Falling headfirst, blind, and functionally paralyzed was not as terrifying as I expected. Not that I ever expected to be in such a situation, but the point stood. Rollercoasters and drop towers were scary because of the anticipation, the building tension. This was a simple zero to…whatever the acceleration due to gravity of this new world was.

If anything, the blindness and general incapacitation made it easier. I was not in control, and I couldn’t see an imminent threat, so my adrenal glands decided that no, now was not the time to spike my brain with fear juice.

I knew though, if I hit the ground at anything like the height of the trees I had seen, I would be dead.

With this knowledge, when the first whisper of sensation brushed against my forehead, I braced for impact.

But instead of slamming headfirst into forest floor my forehead continued a few feet into empty air and vice like arms – for they couldn’t be anything else – wrapped around my midsection as tightly as steel and brought me to a halt.

I squeaked the remaining air out of my windless lungs. It sounded vaguely like a dying accordion. Which promptly turned into fish like gasps as I was thrown over a broad shoulder and carried potato sack style.

“Zabrok.”

***

I feel like kidnapping is a fear that everyone has at one point or another. Maybe you’re the kid and your parents tell you not to talk to strangers because they might steal you away. Maybe you’re a parent and you’ve been hearing about seedy people wandering the neighborhood. Maybe you’re the seedy person and you know that if you can’t scrounge together fifty dollars the local mafia might start threatening your own family. And so on and so forth.

I remember when the world was still new to me and going outside into unexplored streets or neighborhoods always brought an anxiety of being taken. How part of my brain was always looking at nearby cars and trying to discern whether they were behaving like kidnappers.

I remember the fear fading when I learned – or maybe just intuited – that I was much more likely to be run over by said cars than offered drugged candy by them. I think my paranoia shifted then and the fear of kidnapping became reserved for travel in foreign lands.

This is all to say that what I was experiencing at the current moment could under some definitions be classified as a kidnapping, and it wasn’t at all what the movies made it seem like.

I mean, fair, generally speaking the victim isn’t already half-dead and trapped inside a spider’s cocoon of web. Nor was the experience such that if I hadn’t been kidnapped, I would likely be dead. Nor was the setting usually in another world.

I pondered for a second. This wasn’t a kidnapping so much as a rescue filtered through the eyes of a paranoid engineer who kept getting betrayed by his surroundings.

A hard shoulder knocked into my ribs as my not-kidnapper took a heavy step. I grunted. They grunted. We fell silent. And people say programmers are bad communicators.

Which reminded me that I need to start worrying again. The language my hopefully-rescuer spoke sounded like the guttural tongue I heard from the ogre bent on murdering me.

Now, I’m a big fan of not judging a species based on the actions of one goat-killer, but maybe I should consider my slightly less than five-star uber driver not having my best intentions at heart.

For example, what if they only saved me so they could kill me themselves. I already had one example of power in return for sacrificial murder.

Assuming I even got the chance to die to sacrificial murder. I was still poisoned. The numbness had spread to my neck in the time between my fall and wherever I was now. Based on the sounds of the waterfall growing distant I wagered we were going deeper into the valley.

Thankfully I wasn’t haven’t trouble breathing, sans the occasional shoulder check. Maybe the poison was just meant to paralyze, not kill.

With my luck it was only meant to paralyze, but I would die anyway. It’s not like anesthesia isn’t incredibly dangerous anyway.

I focused on breathing and trying not to hyper focus on every hitch in my breath as a sign of impending suffocation.

***

I couldn’t tell how fast we were moving, nor how long had passed, but by the time we stopped I no longer heard the crash of the waterfall.

In fact, I only knew we stopped because my ever so gentle host dropped me onto the ground with zero a preamble. I was reacquainted with the sensation of wind leaving my lungs and the small panic of never getting it back. My optimistic parts told me that this was simply a sign of my savior spending all their energy on rescuing me, having nothing left over for compassion. My pessimistic parts told me that predators care little for the comfort of their prey.

