A New Beginning

Like a Moth to an Open Flame

Backandforth, backandforth, back-forth-b-but alas, what seems straightforward rarely is. Past an outcrop concealing an ominously placed, long forgotten hatch, the devilishly wayward miss Fortuna spins her precariously capricious wheel of fate anew and, in consequence of the ill-fated combination of permeating rot and concealment by fresh snow, your seemingly straightforward path takes a sudden dive to the center of the earth, or so it seems. The ground disappears beneath your feet, revealing a mountainous abyss into which you fall. You tumble down a slope too steep for leverage, thwarting all attempts at finding handhold or footing, leaving you at the mercy of gravity like a dice of meat, marrow, and bone in miss Fortuna's hand.

You try not to think about impalement on stalagmites, a bat in your hair or the brutal, inescapable, imminent death, which surely awaits. You try, and miserably fail, to not think about broken bones, fragile bones, easily splintered into bits and pieces hard enough, sharp enough to spear tissue and vital organs. You protect your head and hope against hope to live, that, when the inexorable happens, it will be quick and painless.

Then all is still. You were falling and now all is still, a gap of nothingness in place of when you stopped falling and all became still. Complete darkness surrounds you; there's not as much as a dull shimmer from where you fell thought the ground. Conversely, where your eyes are, at present, unemployed, your nose is not. A reeking rot so intensely pervading it seems to be seeping into your every pore lingers in your airways. That, and dirt. A slimy substance is oozing out from underneath you, from something soft and mush, yet hard inside, its fetid effusions soaking your hair, your clothes, and smearing your fingers.

You stumble off the soggy, insalubrious mattress and crawl away from the pong of decay before your brain can start dwelling on what kind of mold-infested creature and for how long, refusing to concede the burgeoning taste of bile in your mouth and whether it's a consequence of the stench or rising alarm.

How long have you been out? Seconds or hours, it's impossible to tell but out of consciousness you were, of that you are sure, and a part of you almost wish you still were...

You try to stand. Everything hurts – palms, feet, knees, sore, pain, hurt, yet as luck would have it, you don't appear to have any broken limbs, though you suspect a bruised rib or two. The cadaver onto which you settled, the remains of a creature that died so you could live, had eased your fall enough for you to remain fairly unscathed, aside from a throbbing ache at all the places one is to expect bruises and lesions to appear succeeding a tumultuous roll into an abyss unseen, that is, pretty much everywhere.

A pang flares athwart your chest. You keel forward with a whimpering yell, which you in a sudden jab of fear the wrong person might hear – a precaution all in vain as muffled whimpers spatter through clenched lips and fanned-out fingers leeched onto your face, untamed and for want of control, whispered away by the cold, subterranean air.

Movement! Tickly, crawly, susurrus movement, to which you scurry left, right, left with panicky yelps. The pain from such rapid, jerking movement is excruciating, yet terror usurps dominance.

Your body writhes in the losing struggle to not fall victim of the most primal emotion there is. Panic claws at your throat, summoned by the tormenting amalgamation of alarm, solitude, and darkness, rendering each breath into a jagged, shallow gasp or impossible to contain yelp, mingled with the haphazard, directionless scurrying of hands and knees scraping against stone.

Your skin burns with alternating flashes of hot and cold. It's getting progressively harder to swallow, to breathe. Your chest aches with such vehemence you fear you are but one, uncontrolled wail from bursting a rib. The unmistakable taste of bile returns, a forewarning of what is to come. It was just your hair most likely, not an insect or... arachnid. The sand lobster is a desert-dweller, hence the appellation, inherently nocturnal, and like actual lobsters, they occupy a number of habitats, underground caves subsumed, the Arizona stinger, the most venomous, can grow up to three-point-fourteen inch–Don't. Think. About. It.