A tunnel that led all the way to the Bay? Woah! Junco blinked away from his mother to peer down into the darkness of the tunnel, his eyes slowly growing used to the lack of light the further in they moved. His father had once told him about the Bay, that years ago their family had lived there, but it was even before Orphiel’s time. The idea of something being before his father’s time was something his young brain couldn’t quite wrap around. He’d only been on this earth for one whole year, he could try and understand what ten of them were, but he only had the faintest of ideas.
One creamy-gold ear flicked among his partially grown red-brown forelock, turning toward his mother as she started to speak. Did you know you were born in a cave? She asked, and his gold eyes widened somewhat. “I was?”
Not this exact one, but a smaller, more secretive one in the Inlet. It is the family's royal birthing place where most of your siblings have been born.
“Woah,” he exhaled, then glanced away from his mother to look down at the hard ground, at the rock walls, at the way the darkness wrapped gently around them, then back to her. “Maybe that’s why I like the caves so much,” he said with all the wisdom of a young child connecting dots where dots may not need to be connected, “cause this is pretty cool.” There was a very, very good chance this little day of exploring with his mother was going to blossom into further curiosities of the cave. Maybe one day he could even take the passage to the Bay his mother talked about.
Just then, he noticed a forked path where an arm of the cave reached back toward the left and, from that way, he could just hear the very faintest of squeaks, of rustles, and he froze. His neck pulled back into his shoulders and he blew a hard breath out, sucking in a following breath that smelled of musty cave and something mineral-rich. His little tail - half white, half brown - flicked out behind him with a few excited swishes. “Mama,” he whispered, “are those where the bats are?” He’d made his voice even quieter than before, remembering that she’d told him they were sleeping and he needed to remember to be quiet.
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