A skull, yellowed, fractured, and humanoid, stared up at me from the frothy bank of the waterfall pool. It would have blended in to the surrounding white if I hadn’t been about to sip from its eye sockets.

For a moment I simply stayed frozen, one knee touching soft dirt and my attention not wavering from the skull. I think in immediate retrospect I thought it might attack me. The magical morning and afternoon had disillusioned me to assumptions of safety.

After a few long seconds of relative peace I took a breath.

A skull. Right. Looks human. That’s…good or bad? Good if it means other – hopefully peaceful – humans were around here, bad if it means something nearby was going to eat me.

I considered inspecting the skull more intimately to see what I could learn, but found my natural inclination towards handling dead things was not quite up to par. Today I learned.

In fact, I don’t think I’m going to be sipping out of this pool of water anymore.

I cleared my dry throat and stood up. Maybe I could get water straight from the waterfall? I looked at the crashing volumes of white skeptically.

Maybe not that either.

This…limited my options. I didn’t know the exact science of water contamination, but I would wager finding clean water downstream of the dead body infused pool wasn’t going to be likely.

Although maybe it didn’t matter. I had proof that near death body regeneration was possible if you sacrificed…something…to an assumed deity. Maybe if I caught some rabbits I could trade them in for a parasite body cleanse.

Assumptions were going to kill me.

I walked around the pool to the edge closest to the waterfall, looking for more skulls, and thinking about what to do.

I did not find skulls, but I did find thalassophobia.

The pool, of what wasn’t obscured by white froth, was deep. Or at the very least it was black and impenetrable. Glimpses of void between white rapids did not fill me with confidence.

I decided to test my fear by finding a long branch at least twice as tall as me and gently lowering it into a calmer section of pool.

I didn’t find a bottom.

Nor did I retain my stick. I told myself it was just the current that had torn the branch away from me. The current at twelve feet of depth.

In the end, some mysteries are best left unsolved.

Initialization encountered a fatal error and must be restarted.

ERROR_CODE 45: MEMORY_NEXUS_OVERLOAD

1%...2%...3%...

Oh right, you.

I finished my halfhearted investigations when I felt the sun break through the trees above and kiss my neck. I no longer had my phone to check the time, but I couldn’t have spent more than fifteen minutes here. The heat reminded me that I needed to find shelter. Especially now that I was lacking a shirt, the exposure during the night would kill me.

Assuming climate worked the same here that it did on Earth.

Rather than follow the modest stream flowing out of the pool – which now that I thought about it, also didn’t make sense, where did all the water go? – I decided to walk alongside the cliff face. Maybe I could find an uninhabited cave to rough it during the night.

After about two error messages worth of hiking, I realized I wasn’t going to get very far. Even with my sandals, without which I wouldn’t have gotten more than a minute, the terrain was just too rough.

Jagged rock, deep fissures, and fragile looking shale looked like they were conspiring to impale, trip, and cover me in tons of rock before the day was over. It made for a dangerously beautiful sight, like the cliff was doing literal battle against the valley, but it made for poor shelter.

I tried going the opposite direction to the same effect. The few caves I did see were either too high up to reach, or angled such that falling into and never leaving was a real concern.

Four more error messages later and I returned to the waterfall pool.

At which point I was rewarded with my tenth error message post divine encounter.

Initialization encountered a fatal error and has exceeded automatic retry attempts. Administrator escalation is unavailable.

Manual retries available: 1.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

ERROR_CODE 45: MEMORY_NEXUS_OVERLOAD

Well, that’s cool. I wondered if it was possible to soft lock myself in whatever hellscape this was, simulation or not.

Based on my naïve guess of the error message being the equivalent of ‘need more RAM’ I wasn’t sure it was going away any time soon.

After all, the nearest BestBuy was an entire universe or three down the street. Amazon had good shipping, but not that good.

I chuckled to myself, sat down on a log near the pool, and felt the hysterical panic rise in my chest.

Before the full body shakes arrived a glint in the trees captured my attention.

I looked up, expecting to find the sun reflecting off wet leaves, and instead found strands of…web?

I should have realized by this point that my lack of spatial awareness was going to get me killed. It was something I intellectually understood but was clearly not making enough effort to change. I am not sure why, maybe because being in my head was more emotionally comfortable than facing reality.

Alas, the universe or its cousin had great comedic timing, the moment I noticed the web was also the moment when something large landed on my back and stung me.

Blackness.

***

I woke up feeling numb and miserable. There was fear too, muted by confusion, dizziness, and a growing tedium towards being knocked unconscious.

I was hanging upside down.

Cocooned in what I could only image was spider web.

Thankfully I was not an arachnophobe, otherwise I would have been panicking to the beat of an imminent heart attack. As it were I was only panicking towards a mental break instead.

Hanging upside down is not a pleasant experience. I had done enough handstands in my life to know that. Add in chest constriction and the inability to move my arms and legs and I was guaranteeing a weekly therapist visit for the rest of my life.

I also couldn’t see, assumedly due to spider web covering my eyes but I wasn’t ruling out being blind as a result of what I was imagining as some giant spider pumping me with venom. Make that a bi-weekly therapist visit.

