Ray awoke breathlessly gasping for air.

Nausea, restlessness, ringing ears and a terrible-terrible headache assaulted him right after. He shifted on his unusually hard bed, fell to the ground, got on his knees scraping them against —surprisingly— stones and retched in vain. The next few minutes blurred through his tumbling vision as he tried to breathe, for the room was blasphemously warm.

Hissing through his lips after brushing his hand over the back of his head, Ray stood up with jelly legs. His hand came away sticky from his head, giving an alarming reason to his headache. Ignoring the thought of being hurt, he stumbled forward in his half asleep-half awake state in search of the wall to turn the lights on. His room was humid, too warm and absolutely dark — just like how he hated waking up. The dark he didn’t hate so much; it was the stupid heat which had him concerned. He had fallen asleep in the middle of the winter, with the forecast of a storm; there was no reason for the climate to turn so hot suddenly. Not that he wouldn’t have liked a bit of relief from the cold. The room temperature, however, was just too much; he was sweating enough to drench even his shorts, which upon inspection he found out to be missing and replaced by a kilt or a skirt of some kind. His clothes weren’t the only thing missing though; the wall he had been trying to bump into was also still out of his reach, and he had taken more than enough steps to scale his whole house.

Understanding that there were more than a few things of concern, Ray decided it was time to have a look at his surroundings, however nauseating the look might be. His surroundings were dark, but there was still some light bouncing off the wet gleaming stones which disappeared further into the darkness, making it recognizable that he wasn’t in his room.

“Where—“He trailed off looking at the high ceiling of his cave-like dwelling. He was in an underground hollow of some sort, where water dripped from the ceiling and light entered through a single, but large opening in the center. It was either cloudy outside or there was no moon because there wasn’t much light to work with; that was a serious cause of worry.

He looked back at the bed he had fallen from and found it to be a ledge running across the cave wall.

My Knife—

The foreign and dangerous thought passed through Ray’s head and he hesitatingly searched around upon the dark ledge, only to come back up with a dagger wrapped in a leather case. Its one side was crusted in red, possibly his blood. A worried swipe of hand on the ledge revealed that the whole piece of stone was covered in a sludge of clotting-dried blood, making his liveliness a miracle and a reason for his headache and weakness.

Ray stood there in silence with his hand stretched in front of his face then ran for the ground, retching once again in vain he passed out. Sometime later, he woke up again feeling absolutely parched and exhausted but normal in other ways. His headache was shallower than before but still a pestering bugger at the back of his mind. Night had given way to day and wildlife was at full boon outside — at least it sounded as such. Ignoring the scenery around, he crawled to the nearby puddle, drove his head straight into the cold water and started sucking huge mouthfuls. Brought his head out of the puddle absolutely stocked and out of breath but wide awake, and went to drink more water but this time in a more conservative manner. The rippling water slowly settled as he sipped in small amounts, reflecting a face with big black eyes and tanned manly face on its surface, making him chock and back away in fright.

That wasn’t his face!

“Who?” he said, turning around, but saw no one standing beside him; a quick look around provided no further information either, for the stone hollow was empty of any other presence beside his.

As if the waking up all alone, in a strange place, and underground wasn’t hard enough, that unknown hillbilly face in the water had him on his toes. Was I kidnapped? Or is this some sort of a prank? But why would anyone kidnap me? Such thoughts passed through his mind as he looked around with his ears perked for any signs of disturbance. Although there was no one else there, he had seen that face with his own eyes. It had been there in the water. He may be scared and mentally vulnerable, but he wasn’t losing his mind yet. There was another possibility — one even more absurd and impossible than being kidnapped and along the line of being the tale of some fictional story; a possibility that the face he had seen was his.

Ray scoffed at the absurdity of his idea and waved it off smiling; until the smile froze on his face and he waved his hand in front of his eyes and went off screaming.

“HOLY SHIT, WHAT HAPPENED TO MY HAND?” He yelled out, holding his right wrist with his left hand —with the fingers all spread— and started screaming while backing away upon understanding that those big, bulky, and hairy hands were his. If it wasn’t for the pulsating pain from the back of his head, which turned his outraged scream into a subdued hiss, he might have rambled on and on until he was either too tired to continue or had something interrupted him; like the hushed rattling which had rang out in the background once or twice between his booming echoes.

He only noticed the rattling when its source got closer to him, and it sure as hell managed to make him jump. By the time he came to a stop with his back to the ledge wall, he held the blood crusted knife in his right hand with its leather case set off. Obviously, he didn’t mean anything by the knife, for even he couldn’t understand why he had rushed toward it and was currently on his haunches with the knife pointed toward the cause of his distress: a rattlesnake coiled upon itself just a few feet from his last position.

They both stared at each other: one questioning and the other pleading. Their staredown continued until a flicker of light from something stabbed into the stone wall across the hollow got Ray’s attention; of course, a rattle from the snake quickly had his attention back —so prideful— but even the snake at hand couldn’t win him back over completely. His eyes went back and forth between the snake and the wall, spending more time agonizing over the flicker than the snake. Fortunately, the snake soon lost interest in him and slithered away after flicking its split tongue at him once.

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“What? Now I am not worth your time anymore?” he said with a raised brow then hiccupped at the heavy rumbling voice which had risen out of his throat, covered his mouth with his hands and mumbled apologies for the snake to keep going, for it had stopped to look back — possibly because of the sudden release of tension from Ray who inversely also understood the snakes action as an understanding on its part.

