I felt an immense wave of heat over my body. Opening my eyes, I saw yellow, orange, and blue flames dance around my room and slowly working its way to my bed. I dived out of my bed and jumped through my window. I looked back at my house burning to the ground. I peeled my eyes away from the sight and looked all around my respectable town, or, what was once my town, yet now is a world of fire. I ran as fast as I could to my favorite sanctuary: our local library. Panting heavily, I ran through the path that I knew from pure muscle memory and found myself in front of a burning library. I looked through a window and saw a lot of ash, and no books. I ran back to what was once my home and called out. No answer. I screamed a cry of pure, primal agony. Then, I stood there numbly until I heard the sound of hooves galloping towards me. I looked towards it. There was a warrior riding on a fire horse and holding a flaming torch. Seeing what he was holding, I acted on nothing but anger. I screamed and ran at him. He threw his torch to the side and took out a club. I reached him, jumped up, and punched him as hard as I could. My fist bounced off his chest plate and pain shot up through my body. I saw out of my peripheral vision that a fist was about to hook me on the side of my head, but before I could react I was already hit. The last thing I thought before I fell to the ground was how realistic this lucid dream felt.

With a start, I woke up, pain ringing in my head. 

Wow, that was pretty intense for a lucid dream, I thought, slightly shocked by the violent yet exhilarating situation that my brain put me into.

After shrugging off the shock, I decided that it was a good idea to see where I actually am, since the hard surface I woke up from sure didn’t seem like my humble bed.

And of course it wasn’t.

I was trapped in a goddamn dungeon cell. 

I really can’t deal with this right now, I sighed, not wanting to think about even the slightest possibility that my “lucid dream” wasn’t so much of a dream after all.

And I went back to sleep.

Hard as the floor was, I thought that it would be better to just sleep it off than to go crazy and try to do something stupid like breaking out of this cell or something. That kind of stupidity would probably just get me killed.

I figured it would just be better to learn more about the context of my imprisonment before doing or thinking about anything. Right now, doing could hurt me physically while thinking could hurt me mentally, so perhaps doing nothing until something happens or I get bored would be ideal.

If I get woken up by a guard for food or something, that means I am actively being held in this dungeon. If not, I was probably tossed in here and forgotten. Well, let’s see what happens. I thought, drifting off to sleep, dreaming about relaxing aspects of life like rainbows and unicorns.

…

I woke up sometime later, still inside the cell, so any lingering hope that I was in some sort of extremely vivid nightmare or pranked by some passing Illusionist Mage was long gone.

Well then, I thought, Let’s see what’s out there.

I left the cold, hard floor for the first time since I saw this cell for the first time and slowly trudged towards the bars holding my into my cell. Carefully, I tapped one of the bars to make sure they weren’t infused with electrical energy or something. As they seemed like normal metal bars, I brought my head as far out as I could between the bars to look outside my cell. Sure enough, not counting the empty cell right in front of me which I have seen for the part however long, there were near endless cells to my left and a decent amount of cells to my right. 

It seemed like all the people, or should I say -- skeletons -- trapped in this dungeon were to my right, and to my left were empty cells as far as I could tell.

Ok, so the exit is almost guaranteed to be on the right, I thought. Well, it doesn’t seem like anyone cares about us being here, and looking at all the skeletons, it seems like that will be my fate if I don’t escape. I guess I was just forgotten here, which I think is a good thing because I can try to escape unobstructed.

First, I tried the least risky way. “Hello?” I called out, just in case there were some people who were alive. Sure enough, after a couple seconds, I heard a call back.

“Is anyone there? Bing bong bing.” I tried, just to make sure it wasn’t my own echo that I heard. Soon, I heard a muted “Is anyone there? Bing bong bing.” and gave up calling for help.

All right, time to see what I can do, I thought, Maybe I have super strength or something and I never tried enough to know it. First, I tried pulling a bar out of place by locking my feet at the bottom of the bar and pulling on the middle of the bar, attempting to use torque to my advantage. Unfortunately, in this particular situation, you can know all the physics in the world, but you can’t do much to break or bend a bar unless you are strong enough.

And no, I most definitely didn’t have super strength, or even average strength, for that matter. Why I even tried that method is beyond me. Anyway, then I retreated back into the cell proper and looked around for any items that could help me or any alternate escape paths.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The “door” to the cell seemed to be too high to reach.

Huh, looks like they just dump people from the top and leave them so they can’t escape through it. Explains my head pain when I woke up. You can’t break the lock and open the door if you can’t even get up there. 

There was a drain in a corner, which would have been a good escape route if I was the size of a rat. It’s quite impossible for a powerless human like me to crawl through a drain made for excrement.

I banged all over the walls to see if there were any structurally hollow or weak points that I could capitalize on for escape, but everything seemed too solid to do anything with. 

