It is dark. A man is submerged in a pool of still, stale water. He emerges from the pool gasping in the putrid air. It smells of fecal matter. He is wearing a wet coat and drenched trousers. He looks around in the gloom. Fulgin - dark as the moonless and starless night, he sees no reflections of light or the outlines of objects in the dark.
“Where am I?”, he says, but he does not hear his voice.
Still perplexed at his current situation he walks forward through the gloom to discover where he is. The sound of splashing water - the only sound in the dark. He tries to walk in a straight line but due to the absolute darkness and jutting stalagmites and debris on the floor he is not able to. Despite this, he keeps on walking and walking.
Small drops of sweat start accumulating at the top of his forehead and his muscles slowly tighten. His nerves are getting to him. Trudging on forward, he realizes that something is different. The surrounding air has gotten colder, and he can hear a new sound - the small rustling of the wind. A chill runs through his neck and spine. He looks back. He sees nothing. Turning, he walks forward quickly.
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
He slams his head into a wall producing a loud sound and falls back into the water. A throbbing pain pierces his head. His consciousness fading in and out again. Suddenly, tidbits of information and murky images invade his mind.
“Blllerrrgbbb!”
Having trouble breathing, he rises up again gasping for air. After calming himself down he says to himself, “Where am I? Wait, I can hear myself?”
Surprised, he tries to think why this is the case.
“There are two plausible options. Either it is because my previous location did not allow me to hear myself or it is because I crashed into that wall. It would be unfortunate if it was not either of those two options,” he thinks.
Reflecting upon that thought he decides to walk away from the wall. After a period of time, his surroundings start getting hotter and more humid. About half an hour of walking, he stops and attempts to talk.
“Hello.”
No sound is heard.
Nodding to himself, he turns around and starts walking back. Eventually, the air starts to cool again. When the air is significantly colder than before, he stops and says, “Hello.”
He can hear it.
“It seems that what was causing my voice to produce no sound was due to the area I was in and probably not due to me crashing into the wall,” he thinks.
Proceeding forward again,
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
He hits the wall.
A loud noise echoes through the dark.
He can see the frames of his mentor congratulating him for graduating university and murky images of his father(?) teaching him the basics of magic. Then the images cease like a dream and he is once again conscious. Seeing that he gained more information and memories by crashing into the wall, he decides to do something foolish.
“Will it be worth it to alert others of my presence here in order to regain my memories?” he ponders.
Due to his memory loss, the man is dumber than a child.
Steeling himself, he rams into the wall.
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
Again.
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
And again.
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
To be honest, he might have overdone it.
“CCCCRRRRAAAASSSHHHH!!!”
He loses consciousness leaning onto the wall.
Flashes of images and scenes of his lives(?) appear before him in rapid succession. More and more information is recalled as he experiences his lives flashing before his eyes. While this is happening, silence permeates the area surrounding the unconscious body. But not for long.
“Zowl… Zowl… Zowl… Zowl…”
A new sound permeates the area along with the sound of wind.
“Zowl… Zowl… Zowl…”
The sound becomes more distinct and clearer.
He regains consciousness.
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“Zowl… Zowl… ZOWL!!!”
An ear-piercing screech echoes through the darkness and a whirlwind of air can be felt on his skin. Bright luminescent colors appear in the gloom in the form of a large flying creature. It is barrelling toward him. Shocked and sweating profusely, he sprints away from the wall as fast as his legs can muster.
“What the fuck is THAT!!!”, he shouts in his mind.
He stops thinking and keeps running away from the wall and the creature toward the darkness. Splashing noises can be heard.
“ZOWL!!!”
“ZOWL!!!!”
“ZOWL!!!!!”
It appears that the creature is getting closer.
He tries to run faster. The air around him is getting hotter and his pants have become louder and more frequent. He runs with all his might. Then, he trips.
He falls forward into the water. All he can see is a dark abyss. Madly scrambling up, he keeps running forward, but then he realizes something. Looking back he sees that the creature is two feet away from him. However, it is moving its body side to side and appears to be looking for him. It is also opening what appears to be its mouth but no noise is heard from it.
“It seems that that creature finds its prey by sound and specifically by echolocation.” he thinks.
“But wait, if that is true then shouldn’t it have heard the splashing sounds I made when I passed into this area?”
Still tense and nervous that the creature may find him, he stands perfectly still observing the creature.
The creature glows in the dark allowing him to make out what the creature looks like. It is covered in what appears to be phosphorescent greenish white fur and has two large wings. It has no body and only a head. It has no eyes, large teeth that glow red, and large flaps that are probably ears on the top of its head. The teeth make a circle at the center of its head. It is currently flying back and forth around the perimeter of the area, probably looking for the man. After two hours, the creature appears to be alerted by something and flies away from where the man is at. After another fifteen minutes, the man sighs and sits down in the water - drenched and tired.
