The stone walls slowly transformed, morphing into that of flesh and blood. They undulated gently, like the chest of a sleeping toddler after a night of excessive crying. Slightly green mucus licked off the walls’ many glands, falling in heaps and pooling around on the floor. When combined into a greater volume, the mucus glowed slightly allowing Dan to see deeper into the prison.

He had only just woken up, perplexed with the sudden gunk that dripped off his mucus-logged body. He shuddered, a cold wind echoing through his heart and spine. He dreaded the idea of coming back into the cave, especially past the double red doors that marked the cave’s true prize.

Dan, for what it was worth, kept his demeanor calm and collected. Idly he knew, in the back of his mind, that he should be nothing more than a crying mess right now. But something kept him from falling victim to the center point of his nightmares.

In fact, Dan felt like nothing was out of the ordinary. His stone cell had converted into a living being, one of madness and delusion, but that didn’t seem to bother him. If anything, he was more upset with the fact that his bed was now drenched in saliva or snot.

Weird, he thought. What was I doing before this?

The memory eluded Dan. He remembered earlier in the day, he remembered practicing magic with Sully, but what happened after that? What brought upon the mucus-cave’s interior?

With the urgency opposite of the situation, Dan walked through the door leading from his room out into the hallway. He paused, however, inspecting the bone structure that took the place of his once metal door. It was a distinctly off-white sheet of bone, sanded and smoothed like an ivory trophy after a big game hunt.

The smoothness astounded Dan, to the point that the door was all he could think about. His mind went back to his own home, the one on Earth and the one he had not stepped foot in since drifting onto this world. He could imagine the perfect spot for the door. He would use it as a centerpiece of his living room, rather than using it as its intended function.

Every one of his guests would be transfixed just like he was now. It would be his pride and joy, his reason to live, and would serve as a reminder of his social status. Others would want the door, for obvious reasons, but Dan would defend it with his life. No matter the number of bodies he would have to slaughter, no matter how much blood was spilled, the door was his and his alone.

As Dan looked for a way to remove the bone sheet from its hinges, a slug crept across his foot. The sudden sickly cold scared him, breaking his mind away from the door.

What? Why?

He felt the door encroach in his mind, causing him to react under duress. Like unraveling a spool of tape, Dan’s mind pushed away the decaying thoughts of ivory and lavish murder for a much simpler ideal. His core came to life with radiant bloom, cutting down the belittled tendrils of the door. Light formed in his palm, and for a mere thought, he was whole.

Why was he back in the cave? How did the prison turn into this? Why couldn’t he remember anything from moments before? Anxiety crashed into Dan with the force of a charging elephant. He stumbled, finding grip against the fleshy walls that surrounded him. The unfamiliar room started to bleed with red puss, mimicking his mind’s degradation.

Shutting his eyes tight, he pushed away any stray negative thought as he controlled his breathing. Then, something shifted. It was barely noticeable, like a black cat walking by in the dead of night. Slowly he opened his eyes, smiling at the situation.

“It's good to see you again, Spitty,” Dan said, patting the muscle-like wall.

He opened and closed his hand a few times before deciding to simply rub the mucus into his dry skin. What he wouldn’t go for some true lotion, cracked skin was the last thing Dan wanted. Maybe lavender or strawberry. Something fruity, he decided… or vanilla. Vanilla was always a good choice.

Nearly skipping down the hallway, Dan continued to think about lotions and scents. Something deep and disturbed pounded in the back of his mind, however. Every step he took, every corner he rounded, pushed him one moment of lucidity closer to escaping the madness.

“I have a headache, Spitty. Do you have any anti-inflammatories?” Dan’s voice was a breath of fresh air in the hellscape that was the muscle cave.

A low groan sounded as a hole opened along the floor. A porcelain podium raised, holding a small plastic cup with two red rounded pills and a small wax paper cut filled with crisp water. Dan didn’t hesitate, throwing back the pills and downing them with the provided water. Instantly he felt better, his headache disappearing under a blanket of afterthought.

Watching the podium revert back into the floor, Dan patted the wall again. “Thanks Spitty, you are the best!”

The hallway rumbled with praise.

Continuing forward, it took Dan no time at all to come across one of his resident-mates. The woman shared the prison cells with him, but was closer to the entrance while he was toward the back. However, he had never seen this woman. In fact, she was uniquely different, like him. She was human.

“Hello?” Dan asked. “Need some help?”

The woman had a shaved head and thick scars, the type accumulated from battle and war. Shrapnel marks and bullet holes marked her dark skin, while camouflaged clothes perfume a distant and primal animosity. This woman was a trained killer and would rather see herself dead than captured. Which was ironic, Dan thought. Because she was trapped partially into the muscle-wall.

“Who are you?” she asked in English, her tone surprised more than anything. “Who am I?”

