Green Canyon Magic - Ch.3 - Unfamiliar Territory (Patreon)

In some ways our clothing situation was easy to fix, but in other ways there were complications. The two biggest such issues came in the form of our tails, which our pants just weren't designed for at all.

Another minor issue was entirely my own fault. My pants were too long and too loose for my smaller body, and when I tried to trim the legs down I got a bit too aggressive and ended up with baggy shorts instead of something more like capris. 

Stef was a little more cautious, having learned from my mistake, and actually measured before cutting eight or ten centimeters off the ends of their pant legs. They also came up with a solution to the tail problem, which involved cutting a notch into the backs of our pants. Then we both used makeshift belts so they'd stay up around our waists.

We both made do with slightly baggy tops, although in my case it wasn't so baggy across the chest. None of my bras fit anymore either, which was a mixed blessing. I was thrilled with my new figure, but I knew hiking or being active without any kind of support was going to be a problem.

The last challenge was footwear, and that's something neither Stef or I had a solution for. We'd both shrank several sizes and our hiking boots were simply too big to be safe or comfortable. In the end we had no choice but to stay barefoot, which felt unusual at first but the strange thing was how quickly we both got used to it.

Finally I pulled on my hoodie, which was big enough on me the hem was down to my hips and my hands didn't even reach the cuffs. It was very comfy though, and I grinned as I pulled the sleeves up until my hands came free. Stef had similar results with their own hoodie, although theirs wasn't quite as big on them as mine was on me.

All that finally clued me into the fact that they'd shrank last night too. And with me being a good dozen centimeters shorter than Stef now, it meant I'd shrunk more than I thought. That knowledge left my tail wagging again. 

"Are we ready to go see the mountain?" I asked, since it seemed like we were as dressed as we were going to get.

"Yes my little star," Stef replied with a grin. "Let's go and survey what's become of the Thaya river."

The wildcat accompanied us as we both emerged from our cave. We left our packs and everything inside, it felt safe enough and I doubted anyone would come along and steal our things. In fact the cave wasn't that easy to find unless you knew it was there, which left me with another concern.

"Will we be able to find our way back here afterwards?" I asked as I looked around with a worried frown. "I'd hate for us to get lost while we're hiking and wind up without any supplies or equipment."

Stef didn't appear concerned as they replied, "Theo found it last night in the dark, he can find it again. For that matter I'm sure I can find it easily enough too. The whole area around the mouth of the cave is covered in our scent."

I was ready to believe her cat friend could find our cave again, but the comment about our scent caught me off-guard. I frowned at my enbyfriend, "Are you just messing with me now? Or can you really track our scent?"

That made them blush, "It's like my nose is a lot more sensitive? It's hard to describe, but I can even tell what path we took last night, even though the scent is kind of weak by now."

"Huh," I frowned. "I haven't noticed anything like that. Maybe it's a cat thing, rather than a fox thing."

Stef pulled me into a hug and smiled, "Don't worry my little star, I don't know how any of this works or how it's happening to us, but I'm sure your thing will come to you too. Maybe your nose will improve, or maybe it'll be something else."

The way they almost swept me up into their arms like that made me melt a little bit. Something about looking up into their loving eyes while wrapped up in their strong lithe arms was even more intoxicating than usual.

"Mmhmm," was the best I could manage as I smiled up at them. 

They held me another half minute, and the two of us exchanged a kiss or three. Then they let me go, and the three of us finally set off on our little expedition to survey the new mountain.

It looked to be roughly a kilometer away to the north-east. But thanks to the terrain, the canyon, and the new lake, we couldn't just hike straight for it. We had to detour some distance to the south-east, before we could turn north or north-east again. That still beat following the path of the river though, which meandered well to the north and even back-tracked west a little ways. Or at least, that's what it did before it became a lake.

Stef and I were quiet for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, as most of our attention was on finding a safe path through the woods towards our goal. We were being especially careful at first since we were both barefoot, but it gradually became apparent that the lack of shoes wasn't slowing us down in any way.

