WRITING

I feel the need to share this with you to explain my total desertion from the company and my current isolation from the rest of the world. What I ask in trade for my candor here is that when my story is through, you forget my face and you forget whatever path led you to my door.

Understand, I am not a superstitious individual. If I had a day’s draw of ore for every night I was audience to some drunken miner rambling wide eyed about the cursed mines of the Palacido forest, I’d be retired in a golden tower above the cobbles of Verek square. Those stories never moved me. Not a step. I’d always been convinced that those deep miners used the stories of monsters and phantoms in an attempt to hide caches of riches they wanted to mine before the company got wise. It was a much more plausible explanation. 

Not that I’d ever descend into the mines past dusk, of course, but not out of fear of something supernatural. There are enough nocturnal dangers that lurk underground that one need not indulge weak minded lunacy as an excuse to avoid them. Even the things that never see daylight share a rhythm with the moon and the tides. But to the point, I tell you all this because if I were to happen upon myself in a tavern and hear my squalling, even having gone through this first hand, I would still disregard it. I was not, and still am not, a superstitious man, but the me who insists on his senses, if he is to be honest, must concede to tell of a thing that defies sense.

It all began with a tragedy terrifying enough on its own. Three of us were chasing a cascade of ore well beyond the last terminal of Bengalo’s chamber. The last plinth was some bit and several narrow tunnels behind us, leaving  our personal lanterns the only light to illuminate the shimmering promise of the waiting prize ahead. It wasn’t so much greed for riches as it was satisfaction in the thrill of the find, I guess. Even still, it wasn’t a yield we planned to register with the company, and as you might expect, we intentionally kept that deep excursion off record. It was ill conceived all the way around.

Of us, there were three. Saimer, Ornel, and me. Now, our impromptu partnership was quite strange. Neither of these muck rudders were friends. Not of mine, nor of each other’s. Saimer was a common gut grunt whose beast stew was too easily confused with his best coffee. Ornel was a fellow slack back, but rot lung from too many years spent breathing spores and dust and such forced him to stay shallow so that he was never a minute or two away from a surface breath, where as I was still in my prime and could be found most days deep prospecting. Had our paths crossed? Sure. We all knew each other passingly. It was a tight enough company on a small enough campaign. But could I have picked either out of a crowd? Could I tell you their surnames? Could I offer a single detail about the life of either beyond our shared vocation? No. I could not. Our pact came not from any preexisting relationship. It was all happenstance. 

On the very same day, three unrelated incidents occurred. Saimer had struck up a lunch conversation with some support architect who was cartographing the six arteries that begin at Bengalo’s chamber, and who had teased of the company’s promising haul to come. “Fourth channel, you’ll see,” the cartographer had confided, “You’ll know it by the hum.” Almost simultaneously, Ornel got in a pretty brutal skirmish with some scrappy young poult who wanted to slight him for the handicaps that now ailed him late in his career. While Saimer was making a mental map based on the cartographer’s generous and gratuitous disclosures, and while Ornel was finding that much of the physical fight left in the aged brawler had died long ago, I was summoned by the foreman and given an involuntary three day respite, without compensation, after my third offense of being caught hauling without a brace.

 

And half between the mid day and the sun down meal, at peak time for the company to be fully engaged and the barracks to be the most quiet, we three found ourselves there, together. I was chewing on a quiet contempt for our company’s leadership. Ornel had a bruised ego and was grappling with age related inadequacies. And Saimer had this unique, intriguing information with which he did not know what to do. You can reckon how pleasantries slowly evolved into whispered schemes. By dawn of the next day, we were repelling down the Hamishago well. By lunch, we three strangers had helped each other crawl through the twisted arteries beyond the final checkpoint of Bengalo’s chamber to the unexplored caves beyond. As the architect had promised, the fourth passage did hum if you strained hard enough. Or perhaps there was no hum at all and it was a mere product of our collective imagination. 