“Dan, and I don’t know who you are. Never seen you before.”

“How did I get here? Did you stick me in here?”

“Nope, and no idea.”

The woman grit her teeth and seethed, “Are you going to get me out? Or do I have to claw my way out?”

Something in her tone caused Dan to pause. A spasm of misery rebounded against his mind, momentarily making him forget about lotion or pills. He felt a prick of fear, the kind reminiscent of the spiders or rabid dogs. He felt small, like helpless prey.

The woman saw his reaction, quickly amending her words, “Sorry. I’m just scared, I mean you no harm. Can you help me get unstuck?”

Darkness smothered Dan’s anxiety again, the feeling of fantasy invading the blanket. Something was off, he understood. But what?

“Spitty?” he asked the open air. “Can you release Aisha?”

The hallway rumbled before opening slightly around the militaristic woman. She pushed off the wall hard, launching herself to the floor. Groaning in pain, and covered in mucus, she idly looked at the set of dog tags around her neck.

“I’m Aisha… blood type O positive.”

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“Well then, Aisha blood type O positive, why are you here? I thought I was the only human,” Dan asked.

The sudden shock of words pulled the woman from distant thought. She looked at the man before her with different eyes, not having missed how the walls moved to his request. It was then she noticed the small orb of light hovering just above his head.

“What’s that?”

Dan traced her eyes. “Wow, would you look at that? What is that? A lightbulb?”

Aisha stared strangely at him. “What do you mean ‘only human?’”

“Well, Bob and George died already, leaving just me… until you? Who are you?”

Something sparked in her mind, “Association Troop Leader Aisha Lowe.”

Dan raised an eyebrow. “Association?”

This caused Aisha to stare at him with a sorrowful ire. “You are a civilian, aren’t you? Were you on the rig?”

He didn’t respond right away, something burrowed itself into the crux of his mind. It pushed into his consciousness, reminding him of what was going on. Dan’s demeanor changed in that instant, just as the orb of light above his head did.

He scurried back, away from Aisha while his orb intercepted the area between them. It flattened out, forming a protective thin wall. Dan’s heart pounded at this, memories of horror coming back to him. She was a creation of the madness, right? The mucus and fleshy hallway as well, right?

Dan grunted as dread tried to invade his mind. His core caught it, filtering reality back into view. The woman flicked, her expression just as fearful as his own. Blood fell from his nose, littering the glowing saliva droplets with crimson dye. Soon the hallway took to the new addition, bleeding from its own glands and turning the area infernal.

“Why are you here!?” Dan yelled, startling Aisha.

She crumbed to the floor, her own nose gushing with dreadful scorn. “I don’t know!” she yelled back, her voice choppy like her tongue was sliced in two.

Dan didn’t accept the answer, reforming the sheet of light into an orb. He caught the glowing ball and pushed it at her. She cowered from the threat like a child trying to escape punishment. She cried with flamboyant gestures, fear linked in her eyes and pain in her mind. A wash of pity came over Dan in that moment.

The moment only lasted a breath before the muscle floor ripped open like a broken zipper. Tentacles rushed from the hole, grabbing Aisha by the legs and yanking her into hell. She dug her nails into the slick ground, only finding despair at her fingertips. Her screams muffled away when the walls closed.

Glowing orb in hand, Dan stood petrified despite his raging core. Was Aisha a hallucination? Or was she real? Did he let someone die? Let alone a human?

His mind spun for discrepancies in the hallucination, looking for anything wrong. There was always something incorrect about the madness, right? He was always able to find his way back to reality. His core whispered that things were amiss, that everything he was seeing right now was a ruse. But why wasn’t the madness snapping away?

Dan ran.

He was suffocating, the fleshy walls were too much and too tight. He needed air, he needed to breathe something more than stinky stale cave-air. The prison’s entrance was through a set of smooth bone doors. They pulled at his attention, but a single flick of his core disregarded the ivory from even reaching his subconscious.

Frustration kept his feet moving, even after passing the doors. Where the encampment was supposed to open up under the protection of the dome, only muscle and sinew were present. His heart dropped with the familiar feeling of loneliness as insecure memories of the mucus cavern made a reappearance.

The roar of a monster kept him alive in that moment. The shock from suddenly burst eardrums was enough to cause Dan to regain a semblance of urgency. He dove behind the cover of tissue and bone, once a cobblestone wall.

Two monsters battled against one another, each swipe of their grotesque limbs sending shockwaves of nausea into Dan’s feeble stomach. Did he kill Aisha? Did he let her die, too afraid to intervene? What had he done?