Regardless, I was invested in accelerating my removal from the spider’s claustrophobic web. Having my face – nose in particular – slap up against the tacky spider poison human spit concoction for the better part of our traveling had only been tolerable because I knew I was escaping from something worse. Now though, it was unbearable.

It's like how you need to pee that much harder the closer you are to the toilet.

“Mmmph.” I pleaded.

“Mabaj.”

For a moment I hallucinated that I heard ‘my bad’ and felt a chuckle bubble up from my chest and get stuck in my numb mouth. It was fun imagining my captor-rescuer as a guilty-looking ogre who perhaps just didn’t understand the fragility of the human experience and was only just now realizing what a poor host they had been.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

My fantasy stopped when I heard metal leave its sheath. Maybe being inside the stronger-than-steel spider cocoon was okay, now that I thought about it.

A whistle imagined to the tune of a fast-moving blade filled the air. I checked myself for missing limbs and panicked when I couldn’t feel my legs…or arms, or face…

Right, I wasn’t exactly going to be able to tell.

I wonder if I should try praying to the thing that took my phone. Maybe I could ask for a one-way ticket back to Earth and off this crazy train. I wasn’t sure what I could give that would be worth such a deal, but maybe it could be negotiated?

On the other hand, I had no idea what might happen if I called upon a god without a so-called tribute. The presence I felt during my impromptu Abraham cosplay did not inspire feelings of charity. Ye olde adage of ‘if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold’ came to mind.

My ravings were interrupted by something I was not expecting to hear.

Sobbing.

Soft, choking cries of grief.

***

I listened to my rescuer cry. I didn’t keep track of how long, nor did my thoughts wander.

Somehow it felt disrespectful to do anything but listen.

And when their sobs turned into muted sniffles punctuated by an extremely loud blowing of the nose, I noticed that I felt less anxious in general.

Maybe it was the sympathy brewing in my heart for an unknown person I had never seen, nor spoken to. Maybe it was an expression of emotion that so far, I had yet to feel through myself. Maybe it was the fact that I had been allowed to witness such vulnerability despite being a stranger. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome.

Regardless, thoughts of calling upon a predatory god vanished. I will wait for my judgment at the hands of something I know has a heart.

I didn’t have to wait long before the swiftness of metal once more sang, this time terminated by a slit of relative light across my vision. One slit became two and then the rest of the web simply fell apart around me.

I was free.

I blinked, stars filled my vision and for a moment I worried that I had suffered brain damage. But no, my sight didn’t swim, the stars were crisp, sparkling, and painted beautifully across a nighttime –

Oh, so this is what a sky without light pollution looks like. It was beautiful enough to capture my attention for a good two seconds before I realized there was something else in my vision. Something big.

“Lokra sek fra?”

The giant spoke and I swore I felt the ground vibrate.

“Mmm-mmph.” I managed. Numb tongue and lips do that to you. For a brief insane moment, I felt Deja vu and a memory of being at my dentist’s office flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t too far off I suppose, lying down on their torture chairs, interrogating me while simultaneously stabbing me with local anesthetic.

This wasn’t that bad in comparison.

The giant knelt before me, and I was struck by the image of a tree falling to the ground. Except nobody yelled ‘timber’ and the tree stopped a couple feet off forest floor.

Warm light – presumably from a fire nearby – flickered against muscle, hide, and a massive sword before finally resting on a face chiseled from stone.

He, or perhaps a very muscular she, was gratifyingly, blessedly, human. Assumedly anyway. A human scaled up by two. They must have been at least ten feet tall.

“Lokra sek fra?”

I blinked empathically.

The giant stared down at me with chilly eyes. I couldn’t discern color without more light, but there was an edge to them that made my stomach drop; or more accurately – given my current horizontal recess – travel parallel to the ground away from my head.

The giant interrupted my musings on whether the sensation of a stomach dropping was isotropic or not by reaching out with a massive hand and poking me in the cheek.

