Underground Cavern is the cave terrain beneath the world of Vala, holding the halls and galleries of all downward exploration. Its largest piece is the Great Cavern, beneath the mausoleum of Tarvis.
| Type | Place |
| World | Vala |
| Spanish entry | Caverna subterránea |
Description
The rock is “veined, barely worked, but you can tell there is straightness”. The air smells “damp, cold”, of decay; elsewhere of rancid wine, or “half of cinnamon, like incense burned in temples”. The floor is soft earth mixed with rotting vegetation that cushions falls. The Great Cavern stays “somewhat cool”, held up by rock formations. Unseen ceiling openings let in rain; cracks admit breeze and mist.
Sizes range from a 3×3 cave to “a gigantic, gigantic natural cavern” behind some doors. The Citadel’s cavern is 60 to 70 meters high. One depth below ground was measured at four to five meters (earlier estimated at three).
Routes and layers
Travel follows numbered routes (55, 92, 56), with forks by compass point. One cavern has exits east and west and a lake to the northeast. At one point there are two entrances: the upper one, 440 feet up from the valley entrance at “almost 30 degrees, not reaching 45”, is the red-veined cavern with a strange echo from which the Temple of the Satiente is entered; the other is lower.
The system is layered: flooded zones joined to the waterfalls and underground waters at the bottom; numbered galleries in the middle; ceiling openings and high cliff and valley entrances on top.
Occupied caverns
Three large cages are each guarded by an orc; elsewhere cages seem empty. The bronze temple of the Cavern of Four Pillars, home to four fabulous beings in white seen in a vision, and the Temple of the Satiente are built sites. In the Citadel’s cavern, under a strip of sunlight, lies a garden “very much in the style of Minas Tirith” with a pear tree; at its bottom nest “Stymphalian-type birds with metal beaks that eat you”, where those who fall are thrown.
Named caverns
Besides the Great Cavern (one sector of which opens onto the underground fungi of Ardenvull) and the Cavern of Four Pillars: the Howling Caverns, Level 2 of the depths below; the Cavern of the Lost; and a great cavern in the south of the region, which “must be in the nobility of Susana”.
Open questions
- Whether the caverns form one system, and which stretches are natural (“they may be natural”) or excavated.
- What the cages held.
- Whether routes 55, 92 and 56 are map numbering or the world’s own names.
- Whether “the nobility of Susana” is a place or a misheard word.
- The source of the cinnamon and incense smell (Temple of the Satiente or Bronze Temple).
- The extent and number of levels of the labyrinth of which the Howling Caverns are Level 2.