Skin pulled loose and taut, the dwarf’s flesh turned pools of mercury, its temperatures as hot, its surfaces bubbling and reflective, the dwarf’s consciousness detached and treading water. The dwarf himself could not completely understand the nature of what he underwent, but as was recorded: black enveloped the space beneath and above the dwarf, and all around him was the same. Color flickered in varying levels of opacity revealing worlds of lush spiraling jungles and oceans pulsating in reds and blues and yellows. The dwarf’s skin, meanwhile, stretched like taffy and billowed in directionless wind, and his beard spread across the dwarf like a virus and, to its end, the dwarf became his hair. Flesh separated, the dwarf felt in two worlds. And at once all of him snapped back together, as if a thin string connecting every tissue and cell jerked to bring him firm. Colors and worlds continued to blur in rapid succession until the dwarf collapsed to the ground on both knees, face after. He hit smooth stone, and all fell silent.

Summoning the resolve to open his eyes, an action seemingly ensnared to great weights, the dwarf beheld a vastness of dark in a massive cavern lit only by runes, glowing stalagmites and -tites, and what little slipped through seams in the earth far above. The dwarf understood himself to kneel in a near identical replica to that which he fled from elfen guards. And on the subject, the dwarf could not spy them anywhere. There seemed to lay no blood, no body, no violence but that which wreaked havoc across the dwarf in what felt to be an era but could not have been any longer than seven minutes.

Indeed, the replica the dwarf stood up in seemed made of all the same material he had seen next to Captain Locust’s quarters. The open room, for one side did not exist and merely let the dwarf loose upon the cave, was emerald. It glinted like none other. Oblong pillars jutted out in sporadic directions. They resembled the -mites and -tites, the dwarf considered, and some even stretched completely from floor to ceiling--a comical distance shorter than that of the cave’s equivalent. A pale blue settled along the ground. As the dwarf took in the dank atmosphere, he faced an extremely difficult question:

What had happened?

The dwarf had spied the concept smattered in ink across pulp fiction poised towards the future. The concept of what the dwarf identified quickly seemed an imaginative mental exercise for a growing farm boy. And now, bald and with beard, he had stood in one place and found himself quickly in another. But the dwarf fell quick to skepticism. Why hadn’t the elfs pursued? Could they? Why not? Waspig fluttered in the dwarf’s mind’s eye, his still racing heart beating for the animals he missed greatly, their care entrusted to a caphead. Was Funguayou really doing his best with Pistol, Bathiel and Cath, Blissey and Mustard, Joshua and Speedy? How could the dwarf even return if he wished to? And he wished to. The dwarf chided and reminded himself in the same breath over the foolishness of becoming involved in elfen affairs and knowing it was either this or herding his animals into the unknown. It was true the dwarf had ‘SAVING’ as a tactic. But the dwarf did not relish dying and was not going to tempt unforeseen dangers--in this sense, the dwarf really felt he’d been faced with no other choice but to bring the black, gold, and purple to the elfs. And everything would sort itself naturally, the dwarf admitted to himself regretfully, ashamed in his lack of foresight. And now the dwarf, in a sprawling cave of sporadic light, was alone. And he’d no apples.

It struck the dwarf strange his immediate impulse seemed to be crumpling where he stood and giving into tears--strange because he continued a feeling of disconnect. His body begged to fall and release itself, but the dwarf, in control, piloted automatically forward, careless but curious. Exiting the emerald chamber, the dwarf gazed. He identified all the same things he had a moment ago: the pillars of stone that emanated soft intermittent light, the sun’s efforts through slits in the ceiling, and runes, of course, dotting the mountainous roof. But a few further pulsating marks trailed along the wall to his left rounding dirt. And the dwarf knew he’d follow them--the dirt runes--but he felt indebted to beholding the great sight before him first: three massive sculpted heads of various sported beards grinned and bellowed in perpetuity. Thin blue strips wound around their faces flickering and framing the work of hard masonry, their beings a part of a great chiseled entrance decorated in unbelievable shapes and spirals. The dwarf seemed able to make out English but could pronounce nothing, could not even begin to sound the words out. Streams of water poured from their scalps and past their rock eyes, separating the three in falls to a pool beneath. A shore shot all the way around, and the middle connected the heads to an equally sculpted, decorated bridge. The dwarf become conscious of the feeling of having entered a museum, an activity so rarely performed he surprised himself at the connection. His father had brought him some years after his mother’s death. The exhibits were all themed on rocks. His father didn’t care about rocks, and he couldn’t recall then why he was brought at all. But some lessons remained. The dwarf knew emerald. And he recognized the carvings now in likeness of dwarf. And, the two balanced on the same thought, the dwarf recalled the words of Doctor Mallow.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The dwarf understood.

But resisting the impulse to enter the ruins, for the mass of webs confirmed such, the dwarf turned to follow the corner. Tucked between rock and the green gleaming chamber seemed a pitifully dug tunnel. The dwarf did not crawl in complete dark, the sloping earth around him occasionally giving way to glimpses of runes. Once having escaped the cramped conditions to the other side, the dwarf knelt slow and came to a seat with his rear soon firm on dirt. In this new room a single rune pulsed. It struck the dwarf with so strange a familiarity he could only shrug the sense off as a subtle connection between he and his helplessly assigned race. He looked away and could see nothing else. Curiously, the dwarf heard noise. It was muffled, and the dwarf brought his ear over to the rune to hear it hum if only to confirm his sanity. It was definitely noise but not from what glowed, he concluded. No, It came from above, almost piped straight down, the dwarf theorized. But it was utterly unintelligible, unidentifiable. Regardless, it being something, anything at all but the harsh silence of nothing, pleased the dwarf in a way that relaxed him and his body giving way to sudden rest...

As daylight’s warmth touched upon the dwarf’s face, his eyes came to adjust to a sight he considered unbelievable.

The dwarf was, undeniably, back in his hole.

Grooves of the crumbling walls slid down into the filthy pond coalesced at the bottom, the small widening nearly the same as that which had been made from ceiling collapse to which a newly made dwarf once sought cover beneath--and the warmth of the rune was revealed. The dwarf at once understood how Doctor Mallow could escape the steeple unnoticed, realized how the funguay had come to the elfen settlement. It must be two way, he thought. Going back, would guards on the other side imprison the dwarf, making he and the funguay cellmates proper? The dwarf could not be sure of Doetrieve’s intentions, especially if his own usefulness had been played. And in potentially crossing a boundary--entering the emerald and hurtling his consciousness to a seven minute void--the dwarf would not return to the elfs. Not without gathering his flock and wits first, he concluded. In between his goal, the massive hollowed out spear of rock and earth lay, ascended as it had once been, ventured down atop Waspig as well. Something within the dwarf set fire to a determination that brought his hands against the wall unthinkingly, as if hesitating to psych himself for the second climb would only nurture its strength and danger. In fact, the only thought the dwarf allowed himself was a line of simple logic: he would at least net EXP even if he did not really understand what use or difference it made.

So coincidental his level would leap from the eve of specifically twenty-nine it was, the dwarf hesitated in the heavy translucent black, several feet off the ground and hundreds more above. More than the thought, the message stalled him. More than EXP, the dwarf read something new.

“ATHLETICS SKILL INCREASED TO 30”

“ATHLETICS MILESTONE 1 REACHED”

“ADRENALINE TECHNIQUE APPLIED”