I couldn’t feel anything, but my eyeballs provided me with enough phantom sensation to transport me back to the dentist’s office. And here is Dr. Colossal performing cheek palpitations. Do you feel that Edgar? No? Good, time to drill.

Thankfully this giant didn’t have a drill. They did however pull out what looked like a waterskin, open my mouth, and pour…something in.

I felt nothing for half a second. Then, pain.

Alcohol burned, this felt like a novice welder soldering super-heated lead to my esophagus. This was worse than the dentist. Maybe if the dentist kept running the drill against an exposed nerve that traveled through my entire digestive track.

I noticed I was screaming an instant later and that the pain was gone an instant more. In its place I felt sore, hot, and thirsty. And I could feel my legs again.

I stopped screaming and started gasping for much needed air, belatedly realizing that the giant had covered my mouth with their hand during my interpretive song and dance of drinking lava.

I thrashed wildly for a few seconds trying and failing to get the massive hand off me before the giant finally released me, glaring down at me with a silent warning in the process.

I gasped like a fish but otherwise held my voice.

For a few long minutes I simply lay there and caught my breath, staring alternatively between the beautiful night sky and the less than beautiful glowering giant. Although to be fair, if they smiled, I could see them having a certain appeal. It was hard to imagine.

The starry night sky on the other hand, now that I had a chance to truly take it in, was magical.

The stars themselves seemed larger, closer than their Earthly counterparts and filled the dark tapestry upon which they lay with wide swathes of patterns, swirls, and color. I had never seen so much blue, red, and everything in between except in pictures taken by telescopes infinitely more powerful than the human eye. A part of me wondered what it meant, why it differed from even the non-light-polluted Earthly banality I was used to. But I was having trouble putting thoughts together that weren’t synonyms of ‘wow’, so it gave up.

The giant, however, did not. It knelt over me, still a good five feet or so, and glared down at me as if I were personally offending them.

“Lokra sek fra?”

I met eyes and shrugged my shoulders.

“I don’t understand.”

It felt comforting to hear my own voice again. Especially in conversation. Not that this was much in the way of conversation. Still – it was nice. A reminder that I was a human and not a meat puppet trying to survive solely by the power of copious amounts of adrenal juices.

I sat up under the watchful eye of my primitive interlocutor and looked at my surroundings.

Or tried to, the moment I moved my neck my back froze up in sudden agony originating just below my right shoulder. I fell on my side gasping again.

“La jarnak la grolza kafra helja.”

I focused on breathing. It was beginning to be my favorite activity in this new world. Maybe if I returned to Earth, I could start up a yoga class. And probably do a disservice to yoga in the process. Maybe meditation would be more up my alley.

I flinched in surprise as I felt liquid pour down my back, then tense in preparation for agony. None came. Moving gingerly, I looked back. The giant was pouring what looked like water down my exposed back. It looked down at me with something like sympathy. If stones could be sympathetic.

“Mek nufra drasta sek.”

The giant finished cleaning my back, and assumedly the bite mark left by the spider, before taking out a cloth like material from a pouch hanging on their side. Moving with a gentleness I had not expected – nor encountered thus far – the giant wrapped my right shoulder with the cloth and held it in place with a string of plant looking fiber.

I wasn’t sure whether to be scared or grateful for the care I had received. A part of me thought that the giant’s tone of voice sounded like it was reserved only for patients in hospice. Or whatever this world’s equivalent was. The doomed.

I settled on grateful and nodded to the giant. This time moving conscientiously so as not to trigger another nervous system revolution.

“Thank you.”

The giant simply stared at me.

I returned my gaze to the surroundings and found myself disappointed in comparison to the night sky. There was no magical view for me to feast my eyes upon. Just trees, darkness, and a small campfire.

But as my sight adjusted to the light, I noticed beyond the kneeling giant and campfire three more webbed cocoons.

Three cocoons and a body.