve been trying to find you for a long time.”

Then the Wanderer moved.

Not toward me. Sideways, slowly, until its back was against the opposite wall of the tunnel. It lowered itself down to the floor the way someone lowers themselves when their knees have been hurting for a long time and they’ve gotten practiced at compensating for it. It was deliberate. Careful.

And I understood, somehow, what it was inviting me to do. I knew that this might be my only shot to see him when he’s sane. However brief that might be.

I sat down against the opposite wall. We were maybe six feet apart. Close enough that the light reached both of us. Far enough that there was space to breathe.

We sat there facing each other in the tunnel for a while and neither of us said anything. The cold was still present. Not aggressive. Just there, the way he was there. Part of the air around him the way a smell is part of a room.

When the Wanderer spoke, its voice was low. It was not a sound I had been expecting from a throat that had not spoken to a living person in longer than I can actually conceptualize. There was roughness to it but underneath that there was something else, something almost carefully controlled, like someone who is aware that they are doing something difficult and is committed to doing it correctly.

“How long has it been?” it asked. And I was almost taken aback by how simple it was. I was half expecting a whispered congratulations from all corners of the chamber. But the voice, aside from being marred by lack of use, seemed almost human.

“Depends on who you ask I think.” I answered, slowly, not entirely sure how best to approach. “But it’s been too long either way.”

“You came back,” it said.

“Yes.”

It was quiet for a moment. Then it said, “The others come once. Sometimes twice.” A pause, and something shifted in the voice, a gear change that I didn’t understand until later. “The ones who come more than that… they start to think they understand me. I find that… interesting.”

There was something in the word interesting that didn’t land the way the rest of it did. A flatness. The kind of flatness that isn’t emotional neutrality but something that sits just beside it in a way that makes the back of your neck go tight.

I said, “I don’t think I understand you, honestly. I just thought I’d learned enough to not make you angry.”

It tilted its head. It was the same motion Petra described.

“Angry,” it said. And then, almost to itself, “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

Silence. Then simply, “I don’t know. But most don’t know regardless. Enlighten me. Why did you come back?”

I had thought about this question on the drive over, on every drive over, really, for a year and a half since I’d started seriously working toward nine. I had three or four answers prepared. They all felt inadequate sitting across from him in that tunnel.

So I said the true one.

I said, “I want to ask you something.”

He said, “You can ask.”

“The legend,” I said. “About the boon. About nine walks. People have so many ideas on what it was. What do you think the boon was?” I asked.

He was very quiet for a long time. The lantern flame held steady. The cold didn’t shift.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that the boon is the answer to a question. Whatever question you came in here carrying.” He paused. “Most people don’t know they have one. They come in because they hear about the prize and they want the prize. They don’t think about what they’re actually looking for.” He leaned toward me slightly. Or rather his mask floated closer. “You’ve been coming in here for a long while. What were you looking for?”

I didn’t answer right away.

Then I said, “I wanted to understand what happened to you.”

The tunnel was completely silent.

His head was still tilted. And in the lantern light, in the way the flame moved slightly toward him and then back, I watched the mask shift. Not the mask itself, but the shadow it threw. Something in the angle of the light caught the carving of it differently for a moment. And I saw something in that moment that I am keeping. Not because it’s too terrible. Because it isn’t mine to describe. Because in the two seconds I had of it I understood that some things you witness and then you carry them, and what you carry changes you in a way that words don’t touch.

I looked away.

Down at the cave floor. At the old worn stone.

He said, very quietly, “I went looking for something to help people I didn’t know. That was the beginning of it. I went in because it was needed and because no one else was going.” A pause. “I thought it would take a few days. I thought I’d find what I was looking for and come back out. I thought someone would notice I was gone.”

He stopped.

I didn’t say anything.

“It took a long time,” he said, “to understand that no one was coming. That I had gone in deep enough that the part of me that knew the way back had gotten…” He paused. “Quiet. And then quieter. And then the dark got louder than it. And I stopped being someone who was trying to leave and started being someone who was just…” He stopped again. A longer pause than any before it. “…moving through space. Being in space. Being aware of what moved through it.”

I nodded. “That’s when you truly become the Wanderer, isn’t it?”

