I brought the rock down with all his strength on the head of the man in the room and with a sound like a watermelon being broken the man fell to the floor. I then turned to look at the creature on the floor which was now looking up at me with a confused expression. I explain to her, “I don’t know what you are, but treating anything like that is wrong. I could not allow him to enslave you, or torture you more. What is your name?” I stay back from her because it seems like she could do some serious damage if she wanted to, and how she acts will decide how I treat her.

She replies in a scared sounding voice, “Xiantha, how are you called?”

Since she appears to be scared of me, I decided to learn as much as possible and tell her “Alex Johnson. Where did you come from, how did he get you here, can we get you home?” One of those questions must have been a wrong one though because she just starts sobbing and I realize how much of an ass I was. She is in shackles bleeding on the floor, who knows how long she has been stuck like this and I bombard her with questions.

She brokenly tells me, “He said that I could not be sent home, that I could never go home.”

Now I really feel like a horse’s ass, so I approach her and hold her in my arms and allow her to cry herself out. I almost feel like crying myself because I have no idea how to leave this cave and it appears that she might not either. Eventually, she calms down, so I let her know I am going to try to unshackle her. Each of the shackles is attached with a lock, so I start looking around the room to find a key to open them. They are not laying out in the room, so the only thing I can come up with is that man had them on him. I really do not want to approach the body but have no other choice and eventually find the keys in a pocket of the robe. The whole time I have been doing that she has been telling me about her world and what has happened to her and I get angrier at this man.

I get the shackles unlocked, and she tells me that she is thirsty so I head back to where I slid down and get her some water. She drinks it, a look of fear crosses her face, then she guzzles the rest of the water. I watch her face some more, and she closes her eyes for a few moments, after which she declares quietly “I accept Alex Johnson as my master and friend.” Then she opens her eyes to look at me.

I shout out, “What are you doing?” and the pentagram flares to life around us. The next thing I know is darkness.

When I wake up the candles in the room are all out, I feel a weight on my chest, and after exploring with my hands, I determine that it is Xiantha. She does not appear to have woken up yet, so I dig out my flashlight and turn it on to look around. All that is left of the pentagram on the floor is a line of ash, and the candles look like they were extinguished, not that they burned out. I would guess that when the pentagram flared it caused the candles to go out. I check my phone and find that it was over four hours past when I was supposed to meet up with my classmates to go back to the school. I wonder what they are doing if they are searching for me.

I decided that I need to go back to the slide and see if anyone is around there that could help us get out of here. I have no idea what to do with Xiantha though, I mean if she goes with me I am sure that my fellow humans would capture her to do insane experiments and who knows what else to her. I need to wake her up so we can talk about our options. I shake her shoulder, and she stirs, then I hear grumbling in my mind that is very similar to her voice. She opens her eyes, and I hear where am I? in my head. To say I am startled is an understatement. My first thoughts are what the fuck? And she jumps up off of me and grabs her head. This leads up to us both backing away from each other listening to repeated iterations of cursing and questioning our sanity for a few minutes. Finally, I calm down enough to purposely think If you hear this and understand me nod your head. She looks me in the eye and nods towards me, and I hear her voice in my head saying yes I can hear you, and I assume you hear me too. I nod my head, and she continues, “ What the hell did you do to me, why can we hear each other’s thoughts?”

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I respond, “How the hell should I know, wait you called me master and the pentagram flared. Is that what did this?”

She responded, “ This is your human magic, how should I know. Can we make this stop?”

I look at her in regret and can’t help but to think about if this gets out, both of us will end up in a lab with tubes from places I would rather not consider. I notice she does not react to this, but I can hear a kind of muted mumbling from her that I cannot understand. I think at her “It looks like if we are just thinking about something it does not appear in each other head. Maybe we can control what each other hear?” I ask her about what she heard the last few minutes, and she only heard what I had intended to say to her. She didn’t hear my private thoughts. She verified the same with me, and we both breathed sighs of relief that at least we would not be privy to every intimate thought the other was having.

“I do not know exactly where we are, or how to get out of here. I want to go back to where I slid down and see if any other people are there to help us escape from down here. I can’t tell you what will happen to you from the other humans, but at least you can fly and escape, or hide from them, then we can meet up after to see about getting you home.” I think at her.

She shakes her head at me thinking “I cannot fly right now. During the beatings I received, one of my wing bones was broken. It will be a few days at least before I can try flying. Other than that yeah we need to find a way out. I am getting hungry, and I guess you are too.”

I think at her, “Maybe the asshole has something to eat somewhere.”

She points out a small bag against the altar that his book is resting on so I open it and find that it is much larger on the inside than the outside. Inside there is some kind of muffins and a few bottles of drinks. There are also flasks of what I would guess would be potions if this was an RPG and not real life. I ask her if she can eat the muffins and she shrugs and tries one. She decides that it is fine and eats one while I eat another. Surprisingly the one muffin sates my hunger, even though it was not very large. I decided to take the book and place it in the bag as well as the whip and dagger that was on the dead body.

We head back the way I entered, and there is no sign of anyone above us, no lights or sounds at all. We decided to go back to the pentagram room, and I notice another exit to the room. We go through that and find a path that heads at a slight elevation, rather than heading down further. Since we are rested and have eaten, plus we can always follow our footprints back if we need to, we decide to follow the path out to see if we can get out of this cave system.

Several hours later we decide to take a break before heading back to the pentagram room before the flashlight batteries die. Someone will eventually have to come in search of me is my thoughts. I shut off the flashlight while we rest and eventually as our eyes acclimate we notice that there are mushrooms near the ceiling that are giving off a decent amount of light. At least enough to see by.

We decided to go a little further along using just the mushrooms for light, and it becomes almost obvious that they are placed at set intervals, almost like the lights that are placed along roadsides to help people see at night. I relay that thought to Xiantha, and she pauses considering it. “If that is true, then that would imply that this is a roadway of sorts and somewhere ahead will be civilization,” she replies.

I agree with her assessment so we decide to continue to move forward and eventually come to a chamber that can only be described as massive. Overhead is some sort of artificial light that makes this cave as bright as noon, and in the center of this cave is a town or a city. It’s unlike anything I have seen before with building that seems almost grown instead of built. There are buildings with large crystal gardens, and I can see people and creatures moving around inside of it.

Then I notice someone moving towards us, he is wearing chainmail and carrying a halberd over his shoulder. When he gets close enough to us, he says, “Welcome to Underland, young warlock. I have not met you before, where do you hail from?”

In my mind, I think Oh great, Alex in Underland, but that was no rabbit hole I fell down …