“We must get moving! Quickly!” Orndorf shuffled towards the flesh tunnel on the other end of the chamber, his light following behind him. Carl stood frozen in place, half-shrouded in shadows.

“Well? Aren’t you coming?” asked the wizard, beckoning Carl to get a move on. He didn’t trust the wizard — he didn’t even like him very much — but he didn’t like being alone in the dark very much either. After a bit of negotiating, he convinced his feet to move forward towards Orndorf and the tunnel.

The tunnel did not seem to be made of the same material as the chamber they were just in. It was smooth and symmetrical, and smelled less sour, but more like an unwashed horse.

“Where are we, exactly?” Carl asked. “And where are we going?”

“To answer both of your questions at once, I am not sure,” Orndorf said cheerfully. “I believe we are somewhere in the small intestines, but that does not tell us much.”

“And what is your plan to un-shrink Father?”

“Still working on that. For now, the plan is to walk this way until something happens.”

Carl rubbed his temples in a vain attempt to fight off a headache. Orndorf glanced at him and chuckled.

“It’s a good plan,” the wizard insisted. “It works more often than you might think.”

“If you say so,” Carl sighed. It wasn’t as if he could go anywhere else, so he continued to follow the strange old man. He acted as if he knew where he was going, almost skipping onward like they were frolicking through a meadow. He was shockingly spry for his apparent age, Carl thought, and more jovial than any of the old men he had ever met before.

“What if we just punctured him? Had him deflate?” Carl asked, mostly making conversation to drown out the sounds of his squelching feet.

“If you want to cover the world in a nice skin blanket, sure, we could do that, though it would probably irritate a lot of people — the ones that lived through it, at least,” Orndorf said. “No, magic got us into this mess, and magic will have to get us out of this mess.”

“Do you know a shrinking spell?”

“Not a spell, no. I tried a shrinking spell once, but it turned out to actually be a stinking spell — and I don’t think we need any more of that. A shrinking tincture is simple business though, if we can gather the necessary ingredients.”

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“So is that where we’re headed then? To gather the ingredients?”

“Yes, I suppose we are. The liver’s got to be around here somewhere, right?”

Orndorf stopped walking and planted his staff firmly into the ground. He chanted something in a low monotone that Carl couldn’t understand. Carl wondered if he should take cover somewhere, for when whatever the wizard was trying inevitably backfired, but there was nowhere to go, so instead he closed his eyes and hoped for the best.

The ground began to undulate beneath them like the ocean on a calm day. Orndorf’s chants grew louder, and the entire tunnel began to wobble violently and vibrate under Carl’s feet.

“What are you doing?! Stop before you kill us both!” Carl yelled, but Orndorf gave no indication that he was listening. A particularly large jolt of the intestines knocked Carl over, and the wobbling had become too wild for him to get back on his feet. He watched from the ground in horror as Orndorf continued to chant, slipping and sliding on his hands and knees in a desperate attempt to keep his balance, until the wizard finally stopped and the wobbling stopped with him.

The tunnel was still intact, and so was Carl, much to his surprise.

“What in the hell was that?!” Carl shouted as he scrambled back onto his feet.

“Apologies,” Orndorf said. “Once you brought up the stinking— I mean shrinking tincture, I realized exactly where we needed to go — the liver. According to my calculations, it’s somewhere north-westerly of here. We can get most of what we need there.”

“It’s something to go on, I suppose,” Carl said.

“That’s the spirit!” Orndorf looked up at the light floating above their heads. “Lighty, point us north-westerly, please!” He tapped the orb with his staff, and it turned into an arrow that pointed at the ceiling.

“Onwards and upwards!”

Carl sighed. They had been going downwards for what felt like hours, and now they had to turn back and return to where they were.

He thought. Orndorf had other plans.

The wizard pointed his staff at the ceiling again and muttered something that caused the end of the staff to glow like a cigar. He pressed it against the ceiling. It sizzled and popped in a way that made Carl regrettably hungry — he hadn’t had his breakfast that morning, after all. The smell of sweaty ham filled the tunnel as Orndorf burned a disc of Father’s intestines out of the ceiling, and it came falling to the ground with a heavy splat.

“Alright, up you go.” Orndorf said, crouching down and cupping his hands to give Carl a boost. Carl planted his foot in the wizard’s hands, and he boosted him up and through the hole. Once he was up, Carl reached into the hole and helped the wizard walk up the wall and through the hole himself.

Carl was relieved to be out of the claustrophobic tunnel, and to have a goal in mind, but he was struck by the sheer size of the open cavern they now found themselves in. He couldn’t see the end of it, and the light of Father’s belly was now just a faint orange glow, like the dying embers of a fire. It wouldn’t be too long before the light was completely gone, he thought. There was no telling just how large Father had become, but it was clear that the journey to the liver would be a long one.

He looked up at the glowing skin, hoping to see its last moments of light before they started their trek — and something started to form on the skin. At first, it looked like it was ripping, like Father had already reached critical mass, but the skin didn’t come apart, and the rips in the skin formed letters, words, that glowed more brightly than the rest of the skin around it. Three words were written on Father’s skin.

DON’T TRUST HIM