Reflexes took over. I thrust my spear into the earthen wall. I hung there, suspended between the surface and eternal darkness. The walls shifted, closing in, trying to crush me.
My heart pounded. Adrenaline surged.
I pushed off, using my knife and spear like climbing pitons. Fighting against an earth that wanted to swallow me alive.
Whoosh!
I hauled myself up. But the ground fractured right beneath my feet. Again. And again. As if the world itself rejected my very existence.
Rumble!
A massive fissure tore open beneath me. This time, there was no foothold. I was in free fall.
Flashes of lightning from above were my only illumination as I plummeted into the belly of the earth.
Thwack!
My spear arrested my descent just moments before I hit the bottom. My bones felt as though they were about to shatter.
I was at the bottom of a narrow crevasse. The earthen walls on either side began to close in. Like a set of jaws, chewing methodically.
In the gloom, illuminated only by the lightning flashing far above, I saw it.
Embedded in the mud of the trench floor... was an eye.
Not a biological eye. It was formed of earth, with a pulsating, crystalline pupil. It stared at me. Stared right into my soul.
The sensation hit me without warning. A primordial loneliness. Pure terror. The screams of thousands buried alive.
The walls were closing in. I had no time for philosophy.
I wedged my spear into the edge of the eye. And pried.
Crack!
A crystal the size of a football popped loose. I caught it.
The moment my bare skin made contact with the crystal's surface, the world stopped spinning.
No, it didn't stop. The world screamed.
An invisible shockwave slammed into my mind. It wasn't physical pain, but memories. Thousands of memories that weren't mine, forcing their way in through the pores of my hands.
"The rain... when will it stop..."
"It's gone! The rats ate everything!"
"Help! The snake got into the pens!"
My vision whited out. I was no longer in the narrow trench.
I was standing in the middle of a dying village. A torrential storm battered my face—not rain, but the tears of thousands. I saw shattered grain silos; inside was not the golden bounty of harvest, but a sea of black rats gnawing away at hope. The terror of starvation. The dread of plague.
In another corner, I saw an old guard dog. It barked in despair, trying to protect the livestock from snakes slithering through the mud, trying to drive away the rats, trying to hold back the storm. One head wasn't enough. It needed more eyes, more fangs to guard it all. Its absolute loyalty, combined with the sheer terror of failing its master, warped its body, splitting its neck into three.
That Cerberus... he was nothing but a terrified guard dog.
Then, the earth violently shook. Not a natural tremor, but a betrayal. The very soil they had tilled, the land they had bled for, was now opening its maw wide.
Screams. Unanswered prayers. The collective despair of farmers realizing that nature had turned against them.
That energy... their Willpower, saturated with terror, seeped into the soil. It mutated the rats into monsters, the snakes into leviathans, and the loyal hound into a nightmare.
"Gah!"
I snapped back to reality. I was panting, tears reflexively pooling in the corners of my eyes—not out of sorrow, but because my physical body simply couldn't contain an emotional overflow of that magnitude.
The crystal in my hands pulsed with heat. This wasn't a stone. It was the Heart of the Village, petrified by sheer terror.
Vertigo slammed into me. My body temperature spiked. Dehydration. Starvation. Agony. All of it blending into a singular cocktail of suffering.
I took a gulp from my waterskin. It tasted stale, but it grounded me.
The earthen walls above me were closing in faster now. The flashes of lightning from above had been reduced to a thin sliver.
My bones were shattered. There was no way I could climb out in this condition.