The Wanderer glanced at me. “Does that answer not satisfy you? Or is there more? What more is there to learn of with your boon? What were you coming back for?”

I thought about it. “For you,” I said. “I think.”

The Wanderer made a sound that I could almost believe was a huff. “That’s a strange reason.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

Another long pause. The lantern between us was steady, the light calm in a way lanterns in these caves almost never are, and in the steadiness of it I could see the carved wall behind it more clearly. The spirals and the layered marks and the long horizontal figure I’d seen in photographs of Petra’s documentation.

I looked at that figure among the carvings and pointed. “Was that you?”

The breathing across the chamber changed. Not in a way that sent my heart rate spiking. More like the way breathing changes when a question catches someone off guard and they need a second.

“I don’t know,” it said, glancing behind at the markings. “I remember…” A pause “…I remember standing in front of it. When it was being made. I remember the hands doing it. I don’t know if they were mine.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Long,” it said. And then, it continued flatly, with that same gear-change in the voice that made my skin prickle. “I’ve had a great deal of time to examine that question. There are bones in the lower chambers I’ve arranged very carefully. Sorted. I found it helped, at some point. Having something ordered in the dark. I don’t remember when I stopped.”

I didn’t say anything.

“That doesn’t frighten you,” it said. Observational. Not quite a question.

“It does,” I said. “But I think you already know what frightens me more than the bones.”

He was quiet.

“You do,” I said. “The thing you become when whatever this is goes away.”

The lantern flame leaned slightly. Not from any draft. It just started to lean, the way it does when the temperature around it is changing in ways that don’t follow any logic I’ve ever been able to track.

“Yes,” he said. Simply. “I know what I am in the dark.”

“Do you know what you’ve done in it?”

A long pause. The kind that has weight to it.

“I know that things come in,” he said. “And sometimes they don’t go back out.” Another pause. “I don’t always remember what happens between those two points. There are gaps. Long ones.” The voice stayed level. Carefully level. “I think that’s a mercy. I think something decided I shouldn’t have to carry all of it.”

I looked at the floor.

“But some of it,” he said quietly, “I do carry.”

I didn’t ask him to explain that. I didn’t want the explanation and I don’t think he wanted to give it. We sat with it for a moment the way you sit with something true that you can’t undo by acknowledging it.

Then I asked the thing I’d been carrying since before the third walk.

“Was there ever anyone who came looking for you? Not to do the Walk. Not for the boon. Someone who came in specifically to find you?”

The silence that followed was different from the others.

It stretched. It went on long enough that the cold shifted. Not toward me. Just shifted, the way air moves when something in a room changes. The lantern dimmed by half a degree and then held.

“There was someone,” he said, finally.

His voice had changed. Not the gear-shift. Something else. Something underneath that hadn’t been there before, like surfacing through very still water.

“I don’t remember a name,” he said. “I remember… her.” He stopped. Started again. “I remember a light that wasn’t mine. Moving through the tunnels. Not the way the others move, afraid and fast. Slowly. Looking.” A pause. “I remember following it. Watching it. It kept going deeper. It kept…” He stopped again.

He turned his head slightly away from me.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’ve tried to find the end of that memory. There isn’t one. It just stops.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then I said, very carefully, “What did the light look like?”

He was quiet.

“Warm,” he said. “It was warm-colored. Which surprised me.” His voice dropped lower. “Most of the lights that come in here are cold or white. This one was…” He paused. “I remember thinking it was the first warm thing I’d seen in a very long time.”

But I sat with it. I’ll sit with it for the rest of my life.

“I hope she found what she was looking for,” I said. It was the only thing I could say.

He tilted his head again. “She,” he said. Quietly. Like he was testing the word. Like he’d forgotten he was the one who mentioned her first.

“Yeah,” I said. “She. I hope she found what she was looking for.”

He was still for a long moment. Then he said, very slowly, almost to himself, “I hope so too.”

The lantern dimmed.

Not all at once. Just a small degree. The way it dims when the temperature is about to drop.

I noticed it and I didn’t say anything.