The snake soon climbed up the wall and left him alone through the opening in the ceiling, giving him a false sense of security which quickly waned away after being tested by his hunger and weakness. With weakness returned his gullibility and he found himself thinking about his situation. Where was he? How had he arrived there? Things like that. No matter what he did, he always ended up thinking about the face he had seen in the puddle. He was starting to believe that due to some magical coincidence he had traveled dimensions and changed bodies with a non-human being. However much he gloated and cursed his luck, Ray didn’t check out the puddle to find out the truth, because it scared him.

For all that mattered, he was an adult at seventeen years of age, but also one with not much experience in the ways of a real adult, for he had come from a sheltered place and one healthy family: one not rich by any means but not poor either. His biggest feats of excitement included finally confessing to his crush and kissing her, a family vacation to the mountains where he had gotten lost and found his way back alone, and drinking a glass of cheap liquor. He had taken a bus to his school and was getting ready for his first day of college when this happened; he was here, in the middle of nowhere, stuck in a foreign body, hungry and alone, with no idea how to survive. And he was devastated inside.

It was only for the flickering light which stole his attention every now and then that he couldn’t spend time gloating. In the middle of a sealed hollow, completely trapped with no way out, one’s mind finds the most unusual things to keep the attention off the troubles at hand. Paying attention to the flickering was his minds way of coping with his nervousness, so he stood up —Pestered by the thought of checking it out— and went for it.

The flicker, he soon found out, was the result of light being reflected by a golden gem which was shallowly embedded in the wall. Now, who can say they wouldn’t feel greedy upon chancing upon a natural gem of unrecognizable worth? So, yes, Ray got excited and picked up a stone to free the gem from the wall. Some crust fell off from around the gem and he melted upon seeing its revealed size being bigger than a swollen grape. The gem was smooth to his eye and polished to boot, though crusted with a layer of hardened minerals which was already cracking and scraping off, making it a souvenir left behind or forgotten by someone.

Ray tried to pull it out of the wall but it was too tightly fitted in the wall or the wall had come to grow around it, making it impossible to get it without going through the stone wall first. It was either one or the other. It couldn’t be the latter because the gem wasn’t raw, giving weight to it being lost by someone too rich to care about a single glittering stone.

Anyways, with the task came excitement and Ray got busy trying to get the gem out of the wall. He forgot his weakness and hunger trying to get the gem. He almost lusted after it with a desire which had come unbidden and suddenly. There was a voice in the back of his mind, telling him something was very wrong here, but he blocked it behind a cage of shallow reason and ignored it. Fortunately or unfortunately, it wasn’t really stone in which the gem was embedded, but a layer of hardened minerals which although had a stone like structure was actually very brittle. A few weak blows and the gem loosened inside the cavity.

He pounded the wall near the gem and opened a hole big enough to pick it up, but the gem refused to budge, making him put his right leg against the wall and pull with strength beyond anything he had ever produced. A large crack opened perpendicular to the gem; and when he gave the gem a jerk, the whole portion of the wall near the gem exploded outwards at him, making him fall on his back and roll away awkwardly.

He looked at the vine dangling from the ceiling in a daze for a minute, then stood up coughing and waving his hand to swat the dust rising from the demolition. He had pulled the gem free of its confine alright, but it was not the gem alone which he had pulled free. The gem was embedded in the pommel of a broadsword with a spotless surface. Its mirror-polished surface easily reflected his long tanned face and those big brown eyes. The reflection made him hiss in annoyance, and he motioned to throw away the sword, only to digress and using it as support to stand up.

Its fuller was created in the most intricate design of a trail left behind by a slithering snake with its tail facing the point which itself was split into two like the end of a snake tongue. Fortunately, the hilt itself was pretty standard, though wrapped in snakeskin, which provided a decent amount of grip to Ray’s calloused hand. The sword reminded him of Excalibur, making him stand up with his feet apart, a hand on his waist and the sword raised high toward the light which shone dazzlingly or at least the gem at its end did.

Finally, he entered a fit of laughter: some as a mock for not knowing what was more important between a gem or survival, and other for understanding how useless the gem and the sword were to quench his hunger. At least he could hunt with the sword.

“Like hell, I can hunt!” he said in mock resignation.

But as he was getting busy chiding his-self for ignoring the lessons learned from all the survival shows he had watched, the world suddenly shock around him.

“Everybody run! It is an earthquake!” he shouted then remembered he was alone and looked around for a place of some security; It’s needless to say there was none, for he was standing in the middle of a closed cave with the ceiling dangling some twenty feet above his head without any support. He thought he was going to die as the cave quaked with such gravitas that he found it hilariously difficult to stay standing. But God had his own plan for him and he didn’t die to a cave in; instead, the earthquake broke the other side of the ceiling, creating a ramp out of the hollow.

“Oh my god!” he said in celebration and started to a run toward the cracking ramp, but a wave of coldness sent shivers running down his spine and made him halt his steps at the ramp’s base. He looked back. The mineral wall he had found the sword in was slowly crumbling to the quake or something else, and a cold wave of absolute terror was quickly flowing out from somewhere deeper behind the wall. He thought he saw something in between the rising vapors of mist and the scattered dust and started up the ramp when a whispering hiss rang out near his ears.

Up he went and rushed out of the hollow as the solid stone ceiling of the hollow also gave away. By the time he stopped running, the whole area behind him had caved in and buried whatever it was that was trying to rise out from behind the wall.

Snorting at his wild thought of evil beings confined by the sword, Ray looked around and his face turned pale. He surrounded by a very peculiar group of people. Eyeing those sporting amusingly plain expressions on their pale bony faces, he said the first thing that came to his mind, “Very nice weather, isn’t it?” As if to chide him, the volcano at his back blasted out a cloud of smoke in response, ruining the conversation.