Not that there was much sense to any of it, but our order was also foolish. Saimer, with the least experience, led us. Maybe we found prudence in that he was the spindliest, and therefor could contort into the tighter spaces to evaluate the likelihood of our safe passage, but as he was most a cook that spent very little time in the mines, I had to orient him quite often. Ornel was last, and although we never would’ve said it aloud, all three of us knew that our pace was stunted every time the poor old man had to break to catch his breath. It wasn’t just his age that had him cobbled. It was also the deflation in realizing that his usefulness was just about spent, a fact which he no doubt hoped to challenge with one great haul. I kept between the two, struggling to keep up with Saimer’s nervous enthusiasm while waiting impatiently for Ornel’s lumbering frame to pull through the narrows.

I remember in one moment, marveling at the unnatural regularity of the pitted stalactites, so smoothed and slick that they looked organic. And then in the next moment, I remember falling. Suddenly, there was no ground. Without event, our sure footing disappeared and the gravity swallowed us before we heard the buckle of the rocks.

The collision below, however, was cacophonous. It would’ve been impossible to separate the sounds of the large falling debris from the three bodies finding the bottom. Especially in a moment of surprised panic, breaking rocks and shattering bones were sonic twins. 

I was fortunate enough to land on what felt to be a softer bed of moss or fungus, but even still my left hand exploded upon impact and the opposite knee popped out of joint. Reflexively, I arched into an inhuman shape and let out a beastly howl, but I choked on the settling dust and falling pebbles that scratched down my open throat. My two companions, the spindly cook and the disgraced old man, made no sound at all. My guess was that their landing had not been softened and their angle had not been as forgiving. 

This was every miner’s dread circumstance. I was alone, with neither party nor public record of my exploration of this cave’s vein. I was blind, far out of range of the nearest plinth, without any personal means of illumination. And I was more or less paralyzed, at the bottom of a cavity of unknown depth without any realistic ability to climb out.

My first instinct was surprisingly not panic. Instead, it was regret for a guarded life. I’d never married, nor even entertained interest in a romantic partner. I’d never fathered a child and had only fleeting relations with my surviving family. I’d never taken up formal study or apprenticed for any specialized skill. I didn’t have close friends. I really had never made a notable mark on the world or anyone in it. In my horrified delirium, I thought about this for some time. You see, these are the things that are important when you realize that death is inevitable. I would blame my stoic contemplation on shock if the recollection wasn’t so crystal clear to me now.

Perhaps, I thought, if I had forged meaningful relationships or commanded a presence among my peers, my absence would be noted and there might be at least some remote chance that someone would come looking for me. But lying there helpless and lame in that well of palpable black, I knew I had never been more than a strong back, and I would be missed no more than a dropped dining utensil in an aristocrat’s kitchen. 

Oh, sure. I began hollering at some point. I swear, I hollered at full volume until my vocal cords were calloused and bleeding. But honestly, I don’t think I was motivated by self preservation at that point. I think it was boredom, or maybe it was just the onset of mania. Mania would go a long way to explain the direction of the experience.

The first anomaly was the elastic nature of my voice’s echo. Initially, my cries reverberated as one would expect. While I hadn’t my eyes to gauge, anyone who has spent quality time in caves or mines begins to develop a sense for space using sonic reflections. Whether or not I was able to process it through my conscious mind, I could, at first, venture a calculated guess as to the size and shape of the cavity that would likely become my tomb. But as the hours stretched, the reverb suggested that the dimensions of the cave were actively changing. The echoes would lengthen, making the space feel as if it had grown. Then they would tighten, leaving the breath tight in my lungs. Before long, I was screaming just to hear the impossible phenomenon and trying to track any sort of pattern in the bizarre behavior of this cave.

I would estimate I passed out three or four times, but it could have been significantly more. I can not tell you how long I lay there. As a fever from my injuries took hold, my sense of time, and to my surprise space, fled as if they had no more use of me or my mangled form. It was upon waking from one of these blackouts that I became aware of sharing the space with something. It’s not that I heard it, at least not yet, and obviously I couldn’t see it. But I sensed it nonetheless. Perhaps it was a scent or a disturbance of the air, but I don’t remember noting any of these things. It was just an awareness. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been literally petrified. I could not move. I could not speak. I could not breathe. I’m sure at that point, I passed out again.

Here, the fever began to stitch my dream state with my waking awareness.