He noticed it too. I know because the quality of the silence changed. A stillness came into him that hadn’t been there before, the way a person goes still when they feel something coming that they’ve felt before and know they can’t stop.

“It’s starting,” he said.

“I know.”

“You should go,” he said. “Soon.”

“Not yet,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. In the dimming light I couldn’t read anything from the mask. I never could. But there was something in the way he was sitting that shifted. Something that pulled slightly inward.

“I used to know my name,” he said. “I know it now. Here. In this…” He gestured, a small motion, toward his own chest. “This space where I can think. But there are stretches where I don’t. Stretches where I’m not someone who has a name. I’m just…” He stopped. “The Wanderer.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“Your name,” I said.

A long pause. The lantern dropped another degree.

He gave me his true name. I won’t write it here, because I don’t believe people are ready for that just yet.

I said it back to him. I said it exactly the way he’d said it.

Something happened in his stillness when I did. I don’t have a word for what it was. It wasn’t a relief exactly. It wasn’t grief. It was something older than both of those things, something that exists in the space before you have words for what you’re feeling.

It looked like someone hearing their own name from another person for the first time in longer than they could measure.

“I had a purpose once,” he said. “I remember the shape of it even when I can’t remember the details. I was supposed to be doing something. I was supposed to be…” He paused. His voice was shifting again. Something more gradual, more like watching a tide go out. “…useful. I was going in because it was needed. That’s…” He stopped. “That’s still there. That piece. That’s one of the last ones.”

The cold settled heavier.

“Even in the gaps,” he said, slower now, “when I don’t know what I am or what I was… there is still something that doesn’t want to be here. That wants…” He tilted his head the other direction. “Out. There’s something that always wants out. Even when there’s no…no thought attached to it. Just the direction of it. Just the…wanting.”

“That’s still you,” I said. “That’s the part of you that never stopped trying.”

He looked at me. I held the lantern up slightly.

He went very still.

“You served something real.” I said. “You went in looking for something because you wanted to help people you didn’t know. You weren’t lost because of something you did wrong. You were lost because you were trying to do right and the dark was bigger than anyone told you.”

The cold pressed down.

“None of what you’ve become in there,” I said, “is what you chose.”

The lantern was barely glowing now.

In the near dark I heard his breathing change. Slower. The clarity left it in degrees, the same way his voice had been leaving him. The same way the tide goes out but not all at once, not with any single dramatic moment, just the incremental and inevitable withdrawal of something that had come up as far as it could go and was now going back.

“I know…” he started. His voice was lower. Rougher now. The careful control was nearly gone. “…I know I have… done things. In the dark. I know because I can… sometimes I can almost…” The sentence broke apart. He tried again. “There is a counting in me. I don’t know when I started. I don’t know what I was counting.” A long, slow exhale. “I know the number is large.”

I didn’t flinch. I kept my eyes on him.

“That’s not all you are,” I said.

His head turned toward the wall. Away from me. The way someone turns away when something is too close and they can’t look at it head on.

“You should go,” he said. His voice was almost unrecognizable from what it had been twenty minutes ago. There was a thickness in it that hadn’t been there before, the way a voice sounds when someone is fighting to stay awake and losing

“I know,” I said. I hadn’t moved yet.

“I won’t…” He stopped. “I can feel it… going. The part that…” He stopped again. A long pause. Then, very quietly, with what sounded like the last of the effort he had left for sanity. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The lantern flame bent hard toward him and stayed that way.

I stood up.

He didn’t move.

I said, “Thank you. For coming up this far.”

Nothing. His head turned back toward me, slow, from the wall.

In the almost-dark I could barely see the mask. But I could see it. And I could see that he was still there, barely, behind it. Just at the surface of himself. One of the last seconds of it.

“The warm light,” I said. “The one you followed. I think she was looking for you because she missed you. I think she went in because you mattered to her.” I paused. “You mattered to someone. You still do.”

The cold was absolute.

The lantern was almost out.

He sat against the opposite wall of the tunnel, still, for a long moment. His head came up slowly. And whatever had been almost gone in him was back for just that one terrible, clear second. Looking out at me from behind everything the dark had made of him.

And then he said, in a voice that was barely a voice at all, barely more than a shape in the air.

