WE’VE BEEN FOURTEEN months in this underground city. Lydia and I were not wed that first night. I went to Jenny to ask her blessing, to ask if she’d approve a marriage between her daughter and me, and to suggest a wedding feast because I’d seen the letters on the plaque change before my eyes, from its fanged dew to wedding feast. She told me that Blake just proposed to Onita. There was already a ceremony planned, she said, and she was sure that my premonition concerned her friend Onita and not her daughter. She couldn’t bless our union, she told me, until I had fulfilled my destiny. I stayed away from Lydia for a while. The wedding feast lasted seven days and nights as the cloud remained stationed above the entrance. No packages of meat dropped that first evening and no loaves of bread fell the next morning. But the wedding celebration included gorging ourselves on the fresh fruits and vegetables we found below. The citizens of Proserpina didn’t deserve our nickname of cave-dwellers since their city was better than anything we had in Exodia.