What were the stories of these mines after dark? What was the catalog of paranormal vagueries whispered about in taverns? Faces of lost miners catching in lamplight? The beckoning voices of departed loved ones? Fortunately for me, I had neither a lamp light with which to see nor any pronounced loved one who might beckon. But I was haunted all the same. My estranged brother, who to my knowledge was still very much alive, stole into my mind at one point, and a mental picture painted by my bobbing consciousness reflected in the black cowl of coming to. So strange was it, to register so vividly a sight in a dream to then see it visibly spill onto the canvas of that waking void. Only against a canvas of such black would such a thing be possible. The psychic charge from such abrasion between what I knew to be false and what I experienced doubtlessly only made the phantom more tangible. In the same manner that attempting to will yourself not to think a particular thought insures that you’re shackled to it, so was it with the specter of my alienated brother in that cave.

I entertained the apparition with pleasant conversation. Not about our falling out, nor about any familiar affairs. Mostly about the conditions of the cave. The odd way in which it reverberated. The growing humidity that cradled me as I made peace with what was to come. The ghostly projection of my delirium proposed and repeated an ultimatum that only made sense when measured by standards of dreams. In the typical condescending tone that had been so common of my older brother, he said that I could choose to succumb to the cave, or I could wake and share its wealth with the world. These weren’t his words verbatim, mind you. I’m not even sure he was speaking. In fact, I’m sure he was not speaking because I know he was not real. But these were competing instincts that the apparition of my brother offered in that senseless, metaphorical vernacular so common to the subconscious.  

The sudden awareness of an actual sound fully broke the spell. The introduction of a real external sense shattered the hallucination. It was subtle. It was the faintest drip. Not of something liquid, which would’ve made a very audible puh upon striking stone. No, this was the gloop of something gelatinous. It was a sick sort of sound, and it conjured images of drooling dogs or snail trails dripping from leaves or oozing honey. It’s the sort of sound one would never hear if not for almost complete sensory deprivation. I struggled to listen with an attempt to guess the size of the source, but with the room’s dimensions continuing to fluctuate in the blind blackness, I couldn’t even be certain I was hearing a thing at all.

Then came the haunting whine. It was very quiet. If you’ve ever been half asleep in bed and heard a morning mist change to the softest drizzle of rain, or if you’ve ever submitted to such quiet that you could hear the blood rushing through your ears, or if you’ve sat in a completely silent room until you heard that room’s natural voice, then you understand what I mean by quiet. There was a sound that was present, but in a way that one can not be entirely sure isn’t imagined. The thing that made it most notable, though, was that it seemed to cannibalize all other sounds. It was perplexing, but I knew that if I were to scream out again in that moment, this almost imperceptible hum would mask the scream into oblivion.  

Just when I had exerted every ounce of conscious focus I was capable of marshaling in order to define the sound, the thing in the dark made it’s presence known in the most undeniable way. The roar was triumphant and like nothing I’d ever heard. It was a short horn blast followed by a series of clucking chortles that sounded disturbingly similar to human chuckling. Again, my breath seized as my muscles drew in unparalleled terror. The grand thing was just a few few footfalls from my right hand. My only fortune was that I was too frightened to make even the slightest of sounds, and the thing seemed unaware of me despite its proximity.

There was an aural sensation that I could only appreciate by conjecturing through previous life experience, which conjured the perception of a fleshy body of massive proportion settling itself on the stone beside me. Once again, my brain balked at this because no creature I’d ever encountered or knew to exist was the proportion or makeup that was suggested by what my failing senses could interpret.

Now I’ve told you already that I’m not a superstitious man. And I swear that this is true. But I’m not too proud to admit that in that moment, I invoked the name of every Mystic and deity I could remember from childhood, all in a long string of private prayers, pleading with each entity that I succumb to my injuries before having to see the face or know the nature of the terrible thing sharing the cave.  

And look, you’ll never hear an agnostic like me argue that a prayer or promise to a god or conjurer has the ability to spark some miraculous spiritual intervention. However, I believe that the effects on one’s own psyche can be profound. It is, after all, how zealotry and fanaticism come to be. Not from authentic intervention by the divine, but by structured, psychic mirages built of coincidence and pattern recognition. But to the zealot, the causality is real. And I was, for a moment, a zealot. One of those innumerable prayers bolstered me to will away some of my temporary paralysis. The throbbing dullness that I’d settled into turned to fiery agony.  My left hand was little more than a hunk of misshapen clay. My right kneecap was backwards. But I wasn’t dead. I let the reintroduction of agony be a crutch rather than an impedance. If I could continue to count the number of excruciating pain points from the top of my head to the tip of my smallest toe, it was a sign that I was alive and that my body and brain were still communicating. Allowing myself to feel the pain was probably the best defense I had against the blooming madness.