“Tell them I tried to come home.”

Then he was gone. He had been looking at me. And then he wasn’t. The direction of attention was still there but the recognition behind it was gone, the way a light stays warm for a second after it’s switched off.

The last thing the light gave me was the mask. And the mask was all that was left.

He tilted his head again, but it went too far. Past the natural range. Just slightly. Just enough.

The lantern went out.

And I ran.

I’m not going to dress it up. I know what the rules say and I know what running in those tunnels risks and I ran anyway. Because the cold that filled that tunnel the second the lantern went out was not the patient cold. It was not the cold of something lost and waiting.

It was the cold of something enormous and old and suddenly, completely awake.

I heard it behind me. Fast loud footsteps. A screeching of metal across the wall of the cave and low hollow intake of air that only got louder.

This was something that knew every inch of every tunnel in those caves the way I know the inside of my own house in the dark. It was fast in the way that things are fast when speed costs them nothing.

I had heard the breathing be careful and deliberate twelve minutes ago. There was nothing careful about that breathing now.

My shoulder hit a wall. I didn’t stop. My lantern was dead and I was running on eight walks of muscle memory and whatever fraction of grace was left in a universe that had let me get this far.

I hit the fourth marker with my hand and felt the carved notch in the stone and turned.

The sound behind me stopped.

Just stopped. Like a door had closed.

The cold didn’t leave immediately, but it thinned. Gradually. The way it always thinned when the source of it wasn’t following anymore. And I kept walking, fast, not running, walking with one hand on the wall and my breathing loud in the silence until the second marker and then the first and then I could see the grey suggestion of outside ahead of me, the early pale nothing of pre-dawn coming in through the cave entrance.

I walked out.

The sky was getting light by the time Sara’s car came up the access road. I was sitting on the ground outside the entrance with my back against a boulder and my knees up and the dead lantern in my lap.

She didn’t ask anything. She just sat down next to me on the ground and put her shoulder against mine and we sat there while the sky went from grey to pale yellow to the first thin washes of pink.

After a while she said, “Well?”

I thought about how to answer that for a long moment.

Then I said, “I got my boon.”

She looked at me.

“He talked to me,” I said. “For a while. He was… there was a version of him that was still…” I stopped. “He was a person, Sara. He was a real person. He remembered being one.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly. “Ask me in a week.”

She nodded. She didn’t push.

We sat there until the sun was fully up and the caves behind us were just rock in the daylight and the cold was just the ordinary cold of the early morning and the world was doing its normal unremarkable business around us the way it does.

I thought about what he’d asked me to tell them. To tell you.

He tried to come home.

He’s been trying since the beginning. Underneath everything the dark made of him, underneath the cold and the silence and the countless years of it, there was always something moving in the direction of the outside. Something that never completely stopped trying to find the way back.

He won’t know I told you this. He won’t surface again for a very long time, if he surfaces at all. What I sat across from in that tunnel was the last of something that had been coming up for air in smaller and smaller amounts for longer than any of us can actually hold in our heads. The version of him that could speak to me, that could sit down and be careful with his words and say his own name when I asked him… I don’t know when that will happen again. I don’t know if it ever will.

But it happened once. It happened yesterday morning. And for a few minutes in the dark he wasn’t just the cold and the silence and the thing that the legends made of him.

He was someone who went looking for something to help people he didn’t know.

He was someone who mattered to someone who came in after him.

He was someone who, at the very bottom of everything he’d lost within himself, still pointed toward home.

I’m going to sit with that for a while.

I think that’s enough.

This is the last entry I’m going to write about the Therralian Caves. Not because there isn’t more to say. There’s always more to say about a place like that. But because I made a promise to myself a long time ago that if I made it to nine I would have the sense to stop while I was still capable of making promises.

I have the list. I’m going to leave it up. If you’re seriously considering the Walk, read it. Read all of it. Read Rule Eleven especially, and read it like it means something, because it does.

If you go in treating it like a puzzle, you’ll act like someone being hunted. You’ll panic. You’ll run.

Go in knowing what it actually is.

It’s something ancient and broken that never stopped trying to find the way out.

Don’t let it forget that.

Don’t you forget it either.