She stood at the edge of the great hole, looking down. Two armies rested, one on each side of her, trapping her between their amorphous forms. But she belonged to neither side of this war. She cared only for the forsaken hole they fought over.
The surface of the hole, though it had seemed empty and dark but a moment before, now shimmered and glistened as if it held water within its depths, as if there had been movement beneath its smooth, glassy veneer. She leaned forward slightly, but could perceive nothing within the unfathomable depths of the hole.
She took a cursory glance at her surroundings, the guards she had bribed standing incuriously behind her, before leaning forward until her whole front was touching the wet, viscous surface of the hole. The skin of its surface held for a few sickening seconds before releasing her, suddenly, into the dark liquid within the hole. She dropped quickly, much more quickly than she had expected, through the abyss within the hole, until at last the line she had tied for herself above grew taut, jerking her to an abrupt halt.
At the sudden stop, she began working to get her bearings. She spun slowly at the end of her line, the momentum of her fall now redirected to propel her gently side to side. She had known, intellectually at least, that the hole would be larger inside than out. They had said, after all, that it held its own separate world. Only now did she realize how foreign the world within the hole truly was.
Around her, she could see only the line that tied her back to her safe world. Even that was only visible for a few feet, disappearing into the darkness surrounding her in a wave-like haze. Though she could not see, she had a definite sense of the enormity of the space around her. The sounds she had made dropping down had been muted by the syrupy atmosphere of the hole, but she thought she could hear the faint echoes of her descent even now.
She would have to move quickly. They said powerful creatures lurked within this darkness, and even had that not been so, she had wasted enough time getting to the hole in the first place. She had no time to go sight-seeing now that she was finally here.
Closing her eyes and taking a few shaky breaths, she focused her attention inside of herself. She could feel her tensed muscles and worked to relax them one by one. The pressing darkness was having more of an effect on her than she would have liked admit, but she knew she would only progress slower by worrying. She painstakingly took control of her troubled emotions, shutting them away until she felt only apathy. Then she found within herself the emotional tie that attached her to him.
She held that before her in her mind’s eye until its glow was so bright it nearly burned to imagine it. Opening her eyes once again, she could see, faintly visible in the muddied light, a shining golden line leading from her chest and disappearing into the darkness just in front of her.
She moved her arms and legs in a swimming motion, trying to move towards the end of the golden string. As she thrust herself forward, the atmosphere that she had previously fallen through so easily thickened to a soupy consistency. Her body began to move, slowly at first and then more quickly as she steadied into a more rhythmic motion.
Though she could feel the passing of the atmosphere around her body and knew herself to be in motion, the darkness all around her did not change. She felt an eerie sense of going nowhere, despite all her effort. Eventually, however, she spied a single point of light in the darkness, growing larger and brighter as she moved towards it.
The golden string led her on and on, past the first light and on to another, and another. She passed into a field of the comforting lights, some as small as her head and some larger than her whole body. Shadow still pressed in against these distant, pale lights, but the simple presence of brightness in this dark, empty world alleviated some of her worry.
At last, just as she began to grow weary from her travels, she could dimly discern the tail of the golden string. It hovered just underneath and beyond one of the largest of the floating lights. With a grateful push, she traveled incautiously forward to her end goal.
Just as she swam close to the great light, she spied a movement underneath it. At first her heart leapt. She had seen him! He was alive! But within seconds, she realized that the bulk beneath the light had been far too large to be a human man.
With a sudden, numb shock, she registered what her eyes, so focused on the soothing lights, had failed to see just beyond them in the darkness. Surrounding her were dozens of gigantic, eyeless, evil-looking fish. They barely moved. She could not even distinguish the motion of their breathing, if they breathed at all. And attached to their backs by a long thin line, were her one comfort in this world, the floating lights.
Looking more closely into the oppressive darkness, she could see dozens of small creatures: fish, snakes, beasts unrecognizable in the dark. They flocked to her as she tread water, holding her up in the weak atmosphere even as they bit into her and fed from her flesh and bones.
And in front of her, just beyond the reach of the light, she noticed at last the huge eyeless face, the great lips and the sharp teeth jutting menacingly from them. It was into the dark crevasse between these lips that her golden string led her.
With an immediate sense of alarm, she pedaled awkwardly backwards. The abrupt motion dislodged many of the smaller, weaker beasts from her arms and legs. New creatures flew quickly to her struggling form, engulfing her in their hunger, even as she dislodged others. She could feel herself drowning, being eaten alive by these beasts in this dark world.
No matter how she struggled she could not free herself from their tiny grasps. She tugged on the rope connecting her to her home world, but she knew that the energy these tiny beasts had stolen would prevent her from making the return trip.
