I am the Earth.

I woke up with a pounding headache like someone was taking a hammer to my skull and going to town with it.

A feeling that I am all too familiar with given how many times I end up drunk beyond belief with the boys at work.

I am that which bears the weight of the world.

I tried to massage my forehead but my hands felt like they were made of lead, refusing to move.

The earth heaves with my breath.

Tch. Is that Mike? What the hell dude? Can you turn down the volume on that TV? I don’t want to wake up to your weeb ass watching some over-the-top cartoons this early in the morning.

Actually, how come you are not in bed? Suffering the same thing I am since I know for a fact that you drank more than me?

The world bleeds fire at my rage.

Slowly, I am starting to get annoyed as my headache increases in magnitude at the words resounded across my house-

…Wait a minute. How did Mike get into my house? I don’t remember giving him the key. Hell, nobody has the spare key to my house, not even my sister since she went to Australia for college over three months ago to escape the dumpster fire that is America right now.

I am-

“Shut up already!!”

Opening my eyes with a snarl, I tried to get up and check out how Mike managed to break into my house.

Instead, what greeted me was darkness.

Massive walls made of rock stretched into the sky, casting shadows on my surroundings that were as pitch black as I imagined the depth of the oceans to look like. The only source of light that I can see is the light coming from the very top of the walls.

A chasm? What the hell am I doing at the bottom of a chasm?

Panic instantly set in as I tried to get up to my feet, ignoring the pains across my body and headache. Only to fall flat on my face with a resounding boom that sounded like a bomb had gone off.

This only enhanced my panic as I flailed around, causing the noise of explosions to continue repeatedly.

I don’t know how long I spent trying to get up and run, only to fall flat on my face or on my back repeatedly, although, I was slowly starting to get the hang of things.

Another anomaly I noticed was that my body felt weird. I could feel sensation across my body just fine, but when I brushed my fingers across my skin, all I felt was stone. Aside from this, I am also naked. I don’t feel any clothes on my body, let alone my wallet or phone.

Something is seriously wrong here and I need to find out what, and I need to find out before my headache kills me.

I don’t know how long I tried to keep getting up and falling to the ground, but finally, I managed to find my balance and started walking in a random direction following the narrow walls of the Chasm, trying to find a way out of here.

From what I know, Chasms are usually formed in multiple ways with erosion from water and tectonic activity being the most common methods. Given the noise that I have been hearing since I woke up from running water, I think it is safe to assume that this chasm must have been formed through erosion, and since there is running water, there must be a way out of this chasm. All I have to do is find the water and follow it upstream.

The problem is, I can’t see much in this darkness. The most I can do is see a few meters in front of me at best. But, I have no choice. I’ll have to make do with this limited vision and move forward.

Hopefully, someone will notice that I am missing and search for me. Although, I don’t feel like they would think of searching for me at the bottom of a chasm of all places, so I need to prepare for the long haul.

Strangely enough, I don’t feel thirsty or hungry, nor do I feel any other such bodily needs. A drug maybe?

A chill went up my spine at that thought.

Oh God! Please don’t tell me I am in some kind of an experiment. I don’t want to end up becoming a statistic for those bastards at the CIA or any other such organizations for that matter.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

With every step forward, I feel the ground shake and the rumbling of something massive moving about along with the feeling of my body feeling like it is being pressed down by a mountain. At first, I thought that there was an earthquake, but as I observed more and kept moving, I realized that I was the origin of the noise.

How? I don’t know, but I hope I will find out soon because I don’t think I can take this mystery anymore.

I don’t know how long I walked alongside the wall given that I passed through various passages where I did not have any sunlight to keep track. Sometimes, I ended up stumbling after tripping on something that I could not see. Sometimes, I felt itching across my entire body caused by insects that I could not identify in the darkness, causing me to scratch furiously across my body. Sometimes, I heard distant roars of animals that I could not identify. But, I think all these inconveniences were worth it.

At the end of my journey, I finally found the source of the running water. Although, it was a truly tiny stream that could barely be called even that, like something that would be dug out by a child in their backyard.

But hey, something is better than nothing.

Without wasting any time, I walked to the stream which was being illuminated by the sunlight from the top of the chasm, and promptly fell on my butt in fright when I saw my reflection in the stream.

