the Swords

I first remember how I felt, I felt excited, geeked out on ancient discovery, on exploration, I love ruins.  I went to find them, a familiar place I have been to a lot, hiking and camping, rocks and juniper, and big cat prints.  Fresh scat, oooo-scary, should have packed my 9mm.  I found a well, sort of.  Near sandstone stacked for ancient people to hide behind, a circular stack of similar rock, and as dry as it was out here, the inner walls of this circle were damp.  I got in, and slid down accidently.  I was glad I had my molle backpack to take the scraping all the way down as I tried to wedge myself to a stop with my boots and back.  It didn't happen, the bricks were slippery, then the shaft opened into darkness suddenly.  My heart fluttered and the adrenalin flushed my face of life it felt.  I reached below me like a cat jumping off a roof, and splashed into water.  I was in shock, and paddled best I could up, I hate water.  When I surfaced and took a breath, there was light, dim but inherent.  There was an edge of the water I could climb up, onto a stone path with stone walls and a stone ceiling, all dark and damp, with moss growing between the bricks, all man-made.  It didn't smell like a sewer, it smelled like a cave, natural.  The water was clean, yet I found I had bled into it.  Somehow I received two gaping gashes on my left thigh, and I opened my pack to fashion a bandage.  I used my headband and all the contents of a tiny medikit I had.  It hurt, I couldn't walk. I looked up the shaft I fell through, it was dark.  I used a flashlight, and remember thinking "I'm so glad I bought this because it doesn't use batteries", my worst fear is getting lost in a cave.  The expanse echoed as I cranked the lever on my flashlight to get it charged up.  As I directed the light into the shaft, there were two shiny objects partway up, stuck in the walls.  I took out my monoculars, and in the dream everything seemed to get bigger, the stone path became cavernous and the shaft became a monolithic feature.  I used my monoculars to get a look at the reflective objects, and found they were two swords, handles stuck between the bricks, blades readied to slice anything that fell through, like a leg.  If dreams reflect inner struggle, I must be doing something wrong.  My mind wasn't set on my wounds, on a path out, even on fear of dark waters or starvation or loneliness.  I wanted those swords, as if my world became nothing but dark waters and slippery bricks, nothing to strive for except those pieces of treasure or death, and I begun obsessively thinking about how to get them.  That's all I remember.