In fact it seemed like there were two factors at work. Part of it was an almost instinctive understanding of where to step, what spots on the ground were safe to place our feet and what areas weren't. And the other part was a growing certainty that my feet were tougher than they'd been before. By the time our course shifted northwards Stef and I both seemed completely comfortable and at ease marching barefoot through the woods.

Another thing I gradually noticed was how easy I found it to follow the wildcat. He was a couple meters out in front of us and he seemed to be the one leading the way. Half the time I couldn't even see him, but I always seemed to know where he was. Same with Stef, they didn't have any hesitation or difficulty keeping track of the little guy.

I wasn't sure if it was scent, or perhaps that's how it worked for my enbyfriend. For me I wasn't aware of any particular changes in what my nose could detect. It was something else, and I spent a few minutes quietly trying to identify it.

In the end the best I could come up with was vibrations, but not through the air. The wildcat moved almost silently, while Stef and I made some noise going through the underbrush. It didn't really make sense but I started to suspect I was sensing their footfalls, as vibrations through the ground itself. 

I was still thinking about that a minute or two later when Stef suddenly spoke up, breaking my train of thought.

"We've been really lucky with the weather," they commented out of the blue. "Our whole vacation it's been good, but today seems especially nice. Considering it's nearly the end of September, we've got the sun shining and it's really pleasant out. My feet aren't even cold."

"Yeah now that you mention it, it's almost unseasonably warm out today don't you think?" I agreed.

That put a little frown on their face. After a moment Stef gestured at the impossible mountain ahead and asked, "Do you think that thing's got something to do with it?"

I shrugged, "I suppose anything's possible? It's just as likely to be plain old climate change though. The weather's been getting more and more unpredictable for what, a decade now? At least?"

"Yeah good point," they grimaced.

A moment later they addressed the wildcat, "Ok sorry."

"What did he say?" I asked with a frown.

Stef grimaced again, "Theo said he can hear a loud noise in the distance and said we should be quiet for now."

I couldn't help feel a little grumpy about a cat telling me to shush, but I didn't complain. I had a feeling the loud noise was maybe the water spilling past the mountain, and I was positive it was going to look spectacular.

In fact only a half minute later I started to sense it myself. Not with my ears, but as improbable as it seemed I was definitely sensing it as vibrations that were conducted up through the ground and into my bare feet. I actually stopped moving a few seconds later, then closed my eyes so I could concentrate on those new sensations to try and get a better understanding of how it worked.

"Oh wow," I whispered to myself. 

It was like a whole new world was slowly opening up to me, or like I was suddenly seeing with eyes I'd never opened before.

I was aware of Stef as they slowed to a stop a couple paces away from me. I could track every tiny footstep Theo made as he forged on ahead of us. I was aware of things in detail I couldn't believe existed before, like earthworms working their way through the soil below me as well as ten meters away from me. Twenty meters to my right a squirrel was digging through some leaf litter, while a bird landed a dozen meters behind us to snatch up an insect.

And beyond all that, in the distance ahead of us, the ground rumbled. It was far enough away that the details were muted, but I could feel the weight of the new lake forcing the landscape downwards, while the constant surge of water past the obstruction battered the rock below like a high-pressure hose blasting away dirt and debris.

"Stella?" Stef's voice once again snapped me out of my thoughts. "Are you ok? What's wrong?"

I shook my head as I started moving again, "Nothing, sorry. I was just um, listening to the sounds around us. The waterfall is about half a kilometer ahead."

They looked a little worried as they said, "Just keep your eyes open, all right my little star? We're in unfamiliar territory now, with that mountain up ahead everything here is different."

I smiled, "I know cutie. Sorry I worried you."

As we continued making our way towards that impossible mountain Stef commented quietly, "I can smell it on the air now, and I can hear the rumble. It's a little scary to be honest."

"Yeah," I nodded in agreement as that image of a pressure washer blasting into dirt came up in my head again. "It is kind of scary. We'll be careful though."