When I stared into the stream, the image of a monster made out of rocks stared back at me.

And the moment I looked at my reflection, my headache reached its peak before fading suddenly, followed by a rush of memories that were not my own, but my own at the same time.

I wanted to cry, yet I had no tears.

All I could do was curl into a ball in despair.

----------------------------------------

I don’t know how long I just sat there by the stream, trying to come to terms with my fate.

I died. I don’t know how or why, but somehow, after that night at the bar with my friends, I died. And then, I was reborn in this world, as this abomination.

A monster made of stone. With a humanoid body and red eyes that shone like flashlights in the dark. A mockery of human form carved from rock.

The headache I had been feeling ever since I woke up was from my mind, or whatever passes for a mind for this body, trying to make sense of the two different sets of memories that now existed in it. The situation was made worse by the fact that one set of memories was only around 3 decades long at most while the other set, the set that belonged to this body, was millennia old at least.

According to my memories, I had been alive in this world for a very long time even before my previous self gained sapience, and in that time, he had traveled all over the place aimlessly, giving me some idea as to just what kind of a strange place I lived in.

This world is some kind of a fantasy world that recently went through some kind of apocalypse. Well, recently from my perspective anyways.

I had no name to apply to the different kinds of creatures that my previous self had seen since he was not that bright, not even able to form coherent thoughts except by letting his instincts guide him, but some of these creatures looked extremely strange.

Incidentally, I just realized that the itching feeling that I felt when travelling through the cave systems of the chasm was most likely some kind of territorial creatures attacking me for intruding on their turf, only to be crushed pitifully by my hands scratching my body in response.

And therein lies my current problem.

I am huge. Extremely huge. The size of a huge building at the very least. I know this because of the stream that I am sitting by? That is a full-blown river, a massive one at that. I realized this fact when I saw tiny creatures warily arrive to drink water from the river despite my presence, creatures that I recognized as heavily deformed Mountain Lions with crystal-like structures growing out of their backs. It also helped that I recognized tiny humanoid creatures from my memories that might have been some variation of humanity in this world.

Shaking my head to forget about it, I climbed to my feet and started considering my next step.

I won’t gain anything by staying put and wallowing in self-pity. First things first, I need information. Information that I cannot hope to comprehend from the jumbled mess of memories that I inherited from my current body. Then, depending on the outcome, I will need to decide what I want to do after.

But, for any of that to happen, I will need to get out of this chasm that I fell into an undermined amount of time ago. (was it a year? A decade? A century? Maybe even more? Why is my life so difficult?)

I raised both my hands to my face while concentrating, and watched in surprise as my fingers suddenly turned into massive stone claws, just like I wanted.

Looks like my powers work based on instincts and will. How convenient.

Based on the memories I inherited, I had various powers available to me thanks to the nature of this body. I could manipulate the land around me to my will. I could do the same to my body. I could also absorb any new material that I came across and incorporate it into my body for strength. As far as I can tell, these are the only powers that my previous self remembers.

My previous self usually used these powers to defend himself from the various hostile creatures that walk this world, but he never thought of using these powers to bring himself out of this chasm after he fell down accidentally.

I would like to think that I am a bit more intelligent than him, but I will not allow arrogance to cloud my mind since that could be a dangerous thing to do given my current situation.

Looking at the steep wall, I took a deep breath, despite knowing that I had no lungs or their equivalent in this body, and started my plan.

I dug my claws into the wall and started pulling my body up.

I heard the noise of rock cracking under pressure as I hauled my body up, using my arms and legs to dig into the wall and pull myself up.

And just like I expected, just a few feet (from my perspective) off the ground, the wall finally cracked under my weight and crumbled, causing me to tumble to the ground in a heap.

Thankfully, this body seems to lack anything remotely similar to pain receptors, or maybe the fall was not that significant for my body, since I did not feel any pain despite the fact that the very ground shook under the impact, no doubt causing a minor earthquake in the surrounding area.

…And given the distant squawks and shrill screams I am hearing, giving a heart attack to a flock or two of poor birds somewhere nearby. Sorry birdies but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Or, in my case, a humanoid rock monster thing.

Maybe I should try to find a different way out. Perhaps, those caves that I walked through earlier might have something to help me? At the very least, I can try to find a place to lie down and sleep if nothing else.