He thinks about what happened.
“What was that creature and where am I?” he asks himself.
“I remember who I am since I recall my memories both here on Arda and from Earth, but I have no recollection on how I got here,” he thinks.
“Now is not the time for philosophical skepticism, I must find out where I am and how to get out of here.”
Recalling the information that he learned from his memories, he thinks, “From what I remember there is no way that creature can be from Earth, it has to be a creature from Arda. Although I am not entirely sure, that thing looks like something from either the Hadal Zone or the Abyss. I wonder why it stopped chasing after me. I am getting a bad feeling about this.”
“I need some light,” he thinks.
“Actually, now that I think about it. This will be my first-time using magic in this world.”
Trembling with excitement, he closes his eyes and starts to think about the magic incantation for light and focuses his mana towards the palm of his hand.
A small bright blue light is depicted in his mind and mana from his mana heart circulates from his heart to his brain and back onto the palm of his hand.
He opens his eyes.
A bright blue spectre lightly bubbles out of the palm of his hand. The blue ball illuminates his surrounding area. He now sees that the ground underneath the water is speckled with browns, blacks, and reds and that even with the light he cannot see the ceiling above him. Due to the danger of monster, he decides to keep on moving forward in order to find a way out of this large cavern. He walks forward alert for any sudden sounds or sights that may be approaching him. Besides the splashing of the water beneath his feet, he hears no sound. Eventually, the water beneath him starts getting murkier and murkier. Noticing this he tenses up a little while still moving forward.
Something has hit his head. A chill runs down his spine. His senses are vigilant, and his muscles tighten. He sees nothing. He is alert and ready for whatever creature may be lurking in the dark with sweat pouring out of his forehead and chest. After half an hour of being still and alert, he slowly reaches his hand forward to feel for the thing that he hit if it was still there. At first, the hand touches only air, but after moving it toward his right side he feels something. A black key materializes out of thin air on a hook that is attached to nothing. Lightly pulling on it, it breaks free from its attachment and is now in his hand. Touching it further, it feels like some sort of metal key. Realizing that he has the key, he panics at first.
“Is this a trap?” he asks somewhat surprised that he can himself speak.
Seeing that no obvious mechanism has been activated, he sighs and puts the key in one of his wet coat pockets and heads forward. The blue light in hand lighting the way.
The water is now pitch black and above him only darkness can be seen. However, soon spirals of colors can be see lighting up the area he is traveling through and soon sees a giant shadow loom in the distance.
Two slabs of black rock pierce the colorful backdrop – ancient and heavy. He feels pressure moving closer to it. Even so, he moves closer to examine it.
“I must find out where I’m at and return home,” he thinks.
The water below him is still pitch black, but it is now moving. Using his little mage light, he illuminates a section of the wall. Most of the wall is fulgin - darker than any black he has ever seen before and has a perfectly smooth texture. He keeps on searching the wall for any sign or clue about what this place is and what time period this dungeon was built. He then spots some garbled script of white letters about two feet above his head. He backs away a little and pours more mana into the palm of his hand. The blue ball gets brighter. He can now see the script. It appears to be in messy English.
“Why English?” he thinks to himself.
The script says, “Truth lies behind Unapproachable Light.”
He then touches the white letters with the palm of his hand. Something happens. He has inexplicable desire to take out the black key he found earlier.
“No, this is a trap!”
He tries to resist.
“AAAGGGNNNNHHH!!!!”
He screams in agony.
The desire overwhelms him and he takes out the key and forcefully rams it into the black stones. It miraculously goes through. The black stones rumble. Maddening scripts of fiery white appear everywhere on the massive stones. He is getting headaches seeing it but soon silence returns. No sound can be heard. Something is coming. Then blindness.
The gloom snuffs out his mage light and envelops him in a suffocating embrace. He struggles. He tries to use his magic and sorcery, but they fail to activate. He tries to tear apart the darkness with his arms, but they do nothing. He tries to bite into it, but breaks some of his teeth instead. He kicks into the darkness, but his legs contort and break becoming noodles. He screams out in pain and falls onto the watery floor. The darkness squeezes onto him tighter, pinning him onto the ground. His arms are broken and he is underneath the water. Black water gets into his mouth and lungs.
He thinks, “What’s ….happening... ?“
His consciousness fades and his broken limbs and body go limp. The temperature from his body gets colder and colder. His eyes reflexively open. There is no life or light in them. He who wished to know more met his predestined end today, but it was not so. A great cosmic hymn echoes through the Zone driving back the darkness, the water, the stone, the sky, and all creatures great and small.
He wakes up.