Even though we were less than five hundred meters from our destination our progress slowed right down. The ground here was all torn up from the earthquake, it seemed like half the trees were uprooted, and there were broken branches everywhere. 

Theo was able to pick his way through, around, and over the obstructions fairly easily, but Stef and I had to take more time to carefully make our way around the worst of the mess. In all it probably took us something like two and a half hours to cover no more than one and a half kilometers, and about half the time was spent on those last five hundred meters.

There was also an impending sense of awe, and perhaps a little fear mixed in the closer we got. I could feel that constant rumbling-roar through the ground, and when we were nearer I could hear it too. So could Stef, and their tail twitched around anxiously. Meanwhile mine hung straight down, practically between my legs.

It was all worth it though, when at long last we emerged from the trees at the top of the canyon and got our first look at the base of that new mountain.

"Oh wow," I murmured to myself as I stared wide-eyed at the scene before me.

The mountain seemed to rise up directly in the middle of the canyon, probably right out of the riverbed, and stretched at least a half kilometer into the air above us. It was shaped more like an obelisk than a mountain, with a narrow base and four mostly-flat sides that tapered upwards into a point. 

The sides weren't flat enough to say for sure it was man-made, not that anyone could make something so massive, especially not overnight. But they still seemed almost unnaturally smooth. And it was unnaturally thin, there was no way any mountain could be that tall yet have a base so narrow. 

It didn't even span the width of the canyon. The mountain on its own wasn't enough to create the massive lake behind it, the river would have just gone around. Unfortunately the canyon walls must have collapsed during the earthquake, they blocked up either side of the mountain to about half the depth of the canyon. And that in turn led to the lake we were now looking at.

The waterfall wasn't visible from our vantage point, we were still on the upstream side of things. I could see where it was though. The water was flowing past the south side of the mountain and disappeared into the canyon east of the massive spire, accompanied by a constant dull roar. 

"Do you think we can get over there?" I asked, as I pointed downstream. "So we can get a proper look at the waterfall and the lower part of the mountain?"

Stef frowned, "We'll have to be very careful going around where the side of the canyon collapsed. It might take us another half hour, but I think we can get there."

It turned out my enbyfriend's prediction was fairly accurate. After about thirty minutes of cautious hiking and a bit of climbing, we found ourselves standing on a small outcropping of ground about a half dozen meters above the surface of the lake. 

To our left was Lake Thayatal, some three hundred meters wide at this point and roughly thirty meters deep in the middle. On our right the river Thaya flowed through the canyon towards Znojmo, a dozen or so kilometers downstream.

Directly in front of us stood that impossible mountain. The base was no more than a hundred and fifty meters away from where we stood. Between us and the mountain was a mess of boulders, rock, and earth that acted as a natural dam to hold back the waters of the new lake. 

There was even some of the lake below us, water reached into the nooks and crannies created when the canyon walls collapsed. There was no lake shore here, just near-vertical walls where the terrain had been churned and broken during the quake. The water below us looked deep, but at least there didn't seem to be any current out here at the edge. 

We could certainly see a current towards the middle of the lake. Specifically some fifty meters from where we stood was the waterfall I'd wanted to see.

The lake surged out through a small gap in the natural dam, about five meters wide and no more than a half meter deep. It shot out with some force, like the pressure-washer in my imagination, before falling thirty meters to the canyon floor. There it formed into a large dangerous-looking pool, before it continued its way eastward.

"You know what's strange about this?" my enbyfriend commented over the noise of the waterfall.

I almost laughed, "Stef literally everything about this is strange!"

That made them smile too, "Ok cutie good point. But look at the waterfall? Or look down there, where the Thaya flows out of the plunge pool?"

"Yes?" I asked as I looked where they were pointing. "It's impressive and kind of pretty, but what of it?"

They shook their head, "There's more water flowing out of this lake than there was flowing into it. Look downstream? That river down there is at least twice as big as the Thaya was when it flowed past our tent yesterday."

"Oh wow," I gasped. "You're right!"

*** This chapter is brought to you courtesy of Lucy who commissioned it! ***