With great care, I slowly began to explore my surroundings with my right hand. I was able to confirm that my broken body was not sprawled upon rock. The ground was, as I had inferred, much softer. But it did not feel like fungus, nor moss, nor anything one might naturally find on the floor of a cave. I couldn’t define it, but I was sure that it was too smooth to be either of those things. It was too pliable. 

A voice filled my head with my brother’s condescension, “Is the reason you fail to recognize this texture because it’s so unnaturally cold?”

Yes. That was exactly it. This familiar texture should have been warmer.

Like a charging bull whose angry path was inescapable, the realization accelerated and finally struck me before I could dodge. My mouth puckered as all of my saliva receded and my heart all but gave out.

Flesh. It was a thick blanket of human flesh that had prevented the painless charity of an instant death. Monster be damned, my voice took on the character of a banshee. The certainty that those screams would easily mark me and that I’d be devoured by my tomb’s native inhabitant, that I’d be digested and shat out as a gross layer of organic mush, could no longer counter the reflexive horror of it all. The raucous discord of my desperate cries masked any grotesque sound the thing may have made. But I was left unmolested as my screams settled into feverish chatters and I passed out again.

The next phantom to straddle the divide between the objectively real and a dream manifestation was Viccaro, the very first miner I knew to be lost in a collapse. We weren’t friendly. I didn’t know him well. But from what I remember, Viccaro was the spoiled kid of one of Verekai’s elite, sentenced by his father to toil a while in the mines as punishment for some trivial transgression. The privileged manner of discipline, which had mocked our station, became capital punishment for the boy, who presumably perished in a cave in. The straights in the city likely threw parades in his memory. He may have gotten a holiday for all I know. But not a tear was shed nor a meal skipped nor a pyre lit by any member of the company. The risk of such an end was a contract signed again and again with every step beyond the timber archways. No one entered who was not fully aware of this risk. The mines, while rich with ore, were also a boneyard.

“Or skin heap,” Viccaro laughed. His manner was pleasant for a kid who had died so unfairly. I tried explaining to him that he was dead. He was unimpressed with the revelation.  His retort was, “Perhaps, but I’m here.” Was either thing true? Was he dead? Was he there? I was very far beyond the capacity to identify the fantastic.

“Where are you, exactly?” I asked him without consciously providing the impulse for the asking. He shrugged and gestured to the soft, skin-like mass that cushioned my weight. And because I was now experiencing my tomb in that limbo state between sleep and wake, I could see it as clearly, and as irrationally, as I could see him.  And I saw it all so clearly. I lay broken on a blanket of liquified flesh; bones dissolved, blood drained, skin reconstituted into an ambiguous, organic mound. This wasn’t the end result of natural decay from those miners who had gotten lost and starved to death, or who had fallen to their death in more dramatic rock slides, or were bludgeoned by falling boulders. This was all the excretion of some massive, unknown creature. 

As with the phantom who had worn the guise of my estranged brother, the ghost that had taken the shape of the unfortunate, baby faced Viccaro posed an ultimatum. The lines of it were a bit cleaner coming from him, maybe because I was that much further along now. They were almost words. They were almost a true external stimulus. He said in his way, “Stay and become the cave or leave and spread its story.” It was the second time these broad terms were expressed. I had no idea how I could select either option. At this point, all this was happening to me, not through any influence I was exerting on the situation.

