I awaken in total darkness and excruciating pain. My first thought, floating slowly to the surface of my mind through fog of pain is a question.

"Am I dead?"

But breathing hurts far to much for me to be just imagining it. Thinking hurts too, so for a long moment I just lay there feeling the pain for an unknowable length of time. Eventually existence becomes more manageable. The pain is not lessened, not different, just more familiar. Slowly the fog that clouds my mind starts to clear and I begin to feel just what exactly about me hurts.

Breathing is first, both in the muscles in my core and the air my throat burn like fire, on the way in and on the way out. But I am breathing, shallow panting breaths as I fight for air. Then comes the ache in my bones, a deep seated all over kind of pain that forms a wall in the back of my mind. Complex thoughts cannot pierce that wall, all reason smothered by the pain. Nothing feels broken I think, but it is hard to be sure. I don't know that I have ever had this much feeling inside my bones before. Layered over that, exacerbated by any small movement, is the tightness in my muscles. Like a stretch taken too far, on every muscle at once. Lastly, my skin is raw and sensitive, like it has been scoured with sand. I can feel every stitch and seam in my clothes, all the lumps and buckles of my backpack where it lies underneath me. Even my eyes feel gritty.

I try to open my eyes, but the attempt sends jagged pains through my eye sockets. After a few breaths, as deep as I can manage through the pain, I try again. This time my eyes flutter open, revealing nothing at all except the stars bursting behind my eyes, a riot of color amid light that exists in my head alone. I try to focus, to make out anything through the pain, but there is only darkness above me. The attempt is to much for my poor abused brain and I black out once more.

….

When I regain consciousness I feel much better. Not good, but better. I can think more clearly now at least.

"What happened to me? " I ask myself. But I have no answer. It takes a moment for my memory to return, of the trap and the tiger. The ripple and the yank. A vague sensation of falling.

My second attempt to open my eyes goes much better than the first. I blink slowly up at the ceiling of a cave, rough limestone arching over my head. A dim watery light illuminates the space, rippling patterns of light and dark splashing on the walls.

"Augh" I groan as I sit up.

The ground underneath me is a thin dusting of sand covering a smooth slab of granite. The cave is large enough to fit a small house into, about thirty strides across, with a high ceiling. A trickle of water runs down one wall, pooling at the base before overflowing into another crack. The fine sand around me is streaked with the rust red of dried blood. In the center of the streaks, where they meet to form a drying puddle, lays the body of the tiger.

Now lit by the light of day, I notice it's color for the first time. Not the orange and white stripes of the normal Forest Tigers, or the black and gray stripes of the magic touched Shade Tigers we saw more rarely around the village. Instead, the beast bears stripes of black on deep blue, which seem to shift and slide in the light, still moving even in death. And it is dead, no breath in its lungs, no beat in its heart. My fathers heavy spear still plunged through its back, straight into its heart, staining the fur around the wound red.

I shrug my way out of my backpack with a wince, the get shakily to my feet. I can't seem to take my eyes of the tiger, and make a slow lap around it as the weight of what I have done starts to sink in. It feels powerful, even dead, with silver-blue teeth and claws, so much bigger in person than I had imagined. Even limp on the floor I can see the powerful muscles that once propelled the beast in life.

"It was just luck," I tell the tiger, "that killed you. Luck that saved me and killed you."

And it must have been luck, because the traps didn't work. Well they did as they were designed, but... I didn't design for this. I pull one of the wooden stakes out of the belly of the beast. What ever spell the tiger cast brought everything attached to in it along, including the splintered tips of the spikes from the pit. They barely punched through the hide of the beast before breaking, and the remaining lengths are comically under sized to reach anything vital. The log I dropped on its back was dislodged before the teleportation, and didn't make the trip with us, but an inspection of the wound reveals that it to failed to penetrate deep enough to reach much of anything serious.

Only the spear did what as it was supposed to. I have seen the same combination of traps punch fist sized holes in boar the size of cattle, and my father killed the biggest Shade Tiger our village has ever seen with the same setup. But this tiger is half again as large as the one I thought I would catch when I left my house, and an order of magnitude more durable. Judging by how much trouble the enchanted spear had penetrating, it must be a monster of the third Tier, an occurrence so rare in this area that only a few have been spotted in my parents lifetimes.

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"Did you come down from the mountains? " I wonder, "or grow up under the hunters noses, hiding in the shadows?"

But the corpse has no answer to my questions, so I turn to investigate the rest of the cave.

It appears to be the tigers den, littered with shards of bone and scraps of hide. Everything is dry and desiccated, no flesh or blood clinging to the bits, and no pieces large enough to identify the creatures they came from. The only other feature is the little pool, fed by a little stream emerges from one crack in the wall, and disappears into another.

It takes a moment for me to process what's wrong with the cave, a long pause to find the missing feature.

