Introduction

[theharvestmods]

INTRODUCTION
How did I ever get here?

You're sinking!

You turn, you struggle, your limbs beat through the water in an attempt to right yourself and swim back up, up, home, but something is sucking you down and - if you can keep your eyes open - all you can see is blue below, blue all around, and a pale blue circle above, where you fell in.

It had only looked like a shallow little pond at first, when you'd happened on it just a bit out of your way.

As you'd approached it, the atmosphere had gotten stiller, the air a bit fresher - unless you'd been imagining it, manifesting some other curious sense whispering to you to keep going, you'll find something here!

What you had found had been a pool of water perhaps ten to twenty feet across, pleasingly sparkling on the surface and cloudy below. Through the murk, however, you had spotted something shining, only your arm's length deep.

So you'd rolled up a sleeve - if you'd come wearing any - and reached in, and your fingers had closed cleanly around a chain...

...And the realization that your fingers hadn't grazed a bottom for it to have been sitting on had upset your balance, and that was all it had taken.

Splash!

Now you're sinking freely. The water bears down. You can't feel the chain in your hand anymore - you must have let it go in your struggling. You do feel your heart pulsing loud, low, and slow, and the windoe to the surface above is getting - quickly - darker, darker...

Then something grazes your back, and your heart leaps. It drags along, solid and rough, and suddenly the water around you darkens to black. A current's got ahold of you, pulling you along some sort of underwater tunnel, rapidly, a rock wall skimming your back here, your side there.

And then it drops off. You anticipate a fall. You close your eyes, and in an instant feel light on your eyelids and a cold burst of air on your face. You suck in a breath as the water carries you down, and you hit water again.

This time, you bob up to a surface.

As your heart rate calms, your blood quiets down in your ears, and your lungs reel in their slack, you take in where you've landed.

You're floating in another pond, in an open grotto. From the cave ceiling behind you symmetrically pour three waterfalls. A stream runs out before you through a cave entrance open to soft green, sweet air, a bright blue distant ocean, chirping birds and shuffling breeze.

And you haven't lost that item you picked up in the first pool. However it happened, you seem to be wearing it right now. It's a necklace - silver chain and border for the pendant, a polished black stone heart.

It's a present. Just for you, in fact.

But that something that you sensed she had waiting for you is still out there for you to find, here, at the bottom of that first Goddess Spring.

Welcome to Goddess Grotto!