In a Cave
You slid your body through some caverns and ended up in some large cave systems. Slowly, you inched further and further, taking note of every other twist and turn you had made as you progressed.
Slowly, you discovered what seemed to be history as you explored fossils and more of those bodies you had remembered seeing when you first got here.
“Wait a minute.” You thought to yourself. “These strange creatures are here too.” You wondered what it could have meant. Some of them had seemed spliced together, but they were all kinds of strange species you had never discovered before. Somehow, you had an urge to dig them up and examine them up on the surface but you knew that as deep as you were, being able to explore this area with any efficiency, you would need a lot more than what you have.
After you had gotten tired, you turned back around in the slender tunnel and started moving yourself back out the way you came. For a while, you had been able to orient yourself properly, remembering the winding tunnels as you returned. But before long, something seemed different, it was almost as though the tunnels underneath here were moving and changing. You were coming across all kinds of crazy bends and turns that you didn’t seem to remember. “Am I going the right way? Maybe I made a wrong turn?” You thought to yourself, but you were sure, as you thought back that you had remembered your way down.
For your whole life, you were always good with navigation and you had never made mistakes before. Something seemed weird and different about what was going on. Before long, you started to feel an ominous presence around you. You couldn’t tell if it was something in the tunnels with you or if it was something just outside in the open ocean through thick hard layers of ice.
Regardless, you had been holding your breath for a long time now- almost long enough for you to forget how long it had been. You were feeling light headed. Your heart started to race and you swear you could have seen something large floating around you just outside the ice. You turned around and around, doubling back but at some point it just felt like you were stuck in a small capsule of ice. You pressed on every which wall, but you could tell you were completely surrounded and there was no way out.
It started to get really cold, as though the water around you were freezing in real time. You could feel your lungs about to explode with air and right in that moment you felt the ice hugging tightly around you capturing everything in whether you liked it or not. The last body part you could move was your eyes and when you realized that, you knew you had been frozen solid somehow.
Through the ice on the outside, you see a dark face floating in front of you. It’s toothy grin struck fear into your heart. Their ivory coned spikes scrapped against the ice for a moment and you could hear what you thought was laughing as your last senses started to fade just before your game abruptly reset.
Written by Drifting Dragon on 25 September 2023
The end (for now)