The visage of the boy was dragged back into its own black well. It was getting harder to tell, but probably that meant I was once again awake. As before, it was a real sensation, or what I thought to be a real sensation, that sifted the specter through the pores of logic and back in the recesses of my mind. The hum that had lured us into the mysterious fourth passage had grown. Even though it was still only a dull volume, it coated my ears deflecting all other sounds, making me as a deaf as I was blind. That’s not exactly right, but it’s the only way I can think to describe it. The thickness of the sound felt to be physically oozing into my ear canal and its sticky coating was preventing any other vibration from getting to the drums. The only sound that got through the field of the hum was that goopy shifting of a behemoth body. I had the sense it was upon me now, all around me, above me, in some way I could not process even underneath me. I felt enveloped in a closing mouth waiting for the sharp sting of long teeth. Not literally, you see, though the gradually increasing heat and humidity did also perhaps make it feel that way. I mean that on a psychic level, my entire being was caught in the maw. In a way, this thing was playfully gnawing on my five senses. Maybe the nectar of my aura was what sustained the thing, or at least was a pleasant confection, and it was spilling out of me as it took its first nibbles, dribbling down its proverbial chin. Those wasted psychic juices were manifesting in the cave as faces familiar to me.

There it was. From the incoherent tumble of dying thoughts were the Wraiths of Verekai hypothetically explained. Perhaps there was a real creature, or a species of real creature, that existed in that void. These creatures subsisted physically on whatever unfortunate organism fell into the blackness, but as creatures starved for sensory experience, also relished the flavor of a man’s consciousness and record of sensory experience. The floors and walls of this creature’s dominion were coated with an organic waste byproduct recognizable in disturbing familiarity as human skin, while the psychic crumbs of aura and memory were littered about from the thing’s desperate, sloppy, ravenous devouring.

It was either that insane explanation, or the explanation is that I’d gone insane. The thing that troubled me about this realization was that if it had any merit, it meant that the crumbs of consciousness I’d seen, those phantoms I’d recognized, were evidence my aura was already in the process of being chewed. I began to laugh, as I imagine anyone would. There was no sound to it, you see, thanks to the thing that was sucking out the sense, but I was still able to feel the futile heaves of my chest. I laughed harder. Because honestly, what else is there to do upon accepting an end of a dull, recluse life but to laugh with hopeless resignation.

That is why I surprised myself so when, as if controlled by external forces, I hurled my body through the dark and lunged with my good hand. It was a desperate, mechanical gesture, and the single thrust was a valiant act of the will over the physical. With my body in its shape, there was no hope for a second action, but that futile lunge was not fruitless. In that pitch black, my hand connected with some alien substance. It was viscous, and it caved a bit to the force of my open palm as if I’d taken a swing at a taught tarp hanging on a line. More accurately, it was the loose membrane of a low and powerful drum. And as it would with the membrane of a drum, the contact made a percussive roar. My hand, now wet with a sticky gel, ricocheted with a satisfying bounce and the force turned me away so that my back was to the thing. 

And as if I’d struck the jaw of a man in mid bite, the creature spat out the contents of his meal. The cave, all at once in a way that words can not adequately explain, took the shape of my childhood home, of my junior school, of the interior of a tent by a lake at the mouth of the Palacido Forest, of the mine barracks, of the sharp descent into the Hamishago well; every familiar place distorted and interwoven in senseless, dimensionless impressionism. Familiar phantoms scattered into the abstract seams of these psychic projections like somnaworms at a sudden spark of a bright light. My brother, Viccaro, so many others whose identity seemed to be less precise, or perhaps the memory of whom were more thoroughly chewed, fled from the boom of the drum, which I realized unsurprisingly contained the undertone of the cave’s natural hum.

With the swell of drum sound, the heat blossomed against my back and shoulders like a harsh sun on a summer noon. In the chaotic frenzy of hallucinations and the distortion of sights and sounds, that heat was the one tether that asserted itself as evidence that some part of this was real and not all just a consequence of a fractured mind.

Unlike a drum, the sound did not subside after the initial strike. It picked up new frequencies as if the cave itself was adding sympathetic vibrations. The colors of the haunted visions swirled and bled together and took on new beautiful shades that were not perceptible to the human eye, but that I could see in vivid reverence. The shapes and structures broke down into simpler geometry, which folded and bent at impossible angles. This all accelerated with the growing hum, now molded into solid fingers that violently pushed into my ears.

