A Wind Swept Smile

Were I not lodged wrist deep in the wall, I’m fairly sure I would have once more lost my grip and fallen straight to hell.

As it was, my careful and deep breaths rapidly shifted to panicked hyperventilating until the edges of my vision began to fade to black. My whole world narrowed down to that single paragraph that screamed my damnation.

Blighted: Your very essence is infused with pestilence. While this soul deep corruption influences your mind towards darker pursuits and actions, it can also be brought to the surface to add the Blight to your magical and physical attacks. It corrupts your flesh and blood, making your every cell deadly to consume. Godsblood runs through your veins, and now it has noticed you. He is watching.

He is watching. My mind ran on overdrive, panic stricken delirium meshing with and grating against the haze of a fatigue too great to be called something as paltry as mere exhaustion. He is watching.

Who the fuck is He?!

The image that had twisted my drug addled nightmare rose unbidden to the surface of my thoughts; a great grey face, a kindly smile made from congealed suffering and relentless oppression, eyes so utterly devoid of emotion they made even me shudder at the void, an endless sea of grey and nothing else…

Is… is that who this mysterious He is? That face seemed to be a product of the grey and a dream formed of drugs and misery, so I can’t be certain how accurate an image of this eldritch horror I had (if such a sentiment can even be applied to entities of such a nature). Am I reading too deeply into drug trips and dreams? Is that face even related to this mysterious “He”? Even if it is, does it even matter? Can… whatever this thing is even be comprehended? Is it a god? Does such a term even apply? Can it apply? Is it too vast or too simple? Did I stare into the face of something so utterly alien to mortal minds that its very nature is beyond understanding?

Or am I just overestimating this thing? Has fear and exhaustion overwhelmed my rational thoughts and burnt out emotions such that I can’t wrap my rubbery mind around this thing?

A scowl stretched across my face and I snorted angrily. I don’t care. Whether this face and this He are one in the same or totally unrelated, whether this entity is god or demon or eldritch thought entity, it hardly matters. Whether some nightmare god from early man's deepest nightmares watches me or some concept embodied stalks my steps, it changes nothing. If this plausible entity is so powerful as to bend the world to its will, then it will make no difference whether I serve it willingly. If it lacks such power, then I need only ignore it.

Hopefully.

Expertly repressing the existential dread of having possibly drawn the gaze of something that should not be, I focused back on my immediate survival.

Compartmentalize. Repress. Ignore. The anthem of functional (enough) sanity.

In the time I had been panicking and rationalizing, my strength had not come back. Evidently, I managed to have an existential crisis and recover in less than ten minutes. Lovely.

Being barely able to move leaves one with a whole lot of nothing to do, save take deep breaths and try very hard not to think about the possibility of being an unknowing puppet to a malevolent entity and the high probability of dying at any moment. As someone who had lived quite awhile before I wound up here, I had a lot of experience ignoring crushing existential dread; distraction is key.

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Unfortunately, other than the pain and exhaustion, I had very little to focus on besides the far too knowable horrors of my potential future. I was alone in a melted tunnel with nothing but the pain in my everything, the faint breeze ruffling my fur, and the slowly spreading grey corruption of the stone around me to keep my mind away from smiling faces and endless voids.

Wait… Faint breeze ruffling my fur?

My face ached as muscles contracted, spreading my lips into a toothy parody of a smile. There is no wind underground unless the surface is near (or, apparently, an earthbound star is unleashed and starts sucking up all the oxygen). While the cool, strangely moist breeze was in and of itself pleasant on my scalded skin, what was even more so was its implications; the surface is near.

Now, intellectually, I always knew the surface wasn’t far; unless space was being warped, I hadn’t descended all that much over all. Even still, attempting to chew my way through several dozen meters of stone was an unappealing prospect at the best of times; adding monsters from the bleakest depths of a madman’s imaginations, tidal waves of flame consuming all oxygen, and the labyrinthe actively collapsing made it even less appetizing.

Feeling this cool air shift across my skin of its own volition however, told me that escape was within my grasp. At the end of this tunnel, there must be access to the surface to generate such currents without the influence of that pyromancer’s attention.

Although, I can’t actually be certain this breeze isn’t also being caused by the presumably still numerous fires beneath me…

No! Doubt leads to hesitance leads to death! If I’m to survive, I cannot allow my actions to be slowed by the spiritual rust of doubt! While questioning reality is useful and often necessary, here it will avail me nothing but misery, a weakened spirit, and a slowed body.

I do not have the luxury of weakness.

Even if the flames filling the tunnels below are what is drawing this air downward, this tunnel would have run out of oxygen long ago if it didn’t have a fresh source to draw upon. Besides, even if this doesn’t lead straight to the surface, digging through a few feet of stone is far easier than hundreds of them.

My course set and my energy beginning to creep back into me, I began once more dragging myself upwards. One paw was bereft of functional claws, so my upwards mobility was severely hampered even without the near total inability to move, but I made do.

Luckily, the spreading Blight along the walls made climbing much easier, if somewhat more hazardous. The Blighted stone was softer, almost like mud, but it still somehow retained its shape unless disturbed. This meant that even my clawless paw could find purchase in the grey mud, but it also meant that I needed to dig my legs in far deeper lest I dislodge the stone and plummet to my death.

Again.

Interestingly, the Blighted stone seemed almost… eager to draw me in. It didn’t actively pull on me, but it was very easy to push into and much harder to pull out of. While this made climbing somewhat harder, it also made taking breaks easier; I could simply push up against the wall and let it hold me there while I recuperated.

I’m sure that if I was susceptible to whatever the Blight does to living beings, I would be much, much more concerned with how… welcoming it is. Fortunately, I’m not. Apparently.

While I was no longer hampered by the supernatural exhaustion Hate Engine exacted for its services, I was still so far beyond tired that my eyelids felt like lead and my limbs seemed cast from uranium. Were it not for the pressing knowledge of just how dire a circumstance I may be in and the intense desire to get out of this fucking hell hole (if only to spite Kurzebald), I likely would have fallen asleep half buried in Blighted stone.

As is, it took me what felt like days but was probably only hours before something caused my delirious, almost wholly unseeing eyes to widen; light. There was faint light coming from up ahead; pale, watery, and hazy light but light nonetheless.

My dull expression shifted into a near manic grin, the false energy only available to the deliriously tired suffusing my beleaguered body as I saw vindication before me. I had seen this same hazy light before I fell, but the distraction of nearly falling to my death and the crushing weight of exhaustion had driven it from my thoughts. Now though, now I could truly appreciate what it meant.

While it is entirely possible that smoky light up ahead was coming from any number of sources other than the surface, any of them would at least mean something other than the certain doom the tunnels offered. Change isn’t always good, but that doesn’t make it always bad either.

I had enough personal experience with flame in my time to say that the light up ahead was not being produced by a raging firestorm, though I could not conclusively determine what actually was producing it. The mere fact it wasn’t a wall of fire coming to turn me to ash was enough to bolster my spirits regardless.

Time had lost all meaning for me down in that lightless abyss; seconds, hours, days, I can barely tell the difference. Still, I knew that I would see what the surface holds for me today. I don’t know if the face of this planet (if I’m even on a planet, for all I know I’m on an endless plane or some terrarium for super giants or something…) will be an improvement over the sewers and Kurzebald’s testing facility, but I do know that the alternative is burning to death.

When my options are “certain death” and “probably danger”, I’ll take danger every time. Grudgingly.