Ria heard him, lifted the three-legged stool still standing beside the recliner and threw it at the goblin. She didn’t yell. It was simply her way of telling him to fuck off. The stool fell short of the goblin, however; and her anger failed to even make him flinch. Holding the glass he watched her antics. Maybe he was curious about her choice or maybe he was simply waiting for her to run out of the room so he could have some quiet time and watch the world burn from the window of his television; he didn’t show her what he was thinking. Yes, the TV was still on, playing the gruesome account of events happening in some fictitious universe where the world itself burned and the humans died along with it.

“I’m not drinking that,” Ria said, Period. End of discussion. Just the thought of voluntarily going through the lustful invasion of foreign emotion made her repulsive to the idea. She had seen what uncorked desire did to Nicky. She didn’t arrogantly believe that she could face the goo’s effect without giving in to her basic bodily needs. She had survived through it once, true. But now, with her emotions fuming and feelings conflicted, she held no hope. She knew herself and the truth scared her. The goblin scared her. But the fear of him itself wasn’t strong enough to bend her will. He was trying but she was similarly resisting.

She didn’t even want to listen to him, much less do his bidding. Defiance was growing strongly inside her, but there was also cracks forming around her morality- around the thoughts which collectively made her personality. She wanted to leave. Go back to her world. However, how would she achieve that without becoming the puppet he already assumed her to be? That was a question she had no answer to.

“I’m not drinking that. No way,” Perplexed and scared she may be, she still stuck with her decision in the end. She might have mindlessly drunk the goo before, but now she knew what constituted its elements. She wasn’t going to let him humiliate her again. Try to force me. She thought, clenching her fists tightly. Just try and do it.

But the goblin didn’t force her. “Are you sure you don’t want to drink it?” he asked, tilting the glass toward her and smiling. Her confusion only helped his cause. “Suit yourself.” He said, nodding his head and walking toward her. Ria stepped back in surprise, getting ready to fight her way out of the room if it came to that. He picked up the stool instead and putting it back at its place, he placed the glass on it and pointed his finger at her.

“It was you who refused. I gave you a choice. You can’t back out now.”

“Bring it on.” She said raising her head. A chill, however, shook her whole body, as the implication of his words started settling in her mind. His Grin widened.

Something’s wrong. The thought nudged her fear forward. She didn’t know what he was planning, but his intentions were clearly bad, that she knew. However, she was still determined. She had been through a lot already and she wasn’t about to surrender her leftover dignity to his farce.

The ghostly form of her abandoned knife pressed on her back, reminding her that it wasn’t far away; she could run for it if the goblin tried any tricks. But she put the thought away as soon as it had come. The damage could and had already done to her mind far outweighed the protection it offered. She would rather let the sewer monsters ravage her mind than to pick up that cursed thing again.

I’ll have my revenge. She had no doubts about that.

“Me is left with no choice.” He said, putting his fist in front of her and uncurling his fingers one by one. Semi—bright rays of prismatic light escaped his palm, revealing the object he held. It was a golden marble the size of an almond. Once he made sure that she had seen the thing, he abruptly moved. Ria frowned again. He didn’t attack her. He turned and threw the marble out of the door, into the darkness beyond.

“Go find it.”

“What?”

“That’s your task.” He said acting coy. But Ria knew him. Their relation might have been short, but she knew the type of being he was.

He’s playing with me. She thought. He was truly having fun. She could see it in his amused eyes. There was a certain kind of playfulness in the way he looked at her, in the way his lips curled. She could imagine him gloating, laughing at her bemused face once she left. She would have kneed him in his balls if it had any effect, but he seemed uncaring.

He stands there naked for Christ’s sake, flaunting his assets like he’s the messiah himself! Chasing the helplessness away, she worried about the hole she had dug for herself.

The marble wasn’t big. It was so small and the sewer was also very dark and large. How was she going to find it in the vastness of the tunnel? Just how was she to complete her task? For the first time since Ria had stepped back on this floor, she felt despair. She saw the tunnel becoming endless in the darkness: its walls growing wider, the water murkier and freezing to touch. The door didn’t disappear behind her as she stepped outside, and the goblin also didn’t hold back with his taunts. He didn’t verbally abuse her but snickered at every given opportunity- Mocking and flaming her smoldering anger.

He gave her one last bit of advice before he finally decided to close the door and take a nap. He showed absolutely no intention to watch her grovel in the sewer water. Why had he given her the hateful task if he wasn’t going to enjoy the spectacle of her failure? Ria had no idea.

“You better hurry. Once it attaches to something it will lose its glow.”

