When I was a child, I was afraid of blinking. I don’t know how it came to be and I don’t know when it ended, but I remember the fear. This terror that I would close my eyes for a split second and when I opened them there would be a monster there.

I had developed this strategy of covering my eyes with my hands before I blinked so that I may open them again in the safety of darkness. From there I could release my hands and regain my vision.

It had passed into memory.

Until now.

I felt my arms spasm like an electric shock was pulsing my muscles, lifting my hands to a face frozen in paralysis. Fingers speared across unfocused vision and clasped down against a hot forehead. Clammy palms pressed into eye sockets.

Eyelids fell, and blessed darkness returned.

The sound of a tongue whetting the lips of a mouth filled with too many teeth broke the peace.

And then the adrenaline rushed in, and my body felt fiery panic lance through it. I turned, without looking, and started blind running.

I ripped my hands away from my face and with a force of will and spasming neck muscles forced by eyes open.

I had almost sprinted off the cliff.

My sandals bit into the wide dirt path and averted disaster at the last second. Legs, heart, and ears pounded as I sent all my energy into pumping my muscles against the earth and away from the…thing.

My hearing consumed by the drumming of blood I couldn’t hear whether it was pursuing me. I dared not look back either. I could only focus on sending every ounce of energy into moving.

An eternity of a moment later and the ground started to shake, nearly sending me off the cliff again. My throat constricted and my vision tightened.

It was chasing me.

Adrenaline spiked again and what had initially been explosive but twitchy running escalated into a muscle-tearing sprint.

Legs burned with agony; it was a pleasant distraction compared to the fear gripping my head.

What was that thing? Blackened eyes, a toothy maw and red flesh skin had been all I could pick up before my brain shut down. That and it must have been over seven feet tall. It probably had legs to match.

It was going to catch me.

Even as my thoughts stuttered through panic ridden neuronal tissue, I could feel the tremors of earth behind me confirm my fears.

Thud.Thud.Thud.

To my left, a dense forest full of trip hazards. To my right, a cliff edge with a lethal drop. Ahead of me—

Thud.Thud.THUD.

I veered left, prayed to a god I didn’t believe in, and jumped into thick underbrush. I winced as something thorny tore into my sweatpants and bit skin.

My right foot landed squarely on pine covered dirt.

My left foot twisted inward against a gnarled root and my ankle snapped. White-hot pain seared through my leg.

The ground behind me exploded with the sound of a meteor hitting bedrock and I flinched uncontrollably.

But I didn’t stop to look. I couldn’t stop to look. I stumbled forward, desperately trying to maintain balance and speed before I could remember that my ankle was on fire.

I made it four steps.

Something heavy came down on my shoulder and I toppled to the ground. Pine needles dug into my face and my vision became woozy.

My neck felt the grasp of something meaty and calloused before my entire body was hoisted into the air like a doll. Then it started squeezing.

I tried to close my eyes and failed as the blood pressure built in my head. I could only flail in broken pain as the monster slowly turned me to face it.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

It was humanoid, in a sense. It had a recognizable nose and mouth, with elongated ears that might have fit on a fantasy elf scaled up in grotesqueness. Pitch black eyes and crooked shark teeth laid against red skin pulled taught beneath bulging muscles. It gripped a wooden club in one hand, and I could see blood – my blood – painting the tip.

For a moment I was reminded of the cozy D&D sessions during freshman year college. Ogres were what CR level? 2? Trolls? I could not remember.

And then the monster squeezed, and my nostalgia was suffocated by oxygen deprivation. My vision started turning black.

Things started to hurt more instead of less. The aches and pains all around my body came back like infected snake bites, pulsing to the beat of a still pumping heart. Every nerve ending was sparking its final goodbye, one last ditch effort to save my life.

One of the endings I did not recognize. A sharp stabbing pain in my waist.

Something in my lizard brain must have clicked, because the next moment my right hand was gripping the broken handle of my coffee cup and slashing it wildly in front of me.

The monster screamed in pain as ceramic edge met vulnerable eyes.

It dropped me to the ground, and all I could do was choke on precious air.

The monster roared in pain again and started thrashing its club wildly against the nearby trees.

I sat there, body burning alive with pain, and hoped it didn’t hit me.