I tried to move and failed. The sensation was close to that of an arm falling asleep, except applied to the entirety of my body. Prickling sensations ran up and down my torso and through my legs.

I focused on my fingers and found mild success in moving my index finger on my right hand. Everything else either too numb to give sensory feedback, or just blocked off completed.

Great.

I continued to articulate my finger hoping that I was not in immediate danger of being eaten.

It was an interesting experience when considered from a part of me that had no sense of imminent mortality. My numbness to sensation and emotion were in a perfect balance so as to continue doing my likely useless task. Any more fear in the system and I would have a panic attack, any less and I wouldn’t see the point.

I observed this with clinical detachment until sensation spread from my pointer finger to the rest of my right hand. It was around this time that the vision of blackness defined itself more clearly as webbing against my now moving eyelids. Based on the intensity – or lack thereof – of light through the web I wagered it was nighttime. Or perhaps I was simply stashed away in some dark cave.

Happy thoughts.

My hearing was also returning and with it a sharp uptick in my anxiety levels. I could not be sure whether I was hearing the soft pitter patter of water droplets against leaves, or the footsteps of giant spiders preparing to sink their fangs into me.

If I started having a panic attack now, it was over.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Plan. What could I do.

I needed to see where I was first, even if I somehow got loose of my trappings, if I ended up falling to the forest floor head first that was just as good as dead.

If I still had my broken coffee mug handle I might have been able to cut some of the webbing away from my face, but I had lost it – presumably in the river above. Which now that I thought about, I could still vaguely hear the crash of water in the distance. The familiarity felt reassuring.

Poking the webbing with my right hand yielded little results. The material was tough, flexible, and tacky. I could not get enough leverage to split the webbing with my fingers. Maybe if my fingernails were a couple inches longer.

Maybe where keratin had failed, enamel would succeed.

Opening my mouth and articulating my jaw took a few minutes to work into. It felt like I was at the dentist under local anesthesia.

Nonetheless, I managed to bite into the webbing successfully. It tasted bitter and chemical.

And even beneath the full power of my molars I felt nothing give.

Fuck.

I guess it was to be expected. I recalled stories of spider silk having a tensile strength greater than steel back on Earth. And that was from Earth spiders, who knew what the material properties of giant magical spiders might be.

I chewed on the webbing regardless. Maybe the introduction of saliva would soften it up.

As the web grew moist with my spit I felt a sensation I wasn’t expecting originating in my chest and consuming my neck and head.

Drowning.

It was instinctual, primal. I jerked my head back and my body spasmed in panic. I tried to move my hands up to do something, anything, but they got stuck in the web between my head and chest. The panic rose and an unconscious keening sound arose in my chest. My legs thrashed, my neck twisted, my vision tunneled.

“Zabrok.” Said a voice.

The surprise froze me.

“La grolza nufra fra.” The voice was nearby, maybe to my left and behind. It was softer, whisper quiet.

“H-hello? Are y-you there?” My own voice sounded panicked and thready. That would make sense. I think I just accidentally waterboarded myself. My lips were feeling tingly. Maybe I was poisoned too.

Silence.

Panic returned. Was I hallucinating now?

“Hello? P-please h-help me.”

“Zabrok, la grolza nufra lyska sek” The voice, clearer now, sounded frustrated.

The response relieved me, despite not understanding what was said. I felt my body relax into webbing and angled my head so as not to run my face up against my earlier mistake. There was someone else out there, maybe helping me, maybe not. But they were there. And they were frustrated. I was a little bit past frustrated, but the sentiment was nice regardless.

I felt a bit loopy.

“Th-that’s n-n-nice. H-hey d-do you th-think you ca-can get –”

“Shhhhh.” The voice was past frustration now. I felt seen.

“Oh! Shhhhh! Y-y-es. I w-will b-be q –”

I will be quiet. Right, stop being self-defeating Edgar. I shut up. My entire jaw was growing numb anyway. Which was concerning. And unfair. Why would the web be poisonous? That was just evolutionary overkill. I wondered if evolution existed here. I mean probably right? Why not? Although if evolution was a thing, the existence of goats implied a very similar evolutionary tree to that of Earth. Which seemed…unlikely? I wasn’t sure. My assumptions were probably wrong. Maybe a spider’s web selected for poison because captured beings tended to converge on the idea of eating their way out? Why not just select for stronger venom in the first place? Which now that I thought about was also kind of strange. Poison and venom just didn’t happen in nature? Right? Rarely? The part of me that I trusted with science nodded emphatically. Why would a creature need both?

I thought about the fauna I had seen thus far. If blood crazed ogres were the norm then maybe breaking out of a web was actually common? Maybe the poison augmented the venom by providing coverage for higher body weight?

My thoughts felt satisfying. My face felt numb. My legs felt prickly and my head pounded with blood. I couldn’t feel my back.

Well, guess I die now.

A whistle of speed split the air. The web shivered around me. And then I was falling.

“Kujra mek sek nufra gredan.”