His body tried to throw up, but nothing came out. Distantly, he formed a connection to this, knowing he had eaten recently. What was he doing before this again? Why couldn’t he remember? Dan felt close, like he was chiseling through the madness. The moment he saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he would be free, right? He would be free…

The world changed with the force of an earthquake. Monsters died in mere moments, muscular structures toppled, saliva dried up. Stone replaced flesh, torch light replaced the glow of the mucus. The massive frame of agony, cast in black and gold, the picture was a reminder of where Dan was reborn.

He stood at the base of the red double doors, breath shot and chest heaving. His vision blurred as the doors cracked open. A presence filled his mind and soul, telling him to return soon. A bloody hand, long and thin, reached through the gap. It reached for Dan as the madness started to unfold.

Dan’s eyes shot open, a figure standing over him like a mortician to a corpse. A dim light connected the figure to his head, a wrinkled hand outstretched just like the hand from the red doors.

He pushed out with a burst of magic, finding his core revel in the true reality. The sudden appearance of bright golden light made the figure stumble back. Dan didn’t let the opportunity go to waste, he jumped to his feet and let loose a battle cry. Gold intertwined along his thrusting palm, only to be blocked by a pure white block of light.

The familiar color refocused Dan’s mind, “Sully?” he asked, squinting through the bright lights.

“You were having a nightmare,” the old man said. “I did not mean to scare you.”

Both the gold and white light fizzled away, leaving the stone cell dark and scarce.

“I… don’t remember,”

“The madness, yes. It happens,” Sully said, stretching his old spine. “Come, we practice.”

The day night cycle within the eternally dark world was nothing short of familiarity. Around the encampment, the sickly green-red lights would dim and brighten at set intervals. Most, however, never experienced the dimming, as sleep was one of the most popular pastimes after the daily chores were finished.

Dan and Sully were walking through the encampment before the lights returned to full force, however a few residents were out and about. All were cultists and all were studying their respective fields of magic. When he thought about it, Dan had never seen his captors practice magic. He had only ever seen deadly attacks or healing light, never any research.

Seeing the beautiful colors of grandiose magic left an impression on him, causing his anxiety stemming from the nightmare to cease. Blues and greens traced through the air creating artificial clouds, purples and yellows mixed like water and oil before forming into statues of stone. A single silver beam ripped through the length of the camp, shattering the newly created statue with a direct hit.

Dan tried not to look at the cultist’s themselves, only finding their appearances to strike fear into his heart. Most, through the early morning dew and dimmed light, were obstructed, giving him ease of viewing. Some spellworks he committed to memory, creating subset goals about where he wanted to be with his proficiency and when.

He quickly found ideas springing to life, ways forward to progress or training methods he nor Sully had thought up. One particular cultist was slicing apart the blood forest’s logs, stripping the red wood like it was made of river clay. The cultist was making use of their magic, pushing obscene amounts of power into the edge of an axe. The metal blade glowed with soft teal but radiated death.

Pushing magic into objects was never on Dan’s forethought, but seeing it once opened his mind to new avenues of life. Could he heal like that? Could he find a powerful weapon using a similar concept? He and Sully had already decided that they would fight their way out of the camp when the time came, would a simple but powerful technique help in their quest?

Dan didn’t know nor did his older friend. But what was the harm in trying? They found the safe haven of the dead field and a mundane garden hoe. Hours went by as they tried different ideas. Each came up short, however, only pushing Dan to experiment more and more. Sully had long given up, citing that he already knew plenty of attack spells, one more was not necessary for him.

Day after day, week after week, Dan practiced with Sully giving out tips. It only took three days to learn the correct approach to make the garden tool sharper than steel. It was simpler than either of them cared to admit, which only soured Sully’s ego. Still, the human felt accomplished and set his sights on more ethereal magics.

It was rough sailing, however, the camp was getting harsher and harsher. The cultists had started preparing something by carving circles and runes into the dirt around the main living quarters. Poles with rotting meat that never seemed to stop bleeding were embedded into the ground. The drops of red caused the blood grass below to grow in violent weeds.

The cultists kept the grass from over growing and reaching the meat, however. They ground every last trimmed blade, creating a nasty spice they seasoned their dinners with. Dan had to admit it tasted good, although the knowledge of what he was eating grossed him out more often than not. Sully, in these moments, always pushed him to keep his strength up.

During all of this, the high priest was seen making rounds through the camp and mines. He inspected everyone with careful raw eyes, his extreme smile nowhere to be seen.

Dan didn’t fully understand what was going on, asking Sully as much. The elder only responded with vague non answers. Phrases like “cultist worries” or “preparations” were among the excuses, all pushing the human to ask more questions.

“Do not worry about them,” Sully finally said with a bit of snap. “They do not concern you, nor any of us slaves, in fact. Best let them be unless you want a beating.”

Dan took the hint and dropped it, refocusing on keeping the miners in tip-top shape. At least, the miners he could help. The madness was a brutal business.