I was lucky.

The monster’s shrieks of anger and pain ground down into whimpers of panic and fear that almost made me feel sympathy. I gave it my disgust instead as I slowly, silently crawled away.

Crawling on pine covered ground was easier said than done. But I did have the advantage of my life depending on it. What would on a normal day have been a painful annoyance of pine needles digging into skin was now pleasant numbness in comparison to the rest of my body.

Hand in front of hand, foot behind foot, I inched through the trees until the piteous cries of a monster lessened into silence.

I propped myself up against a tree and blacked out as the adrenaline faded.

***

When I woke up, I regretted it.

I hurt all over and couldn’t move without nerve endings screaming at me to stop.

Despite the pain, I was alive. For this, I was grateful.

For the experience, I was not.

I felt jarred. Like discovering friends were no friends at all. Except worse. Reality had betrayed me and left a stake through my body and head.

My synaptical meat wasn’t working. I could see the surrounding trees, the mountainous landscape. I could remember the monstrosity that had inflicted such pain on me. I could remember the sensation of slicing through vulnerable eyes, watching as they popped and cut beneath the shard of coffee cup.

I could see the ceramic blade now, clenched in a hand that I could barely recognize behind all the red dirt. When had it broken?

And yet, I couldn’t think beyond that. I couldn’t think about what this meant in a larger way. I knew I should be thinking about that, but my brain was stuck in a way it had never been before.

Any effort at abstract thought beyond a simple acknowledgement was immediately shorted to ground. Back to the present, back to the mountain, back to survival.

Which looked like it would be difficult.

The sun was edging closer to the western horizon. The sky was darkening ever so slightly. Or was that the blood loss? My cracked phone read 1:32 PM at 60% charge. I turned off the emergency contact polling.

Vague hopes from an earlier life drowned.

I needed water. Water and shelter.

I knew where I could find water, shelter could come later.

I tried moving and grit my teeth in agony. My left ankle was broken.

I looked around for anything that might help and found a fallen branch from a nearby tree. Could I make a brace? Unlikely.

I tried it as a cane and managed to stand up. The pine wood creaked ominously as it took the weight off my left leg.

I was situated on an incline, below me lay the remnants of the monster’s blind rampage, trees and blood strewn everywhere. The being in question was nowhere to be seen.

I started hobbling up the slope. I couldn’t afford to go back to a trail I now knew was inhabited by death.

The trees felt more real now, less like those in a national park and more like those in an untamed forest. If I died, they would feed their roots with my blood.

As I walked the block in my brain started to dissolve and with it came a deluge of panic, fear, and anger. The cocktail of emotion bubbled up from my chest and I was wracked with choking sobs.

I forced myself to stop after a paralyzing fear of being heard injected itself into my bloodstream.

I continued on, one hopping footstep at a time.

What had previously taken me a few minutes at a leisurely stroll took me an hour. By the time the river came into sight my body had become enflamed with aching pain, and what was likely infection.

There was an additional element to the pain as well. A feeling of brokenness that went beyond the snapped bone.

My body didn’t feel like it was fitting together properly. If I was a doctor I could probably put a name to the sensation, and I imagine having my shoulder caved in by some mountain troll’s club didn’t help, but it felt like I had aged thirty years in the course of my journey to the river.

It was not a pleasant feeling, at least the physical pain had the honesty of sensation behind it – not to mention I had twenty six years of proof that physical pain was generally temporary. This newer sensation felt more permanent.

I fell down at the water’s edge, my body grateful for the shallow bank and lack of sharp rock, and cleaned the dirt from my hands and face.

The icy water was a nice distraction from my feverish skin. I tried drinking a few handfuls and was rewarded by a wet cough flecked with blood.

I stared at my red-once-more hands grimly.

On some level I felt proud of myself. My life as a software engineer had not been a trial of intense adversity. I mean sure, there had been moments where I had experienced pain and sadness and fear, but nothing where I knew I was going to die if I didn’t take action.

This bit differently, it spoke to a part of me that I didn’t even know existed. Something primal.

Or maybe it was just the fear talking.

My hands shook.

In the distance, birds shrieked.

Something large emerged from the tree line within shouting distance.

It was the monster.