The Bleeding Light

Silas returned to the world of sunlight and noise. The grocery store, the gas station, the bills in his mail. It all felt thin and unreal, like a poorly made movie. His real life was now in the deep, green dark.

He went back to the Heartwood Chamber twice more over the next month. Each visit was the same. A silent communion. The Watcher tolerated his presence. Silas would sit by the stream, sketching, taking notes with a pencil, never a flash. He started to notice patterns. The Watcher’s movements were slower. The vibrant glow of the larger lichen patches seemed… dimmer.

On his third visit, he saw the red.

It started at the far end of the chamber, where the main stream entered through a crack in the rock. The water there was usually crystal clear. That day, it had a rusty, ugly tint. And where this tinted water touched the glowing blue lichen, the lichen died. The beautiful blue-green light turned a sickly brown and went out, like a star that had drowned.

The Watcher was there, pacing by the contaminated stream. It made a low sound, a hum of distress that vibrated in Silas’s bones. It dipped its hand in the bad water, then pulled it back quickly, shaking it.

Silas’s scientist mind kicked in, shoving aside the wonder. This was a problem. A threat. He took a water sample from the clean pool and one from the rusty entrance. He left the chamber with a new, grim purpose.

Back home, he used his old teaching chemistry kit. The results were crude but clear. The contaminated water was full of metals. Iron, copper, lead. Mine runoff. There was an old, abandoned zinc mine up in the hills beyond the North Ridge. He’d read it had been sealed decades ago. But clearly, something had leaked. A new crack, a forgotten pipe. Poison was seeping through the bones of the mountain, finding its way into the secret heart of the world.

The thrill was gone. Replaced by a cold, hard dread. He had discovered a miracle, only to watch it be poisoned.

He tried to think. Who could he call? The Environmental Agency? They would need proof. His photos of the Watcher would be dismissed as fakes. They would descend on the cave with bulldozers and pumps. The noise, the chaos, would kill the Watchers as surely as the poison. They were shy, delicate creatures of silence. The shock alone…

He couldn’t let that happen. He was the only one who knew. The only one who cared. The weight of it was crushing. It was his secret to bear, and now his crisis to solve.

He spent days studying maps of the old mine. He drove to the nearest town library and dug through historical records. He found old schematics. There was a main runoff channel, now supposed to be sealed with concrete plugs. One of them must have failed.

He needed to find that plug and seal it again. It was a job for a team of engineers with heavy machinery. He was an old man with a bad heart.

That night, sitting in his dark study with the sample of dying lichen beside him --- its glow almost gone, he made a choice. He would not be the man who documented an extinction. He would not let the symphony end with a dying cough. He had to try.

He packed his backpack for the last time. Not with notebooks, but with tools. A small sledgehammer, a chisel, and bags of a quick-set concrete mix he could mix with stream water. It was absurdly heavy. He also packed his journal. If he failed, someone needed to know why.

He left a note for Maya on his kitchen table. It did not mention caves or Watchers.

It just said: My darling Maya. I’ve gone to fix something important in the forest. If I don’t come back, know that I love you very much, and I died following my wonder. Don’t be sad. Be curious. Love you, Dad.

He drove to the mine, not the cave. The access road was overgrown. The entrance was a grim hole of rotten timber and rusted metal, fenced off with warning signs. He slipped through a gap.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of rust and wet stone. His headlamp showed tunnels leading down into darkness. Using the old map, he navigated the maze, heading for the lower drainage channel. The sound of dripping water was everywhere. And then, he heard it louder --- a rush, not a drip.

He found the broken plug. A concrete wall with a crack in its center, about the width of his arm. A steady, ugly, orange-red stream was pouring out of it, disappearing down a dark hole that led deep into the mountain. Towards the cave. Towards the Heartwood.

This was it. The source of the bleeding light.

He got to work. The task was back-breaking. He chiseled at the crack, trying to widen it just enough to pack it with fresh concrete. The hammer blows echoed in the tunnel like a failing heartbeat. Dust filled his lungs. His chest screamed in protest, a sharp, biting pain with every swing. He swallowed one of his pills and kept going.

For hours he worked, mixing the powder with water from a cleaner puddle, packing the thick paste into the crack. He was covered in grime and sweat. Finally, as his light began to dim, the flow of poisoned water slowed to a trickle, then stopped. A new, rough seal of grey concrete held back the poison.

He had done it. He slumped against the mine wall, exhausted, his body in a universe of pain. But he felt a spark of the old thrill. He had fixed it. He had protected his discovery.

But he was in the cold, dead dark of the mine, not in the green, living light of the Heartwood. And the only way out was up.