She looked back hatefully at the goblin. She hated everything about him and the room he possessed. If only I had a fire. She thought as the words grew spontaneously into an idea. It spread like a virus, taking over all her thoughts until she came to the conclusion that she was a stupid, idiotic woman. “Why can’t I have a fire?” she mumbled, ecstatic at her discovery. Her grin confused the goblin, and he cocked an eyebrow when she rushed back into the room, this time himself bemused about her agenda. She found all the materials needed to build a fire or a simple torch in there. She double tapped her head for not thinking about building a fire before. It could have made her life so much easier. So many episodes of survival shows she had watched- all wasted on her stupidly.

There was a pile of arm length logs near the fireplace. She ignored them. Instead, she stopped in front of the goblins dearest stool. Once there, she calmly picked the glass and threw its content at his favorite recliner, drenching it completely. Under his watch, she raised the stool and holding its legs, slammed it harshly on the floor. The seat cracked in two with a loud don! The floor groaned under her as splinters flew left and right. She didn’t stop hammering it on the floor until the seat and the legs completely separated, giving her three long sticks to work with. Satisfaction wafted over her body, calming her restlessness by a degree. Then to the goblins horror, she picked up a silver knife from the dining table and tore square pieces of leather from his recliner, leaving it looking like a relic fitting to the sewer. She even tore some sponge from the fillings- not that she needed it for anything, she simply got carried away.

She laughed at her ingeniousness. The goblin didn’t stop her. She had fun tearing and breaking his belongings. But he didn’t stop her. He looked angry but his face already looked too nasty so she couldn’t determine whether the change in his expressions was a result of her expressive love toward his property or some unfathomable genealogical defect.

Wrapping the leather at the thick section of the stool legs, she drowned them in fuel she picked up from the fireplace and ignited one. It burned brightly- the dancing flames rejuvenating her. She almost cried in happiness. The light meant a lot to her. Now there would be no more darkness, no more blind trudging. She tore a section of the table cloth, tied it at the ends of her unlit torches and slung the strap across her neck, letting the torches rest under her left armpit. The goblin cringed slightly as she burgled the candles too and left the room.

“Finally,” He said from behind. “And thanks for not tearing my whole room apart.”

She ignored him at first, still drunk on happiness, but her mind soon connected the dots for her and gave her a reason to worry. The goblin was implying that she wasn’t the first one to build a torch and neither was she the quickest. His words further hinted that everyone else who had come under his care had either died or was still trapped in the sewer, guaranteed by his previous comment of going free if he managed to raise a leader. She had clearly antagonized him.

But the door closed behind her before she could react. She spent thinking about the consequence of her actions, and scoffed at the end thinking that she was already knee-deep in sewer water, what more could he possibly do to her?

Holding the torch, she took a deep breath. Groaning she got down on her knees and cringed hard as the murky water washed against her abdomen. She spent a few minutes settling her emotions and cursing the goblin before sticking her free hand into the filthy floor and started fondling its contents to find the marble. It was a monumental task: Much difficult than trying to find a needle in a haystack. Ria would have happily agreed to go through a stack of hay to find a needle. Sifting through the sewer was still too gross an overtaking, even for her. Not only did she need to manually sift through the whole sewer floor inch by inch, step by step, she also needed to make sure that a sudden ripple in the wrong direction wouldn’t roll the marble into the checked section of the sewer- undermining all of her progress.

It was a repulsive task, a repetitive, mechanical overload of disgust and fear. It was a task much-much-much worse than simply holding her desires in check for just an hour. Only an hour passed and she had already started doubting her decision. She was realizing how deep a hole she had fallen into. She had blundered. Drinking the white goo would have been quite easy. I could have easily handled its effect. It was only cum. It’s not like I never gave Jason an oral. The corrupted her thoughts became, the sorrier she felt for herself, and the harder the task became. It was a task a lot more physically straining than disgusting.

There was even a silver lining to her task. It didn’t have a time limit.

Three hours later she was twenty meters from the door and cursing herself regularly. He lower back creaked every time she moved and the arm holding the torch was screaming.

A fool, she called herself. She even gave up completely a few times after the first three hours, but the fear of the unknown, Nicky’s death, her fate, the promise, and the goblins amused face, they all kept her going. Her resolve changed at her whims. Fear would strengthen her resolve for a few minutes during which she would sift through the begrudging floor with complete concentration, after which it would drop, making her complacent.

Hours and two torches later, she only saw endless darkness spread in front of her. Even the light from the torch didn’t change anything. Did the blasted tunnel even have an end? She knew the answer to that question. The straight tunnel had a warped end which coincided with the start, making it an unending loop. So the tunnel was actually endless but it spanned over a limited area, making it theoretically possible to find the marble with time. Time was the only variable which bummed her the most. Even after hours of concentration and hard work, Ria saw herself reaching nowhere near the end of her task.

