Mineshaft
Mineshaft. Those usually lead to a surface, right? Gripping your shovel tightly, you make your way down the tunnel, following the rails on the ground. As you make your way past wooden supports and old torches the walls start to shift from stone to a rough rad clay.
Suddenly you start to hear noises coming from deeper in the tunnel. Scuttling. Your breath catches as you see a wall of webs, and hear the sounds circle around you, above you and down the walls at your sides. As they grow closer you see countless eyes glow red, reflecting the torchlight. Spiders. Spiders the size of bowling balls.
There’s a moment of silence, of stillness, before one jumps at you and you slam it with your shovel like a baseball. It screeches as it flies down the tunnel and you whirl around just in time to counter another leaping at you from behind. Frantically you back down the tunnel, grabbing a torch and waving it at the spiders.
They hiss and scuttle back, which gives you time to deal with all the spiders behind you. Each time you crush one it sprays a putrid ooze all over your body, and you start to feel sick. One by one the spiders die, but it seems there’s still an infinite number. More than you could possibly kill.
You glance at the torch, and an idea hits. An idea that could just kill you. But if you don't do this you were going to die anyway. You sigh heavily, wind up your arm, and throw the torch as hard as you can, landing it in the cobwebs. They catch fire instantly and you hear the scream of dozens of spiders still hiding within. With a shudder you crush the few remaining ones now hiding from the blaze, and wait for it to burn up. The smell is horrific.
Finally the way clears enough for you to move past, and you try to ignore the smoldering corpses as you walk. Without the light of your torch it’s near pitch black. The mineshaft goes on for what feels like miles, winding through loops and dead ends.
You start scratching the walls with your shovel in an attempt to mark where you’ve been. Days pass, and you still survive. Drinking water where you can and eating the bodies of the spiders you killed. You scratch over your tunnels again and again, making tallies and glyphs that ultimately end up unhelpful. The clay walls of the tunnels are the only thing you could see, even when you close your eyes. Not that it matters when you close your eyes. No light is able to reach you.
Eventually after an unknown amount of time, you slink through another tunnel, scratching a symbol on it with a sigh. Then your heart leaps as you see a small hole in a wall. New territory.
You squeeze through and find what seems to be the main shaft of the mining operation. Light filters through the tunnel and you can see dust slowly falling to the floor. Your eyes fill with tears and you fall to your knees. You had forgotten how beautiful the light was. Even better, you could see the tops of houses a small ways down the desert. Just a short walk and you would be alright. You were going to be alright.
Ending 11/16