It took all of my nerve, and all of my will, but I was able to slowly ratchet my head until my eyes could look to the ceiling. In my direct vision, there was nothing to see. I was still oppressed by a black blanket. In my mind, that maddening flurry of sensory stimulation continued in its illogic. The disparity between the two turned my stomach and made it feel as if I were perpetually falling. But I persisted. And my persistence paid. I managed to see it in my peripheral, in that fringe place that straddles the boundary between true perception and unconscious interpretation. The thing. The monster. The beast that fed on the mind as well as the body. I saw it. Or rather, I experienced a true form of it in a way that can most accurately, if a bit imprecise, be described as having seen it.

Scale and exact shape were impossible to determine, you see, because the blackness of the space wasn’t allowing me to truly see anything. Vague, I know, but I was able to perceive a sight of it as much from the way the sound moved around it as I was from the impossible, semi-conscious visual in my periphery. I know. None of this makes any sense. It doesn’t now, and it didn’t then. I can only retell it as I experienced it. And this is how it went.

As well as I can describe, a giant eye levitated in the space. It was situated in a somewhat spherical frame, but one that bubbled and gyrated and stretched out of focused form. A thick layer of translucent mucus or goo slopped out of irregular pores. Its pupil was wide and reflective, and did not reflect the black of the room, but instead the false light from all of the abstract visions that fought for credence in my failing brain.

My awareness stunned it. Now, in retrospect, that makes a certain amount of sense. If this thing did subsist on our perceptions, and suddenly found that it was consuming a rare perception of itself, would the autosarcophagy be cause for pause and evaluation? Would the self-cannibalization be the equivalent to the pain of harshly biting one’s tongue? Which had disturbed the thing more, my open handed physical slap or forcing it to taste its own metaphysical blood? I had managed to affect it on both levels, in both of its realms of being.

Its temper literally flared upon recovering from the stunned state. The heat in the room became unbearable, and my own eyes began to burn. Closing them tightly did not help. 

A phantom of Saimer poked his head from the abstractions that continued to jumble behind my closed eyes. “It’s a matter of proper preparation, you see” he said with astonishing clarity. “You’re quite lean. That is to say, the meat on ya’s a bit stingy and stretched thin. Gotta bring out flavor.” It had all the science of nightmare. Was the ghost of the mining company’s incompetent cook suggesting that the beast was roasting my psyche? Were my perceptions more delectable when brought to the right temperature? And maybe most pressing of all questions, why was this realization, which felt oddly implicit, the least surprising, least disturbing part of the whole ordeal? Because this finally marked my full psychological collapse.
Then abruptly, amidst all of that, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The next sensation I became aware of was being lifted. This may have come after hours, or it may have been in the next moment. Eyes still closed, I tried to thrash against whatever malevolent thing was taking my body, but my injuries prevented much protest.

“I got ya,” said a voice, “I got ya kid.”

I opened my eyes. There was a trace of light in the room now, about as strong as what a lone personal lantern could produce. My right arm, the good arm, was thrown over a pair of broad, strong shoulders. It was Ornel.

My first instinct was still panic. But all five senses had returned, and I could smell his old man sweat and the pungency of his aged leather gear. This wasn’t another specter. This was material. 

My eyes darted around the room. The light was too faint to see much, but from my vantage, propped up by the senior miner, I found no direct evidence of a giant eye or mounds of skin. The evidence of my experience may have still been there, lurking just inside the mouths of the many black shadows, but there was nothing quite as sobering as the abrupt return to sanity.
Before my mind restarted the mechanisms that would have the capacity to construct proper questions, Ornel filled in a few holes to the narrative. “You and Saimer went down. I ain’t found him yet, but I expect from the look of you that twig is prolly splintered good. Maybe cracked in half. Have ya heard him? A cry? A breath?”

To which my mind responded, “A recipe for deep fried psyche?” Of course, I didn’t say that. I just shook my head and winced when my neck audibly cracked at the gesture.

The fall hadn’t taken all three of us. That’s what Ornel was saying. Just Saimer and I. He, who had struggled to keep up with us, was spared the fall, and had found a way down to mount a rescue.

“We’ll have to come back. More hands, more lights. It’s unnaturally dark down here.” Yes, he was right about that. “And that hum. Hypnotizes ya, don’t it?”

I was saved. All that I heard in each of his syllables was that I was saved. I then questioned the entire experience. Had any of it been real? Any of it at all? 