And of course there was absolutely nothing else.

So with nothing to do and a whole lot of time before I dehydrate or starve to death, I went back to the drain and felt around inside it. Putting my hand all the way in, and feeling as high as I could, I felt some type of fossilized moss or something. Eh, might be handy for something, I thought, and grabbed as much moss as I could before taking my hand out and putting as much of it as I could fit into my pockets, and dumping the rest onto my cell’s floor. Then, I reached back in all the way and felt towards the bottom. By some miracle, my fingers were submerged in water!

YES! There’s my water problem solved! I thought on the bright side, trying hard not to think of what would likely actually be in the drain water under a dungeon where skeletons were rotting.

Eventually, I mentally shrugged and convinced myself that consuming ancient excrement may give me some sort of powers. While this idea was not at all a logical conclusion and I was a man who prided himself in his logical sense, I did what I needed to do to mentally prepare myself to drink some water that would either expand my current lifespan to a couple more weeks or kill me immediately.

Steeling myself, I cupped some of the water and drank it as fast as I could. Funnily enough, it tasted mostly like normal water with a metallic flavor to it, from which I convinced myself that this was perfectly normal water that tasted weird. 

Now, I had a source of water and I could live for a while at least before dying of hunger.

At this point, I decided that the optimal thing to do was to slowly bend two bars outwards enough so that I could barely slip between them, all while living off the drain water.

So that is what I did for the next chunk of time, slowly getting extremely hungry which increased my desperation enough and maybe gave my a steady adrenaline rush where I didn’t feel the need to sleep or do literally anything other that pulling these two bars apart and only when my throat is parched, taking a short break to drink some drain water, before immediately returning to my tenuous task.

Realizing that my efforts were not in vain, and the bars I was pulling apart actually had a slight larger gap than the rest of them, I felt validated and continued with newfound energy.

When my arms would not work any longer, I used my shoulders to push the bars apart. When my shoulders were burning, I used my legs to pry the bars apart. When I could stand no longer, my arms were back to help.

And after what felt like an eternity, I made enough of a gap between the bars to slip out through the middle. After I dumped myself outside my cell, I didn’t have enough energy to celebrate, or do anything other than slowly walk to the right, where I remembered that the exit most likely was.

After passing by all the other cells between my old cell and the end of the hallway, I stood face to face with an iron door.

That. Would. Not. Budge.

I stopped trying to open it, sweat pouring down my face, and simply sat down with my back to the door. To my right, there was a bunch of small jagged rocks, seemingly from a dropped statue or something. To my left, there was a ladder. 

Well, now I know how they get up to the cell doors and dump the captives inside.

As my steady adrenaline rush from the past eternity wore off and I forgot the last time I slept, I realized that I had no more energy inside of me.

I am going to die. Right here. Right now. 

My life flashed before his eyes. I was born and raised in a humble family of craftsmen. Talented in the fields of Mathematics and Physics, in part due to my origins in a craftsmen family and in part due to my interest in these topics. Spending hours after hours in the local library, learning anything I can about the world for my unbridled love for knowledge and understanding. Helping my family around the house by following in my father’s footsteps and crafting various tools and objects. Naively dreaming as a child that one day I would craft something so “fantabulastic” that no had ever done before and become the best craftsman in the entire world…

And that’s about it.

Damn, my life was boring, I realized, before I closed my eyes for the last time.

…

Or so I thought. Until I woke up again, exactly where I thought I died, feeling just slightly energized from my sleep but still starving. 

Ha! I just won’t die, will I? Ok then. Let’s look for some food, I thought. I got up and walked over to the first cell. 

Completely empty, save for a skeleton.

Next one? Same. 

After looking through a few more cells, I found a cell with a short yet sturdy skeleton that didn’t completely rot yet, and still had a decent amount of flesh on it. It seems that dwarves had such dense flesh that it took a while to rot as well...

Now I’m not one to eat my own race or ones that look like it, but desperate times call for desperate measures, you know? 

So, I took the ladder next to the iron door and placed it to get up to this particular cell’s entrance. How did I open the lock, you ask? And how did I avoid getting stuck in this cell? Simple. I used some of the jagged rocks to try and pick the lock, opened the door, sat on the top, moved the ladder to the inside of the cell, used the ladder to pull the fleshy skeleton closer to the bars, pulled the ladder back over to the outside through the door, and finally got back down to enjoy the meal. 

Honestly, at the state I was in, this old skeleton flesh tasted like the best food I had ever eaten in my entire life, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I continued this process every time I saw a skeleton that had flesh on it -- and no, they were not all dwarves -- and soon, I was left with tons of locks, a trusty ladder, a bunch of jagged rocks, and a full stomach. 

I don’t care what this looks like to you, but I saw this as an absolute win.