She silently wept.

There was no stopping the tears once they started shedding. The loss of Nicky had been slowly bearing its fangs at her and now that she was alone, and emotionally and physically tired, it easily found a chance to the hurt her, to make her feel guilty. And with the weight of her unstable future pressuring her from the outside, tears came easily to her eyes.

She had many bouts of false hope lifting her feelings, but they only made her fall to her lowest. When her every find turned out to be a glass marble, a useless gem or some perfectly rounded stone –eroded over time-, she started doubting whether the goblin had even thrown the dammed marble or not. At first, she only stopped sometimes to rest and to warm her numb limbs, but as time trickled away her rest periods slowly increased in length and frequency.

She spent hours and hours scouring the filth and when the all too familiar sunlight entered her view she completely gave up. The ray penetrated through the darkness, dispersing the foggy blindness and providing that small patch of the sewer with greenery and calmness which was completely at odds with the rest of the tunnel.

Ria was breaking down. Inducing meanings from a simple ray of light, she was too tired, too weak, and too numb to clearly ponder.

“I’ll take a short nap and then…’ she didn’t know what she would do next. Once she completed this task there would be another one waiting for her on the next stage, then another one and then another one. This stage had the goblin and the next stage had a crocodile waiting for her. He would similarly ask for a piece of her humanity, leaving her broken and incomplete. And who even knows how deep the sewer went? How far was she from the exit? Her lower back was burning and her feet had blisters over their blisters, and her arms had gotten heavier than lead rods in the last half an hour. How would she face them? She had absolutely no fucking idea. The only reason she was still up and about was her legs, which though were also at their limits, were still providing her with much-needed reprieve.

She didn’t know anymore. She was too tired. If anything, hunger didn’t help her in her condition. Thank god for not providing a mirror in sight for she would have once again cried up looking at her sunken eyes and a protruding jaw. Her face had slimmed down significantly, showing the effect of extreme malnutrition. It shouldn’t be forgotten that she had only eaten a single bite worth of food ever since she had arrived in the sewer. The effects of hunger were much profusely visible from her waist. Her jeans, which had possibly seen better days, were only hanging from her waist because she had worn a belt.

She saw the bone handle of her knife sticking out of the water with dropping eyes. She ignored it, of course. She saw a bloating corpse lying with its head facing her. She ignored it too. Not many days had passed since she had first woken up next to it. She had screamed then upon noticing its stillness, now she indifferently stared at its eyes and passed by. The stench didn’t seem to affect her as much, the warmth from the light, however, made her shiver.

She found the corpse’s company much better than the Goblin who was always in lust. She didn’t even want to dream of sleeping with him in the same room from the fear of waking up with him using her as an object to release his lust.

She stood under the light with her eyes closed. In her weakness, she saw how noticeably dry the floor directly underneath the ray was. She picked a wall and sat leaning against it with light falling on her face. It was obtrusive, but its presence made her feel safe. Safety was something not easily found and much harder to obtain in the sewer. She had a long day ahead of her once she was done restoring some of her health. Yes, she had given up. Yes, she didn’t care anymore. Yes, she was rejecting reality. Having been through everything that she had, she wasn’t delusional and neither did she think someone would come to save her. But there was some part of her that knew she was only rejecting everything and was cranky only because of the harshness of her surroundings. And it also knew that a good night sleep would refresh her mentality.

All she needed was good night sleep. I’ll think about the marble tomorrow.

Closing her eyes, she let her thoughts go away, as the images of her previous Endeavors’ came to haunt her. Dust swirled on a red carpet in her dream. She stood there, a child holding a bone knife in her hand. Nicky lay dead in front of her. Beads of red hovered in the air, trapped by time, a framed witness of her deed. Nicky’s bloated dead body lay under the golden shower of a chandelier. Both of her eyes stared at her –wide, still, frozen- one green and the other gleaming golden under the light.

Ria opened her eyes open and frantically crawled toward the corpse. It lay there silently with its head facing away from her, toward the darkness. She rolled its head and looked into its eyes. One of its pupils was blown open with a rim of green surrounding the deep well of blackness, and the other eye was ruptured exactly in the center where a golden marble stayed fixed, covered in dried flakes of his blood and eye fluid.

Ignored the maggots pushing at it skin from underneath, Ria pried the whole eye out of the socket using a piece of the branch lying nearby. The method was disgusting, but she showed no hesitation. She got the marble out of the eye and sighed victoriously. After getting the marble out of the squelching organ, she peacefully placed the eye back on its owner’s chest. She celebrated the end of this task by screaming her frustration out of her system and stood up.

As she stretched her arms over her head, feeling excited and burning with resolve, the corpse, which hadn’t moved for a long time, blinked.