"Where is the entrance?" I ask aloud.

For a moment I think there isn't one, that the teleporting tigers last act was to doom us to a shared tomb, but that idea seems wrong somehow. After a moment I grasp the incongruity. The cave is lit, the air is fresh, there must be an opening somewhere. But that opening is not obvious. I take three laps of the cave looking high and low before I spot the first clue. The lighting is inconsistent.

I had noticed straight away that the lighting was weird, of course.

It seems to come from nowhere and everywhere, randomly changing in brightness and direction. Like the shadow of ripples at the bottom of a pond. Most of the variations are not huge or sharp, just a gradual fade from one patch to the next. Like the cave is lit by invisible torches, throwing shadows and sunbeams in every direction as you pass from one area to another. Bright rays of light appear from thin air, dappling the walls, ceiling, and floors on random directions. But there are a few patches that are notably different, with abrupt shifts in lighting from one step to the next.

There are three of these patches in total, spread equally around the cavern wall. The light in the first patch seems to come from a crack in the wall, just a hairline fracture in the stone. As I approach it wavers like a failing illusion, growing with every step until it is a handspan wide, then stopping abruptly. The glow of daylight is so close, yet I cannot fit though this gap. I cannot see through it either, the passage curving after just a few inches, but I can hear the sound of falling water, and feel the mist carried into the cave on the wind.

It cannot be far through this passage to the outside, but impossible to reach right now.

I move onto the next patch. Now that I know what to look for I spot the glowing crack immediately, barely wide enough for for a hair from a distance. As soon as I step into the light from the crack it snaps to the width of my hand. Unlike the other crack this one continues to grow as I approach, each step adding width until it is shoulder width across. As I step in to the opening the walls recede again this time several strides back, and now I can hear birdsong, and more water. One more step and I can see the mouth of the cave, a sandy shelf on the bank of a river. A waterfall churns up mist on my left, slamming down on to a pile of rocks, before running away from the cave as a wide rapid that eventually forms a creek. On my right there is a clear area from the base of the cliff the cave is set into, then an abrupt transition to an unfamiliar forest. Several of the trees are familiar to me, oaks and elm, maples and beaches, but many are totally foreign to me. The birds are also different, the familiar calls mixed with strange new notes. The unfamiliar sounds send a shiver down my spine.

Even the sun light is wrong somehow, bright enough, but lacking in warmth.

The impenetrable forest seems like a green wall, no gaps in the bushes except for the creek, and a well worn trail on its bank. I start to step out of the cave, then think better of it. I don't know where I am, or what else lives here. Better to be armed.

As I return to the tigers den the walls restore themselves, the illusion that masks the opening closing the gap back to the thin fracture that it was before.

It takes some effort to pull the spear out of the tiger's back, then a thorough scrub in the pool of water with some sand to get the blood off. Fortunately, it seems undamaged, and the time I was unconscious seem to have given it enough time to recharge its internal mana storage. Then I grab my bag and set out to get my bearings. The teleportation could not have taken me that far- even Third Tier monsters have limits - most likely into the Giants Wall Mountains. The elevation change would explain the different plants and birds. Even the weird sunlight might just be thin air.

I have never been up on the slopes of the mountains before, but I should be able to get out easily enough. All I have to do is get an idea of where in the mountains I am, then walk south, or downhill, until I was out of them and back in familiar territory. A few extra days on my trip, but with my hunt otherwise a flawless success.

The cave entrance was just as weird as before, growing as I approached, then shrinking behind me. When I looked at the back from the mouth of the cave, no trace of the den beyond could be seen, only a shallow tapering crack in the wall. It is not lit from this side, and if I didn't know it was there, or what was behind it, it would not have stood out.

This is a strange illusion, for that's for sure. I wonder if the tiger created it, or just found it by chance and decided to make its home here.

I sweep the tree line with my eyes as I step out, but if anything is watching me I cannot see it. Something still seems off about the forest, some instinctive inarticulable fear that I have not felt from the shadows under trees since I first learned to carry a weapon. In light of the strange feeling I decide not to explore to far into the woods, keeping to the cleared area at the base of the cliff. Instead I look for an alternate way to get my bearings.

I decide to try climbing the cliffs above the cave, hoping that some altitude will give some clues to my location. Before I start up I try to pick out an easy route up. The rough, dark stones at the bottom seem easy enough to climb, but the cliff is high. The stone lightens in color as it goes up, and smooths, until I am worried that I won't be able to find enough hand and foot holds to make it all the way to the top. At first I cannot see the top, so I step away from the cave a few strides and crane my neck back to follow the waterfall up with my eyes, just looking to get an idea of how high it falls from. Maybe there is a ledge or something there I can use as a vantage point, look over the trees.

"By the Gods Below..."