Sands Of Oblivion

The embers of my anger still heated my veins as I leapt forward, doing little to shield me from the frigid cold of the dissolving sand. Before my bewildered eyes the very walls began to crumble, the ceiling leaking increasingly more grey sand. The webs may have fallen far and wide, but how could they have cut the ceiling, let alone so much?

My pace was just fast enough to see as the stone ahead of me began to crumble as I sprinted forth, solid seeming chunks splitting apart over and over of their own accord. My head-ball may be a little burnt out right now, but even as unsteady as my thoughts are I can still tell that that was decidedly not a mere side effect of the spider tearing out its own web. While I can see how the spider might have set something like this up, it’s far more likely that Kurzebald decided to fuck over anyone who killed his shiny creation like the spiteful prike he was.

Admittedly, I didn’t really know the man long enough to get a read on his personality, but I’d be willing to bet “Spiteful Prick” was a solid descriptor.

The threat of the sand was not limited to its crushing weight or suffocating depth, but the sheer unnatural cold that it radiated. It was so cold as to leech the heat from my paws almost completely at every brief contact between jumps. I was almost certain that I would genuinely freeze to death long before I could suffocate were I dragged under the grey tide. Of course, the fact that even if I survived to be dragged to the very depths, all that’s waiting for me down there is a thousand thousand blades sharp enough to slice stone like butter was not encouraging to say the least.

While Paranoia still proved its worth by showing me the stone around me crumbling, it was my own eyes that saw my doom approaching. Unlike the previous times I’ve run from unstoppable death, this killer didn’t have the common courtesy to wait for me to sprint along; the entire tunnel as far as my eyes could see was crumbling simultaneously, the walls falling away and the ceiling falling in.

I saw the ceiling collapsing in the distance before Paranoia saw the wall of sand crushing down on me from above. I had barely enough time to curl up into a ball and create a pocket of air with my paws in front of my face before what was likely multiple tonnes of supernaturally cold sand crashed down unto my back.

Cold. More than the crushing weight that drove the air from my lungs, more than the suffocating entrapment, more than the utter and complete silence left in the wake of the sands crashing, the cold hit me like a runaway freight train. It felt like ice slithering through my veins and chilling my bones until my whole body was frozen solid, my heart beating ever harder in a futile attempt to pump blood that was no longer fluid.

It took me several seconds to realise I wasn’t dead, that the cold hadn’t actually frozen my fluids and the sand hadn’t stolen my breath completely. Sand, as a part of me that oncoming death had driven to the very corners of my mind told me, was in large part air all things considered; more than one desperate fool has survived a wildfire by pressing their heads to the earth and sucking oxygen from the dirt. Managing to wriggle about enough to allow my lungs to expand was the most difficult part, but one advantage of being such a small creature is that I can hold my breath for an extremely long time.

However, all of this would be irrelevant if not for one thing; I didn’t freeze to death. I knew the cold wasn’t just in my head because I could feel the blood still leaking from my wounds freezing solid on contact with the endless sea of grey. I still felt like I should be freezing to death, like creeping tendrils of some sort of anti-flame were dancing about my flesh and consuming all the heat in my body. I felt like my bones were made of permafrost, my flesh formed of ice, and my blood a liquid hydrogen ice floe; the ice engulfing my heart cracked with every beat, sending shards to follow the half frozen sludge that was my blood around a body made of freezer burned meat.

But I was still alive. My flesh had not turned to ice, my blood still flowed, and my bones still… did bone things. Very important bone things, I’m sure.

For a very long time after maneuvering to regain my breath I simply sat there, staring at nothing while I lay in the sand. While the feeling of being frozen to the soul was uncomfortable to say the least, this was the first time in a very long time where I could be absolutely (or as close to it as possible) sure that I was in no further danger of dying right now. Sure, by all rights I should be made of cracking ice right now and I’m definitely at risk of suffocation or being outright crushed if I make one wrong move, but none of that is going to just happen.

Slowly, I began to drift off; the relative peace of my burial somehow turning the crushing pressure to a soothing embrace. My eyes fluttered shut, the lids feeling so very heavy with every passing moment. Darkness reached from the depths to ferry my mind away to the land of dreams…

Then my eyes snapped open, indignant rage suffusing my body like a live wire to the spine. I have no time to sleep now, this whole fucking place is falling apart! What the hell was I thinking?! Where did this exhaustion come from? Sure, I haven’t slept in… days? Huh, I suppose I may just actually be pretty damn tired… Maybe I should just rest my eyes a bit… Just for a little while…

+1 Will

NO! Even if this damned sand doesn’t kill me, this whole fucking tunnel system is going up in flames and crashing down around my ears! I don’t have time to just sleep in the fucking rubble! I began to wriggle and writhe, struggling to move in who cares what direction so long as I was moving.

This sand was oddly tightly packed and almost… sticky. As I burrowed through the icy sand it felt increasingly like swimming through mud rather than powderized stone. It stuck to my fur, clinging like the angry fingers of the dead trying to drag me down with them. It covered my nose and mouth, forcing me to stop and claw it off, each handful clinging harder and being notably less malleable.

Oh. Oh shit. I’m swimming in slowly drying cement aren’t I? Or at least something similar.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! This mantra cycled through my head in ever escalating volume and insistence as my efforts to dig through the slowly hardening slime around me redoubled. Now that I was consciously aware of it, I could feel the not-sand around me growing more and more viscous and solid with every moment; though, that admittedly may have been partially psychosomatic.

As hard as I fought, as desperately as I struggled, I couldn’t see the surface even with Paranoia. Hope is a tenuous thing, far less reliable than cold hard, fatalistic determination and realism. I knew after five minutes that there was no way I could reach the surface, if there even is one, before this shit solidifies completely. Rather than futility intensify my efforts only to wind up trapped like a statue, I fought smart.

As the walls became more and more rigid, I pushed them away from myself to create a bubble of space and hopefully air. Of course, I didn’t just stop tunneling forth even as the consistency changed from mud to stone between my toes, increasingly using my teeth to move stone.

I sighed the moment my claws could find no purchase, before laying fully into the wall with teeth that can gnaw through steel given enough time. Fuck you Alxhaustra, you should have thought of rats when you designed your house of horrors asshole. Unless he did.

I fucking hope he didn’t.