Up
You could feel it within the pit of your stomach. The drive to escape. One hand after the other, your dark claws dug deep into the crumbling earth around you. With the help of the tangle of green vines growing from the cave walls- possibly even roots- the clusters worked as appropriate footholds for the powerful digitigrade canine legs craning your body upwards like a well worked machine.
Before long, you found yourself clawing at scratchy grass around the final horizontal ledge it took for you to escape. Panting and with a sweaty moist tongue, which hung from your mouth as you regulated your body temperature, you looked around to get a better understanding of where you were at. To one side of you, it seemed like a huge half-buried underground facility. The hard white concrete jutted out from the red soils like an ugly bone pillar shooting into the earth like a deep-cutting knife.
You were taken aback by the sheer size of the four towering walls before you. Something about this seemed really off. The only other thing that would have trumped the size of the facility was an enormous span of trees before you. Thick vines and branches performing acrobatics as their limbs curved towards the light. Bright yellow dots danced on green and brown swathes of reddish earth. Their roots swirled like croissants beneath the dappled sunlight filtering through. This situation seemed a bit more appropriate for you.
When you were finished pondering your choices, the voices of your family members chanted their dogma into your subconscious.
“Remember. If you ever get lost, just stay in the same place until you’re found.” You blinked your eyes in confusion.
“Why did I remember that right now?” with a tilted head and an adorably confused expression on your face, you wondered if you could beat the old traditional tales from your past. For some reason, the first thing you ever could have known about this seemed to be the most right to you. Or maybe, that’s because you were told that?
Written by Driftingdragon on 18 December 2020