Of course not. That’s the obvious answer, right? It had been a fever dream brought on by increasing delirium. Dehydration, the injuries, a concussion, completely sensory deprivation, the psychological turmoil of impending death. Of course none of that obscene flight of reason had been true. I’d fallen into a deep, dark hole. I’d teetered on the knife’s edge. That very natural thing had been the impetus for the short acquaintance with the Wraiths of Verekai.

“Can ya hobble? There’s a tunnel up yon where the slope is a bit less intimidating. I fetch we can get ya up through. Crawling back through the narrows’ll be something ugly, but I feel I can get ya back to the barracks with at least a thread or two of life left still attached.” 

Ornel was the hero of this story, you see. That’s what I was thinking in that moment. He had began the day as a defeated expendable, long beyond proper retirement. He was ending the day saving my life. He found his purpose on this excursion. This could be a high note on which he could go out. An achievement to be celebrated. Now, maybe the same ignorant young poults that would have scoffed at his geriatric ineptitudes would sing songs and tell stories about his inspiring last valiant act in the mines west of Verekai.

And maybe it was the overwhelmingness of relief in me, but the smile that drove back the pain in my back and hand and leg and head came with some personal promise to myself to readdress my own handicaps from that moment forward. Maybe I needed to also do things worthy of songs sung and stories told. Maybe I needed to right the regrets that had occupied my mind when death had seemed so certain. Maybe that was the lesson I could take from the wraiths.  

As I craned to take one last glance back into the black of my tomb, I sent a dart of mental intent at the root of my psychosis. One more jab at the fantastic beast of my unconsciousness. I beat you, I thought. I escaped you.

So then, you may ask, why am I hiding in this unmarked hovel? What offset my newfound purpose? It was the gravity of the next words of my savior, Ornel. These words have haunted me every second of every hour of every day since, and I’m sure they will continue to haunt me until my death.

“Come on now,” he tugged me forward. His jovial inflection was innocent enough. “You can either stay a permanent fixture in this cave, or you can let me help you get outta here so you can tell your harrowing tale.”

My mind heard not words, but punctuation. I realized it wasn’t an ultimatum at all. It never had been. Ornel, if in fact it was Ornel, was unwittingly repeating the themes of the cave’s phantoms.

When we did return to the barracks, I never spoke a single world of what I experienced in the cave. I never warned a single person. In fact, I lay in the infirmary in catatonic silence until I was well enough to walk, and then I walked away into the woods. Ornel, though, had taken a search party of very experienced and capable miners, some of the same that had formerly ridiculed him for his age, back to the fourth tunnel beyond Bengalo’s chamber. To the tunnel with the almost, but not quite, imperceptible hum. As of my departure some days later, that search party had not yet returned.

​

If I have not been clear enough, I am not superstitious by nature. That said, the way I see it, there are only four possibilities. Four potential truths, fantastic as they may be.

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The first potential truth is the one most comforting. It is simply that I have gone insane, or that I suffered some temporary insanity. That none of my experience in the cave actually happened. That Ornel and the search party are lost to the unexplored mines like so many miners before them. That truth is tidy and practical. The pragmatist in me loves that explanation.

The second potential truth is more troubling by far. The second scenario is that the excursion to that place had not been Saimer’s first. That Saimer the cook had gone prior, alone or as part of a previously lost party, and after the unreal experience with what existed there, had been offered the same ultimatum. To stay and be devoured by the monster, or return to tell the story. That is to say, to find a way to lure more into the hungry mouth of the psychic beast. In that scenario, he had chosen the latter, and my party had been the intended catch.

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And the third potential truth - oh the third. The third potential truth is that I am not here telling the story at all. That I am, in all actuality, still in the tomb, unwittingly imagining all of this realistic fantasy into being, creating you the reader and the entire world you know to exist; all a manifestation from the perpetual wrestling that is pitting my conscious mind against a vivid dream state, harvested by, and then slowly digested in the belly of, the horrible monster.

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The fourth potential truth is most troubling of all. The fourth potential truth is that you, the reader, are trapped inside the beast. That you are concocting all of this fantasy, and that this story being told by this manifestation of me is your mind desperately trying to show you this terrible truth. And that the beast is lulling you into submission with assurances that it's all just a gratuitous work of escapist fantasy.

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