Jace's grip tightened on the rung as he took another step down. The second one wobbled alarmingly beneath his weight, the corroded metal shifting against crumbling mortar. For an instant he imagined the rung breaking free, his body dangling helplessly above stone and water. He pictured himself later, hanging instead from a butcher's hook, waiting to be carved up like a holiday roast. That thought was motivation enough to keep climbing.
"Creepy well or cannibals," he muttered to himself sourly. "Great menu of options."
For what felt like the hundredth time, Jace wondered where he was, what bizarre nightmare he'd been dragged into, and which malicious cosmic idiot had decided to drop him here—naked, unarmed, and utterly lost.
The light from above dwindled steadily as he descended, the circle of sky shrinking further with each rung. The air grew cooler, the damp smell of stone and stagnant water seeping into his nose. The walls glistened with moisture, slick beneath his fingertips whenever he brushed too close. The metal rungs were cold and clammy beneath his hands, the kind of chill that seeped straight into his bones.
Down and down he went, his breath echoing faintly in the hollow shaft, every sound reminding him just how deep he was going into darkness.
"I'm definitely catching Legionnaires' disease," Jace muttered to himself, his voice echoing faintly up the shaft.
The meager light from above barely reached halfway down the narrow well. Before long, he was forced to rely on touch alone, one cautious step at a time, his foot probing into the darkness for the next rung. His hands clung to the clammy metal, each bar slick with condensation. Every few steps he would crane his neck upward, staring at the shrinking blue circle of sky overhead. It was the only reminder that there was still a world above and that he hadn't been swallowed entirely by the earth.
"Maybe they're not actually cannibals," he whispered, though the words rang hollow. "Maybe they were just… talking themselves up. Macho nonsense."
Even as he said it, he knew he didn't believe it. The memory of their casual debate—elf versus human, tender versus stringy—was burned into his brain like a scar. He tightened his grip on the rung and kept climbing, down, down, into darkness so complete he could barely see his own hand.
He realized he had reached the bottom when his foot splashed instead of finding solid metal. The shock of icy water shot straight up his leg. Gingerly, he tested the ground. The floor of the well was covered in ankle-deep water, enough to soak through his sandals in an instant. Worse, the stone beneath was treacherous, as slick as the walls. His foot slid out from under him and he nearly cracked his skull against the side, saved only by the desperate grip of his hands still locked on the rungs above.
He landed awkwardly, sprawled half in and half out of the frigid water. Now his pants—already blotched with blood and ointment—were joined by a fresh layer of cold, grimy well-water. "Lovely," he sighed bitterly.
From his low vantage point, however, he spotted something he otherwise might have missed: a slightly darker patch in the already oppressive gloom. Squinting, he realized it wasn't just a shadow but an opening—an arched tunnel bored into the side of the well.
Jace hesitated, then stretched out a tentative hand, fingertips brushing the edge. The hole was real. It felt wide enough to squeeze through, a passage sloping into blackness. Maybe a drainage tunnel, maybe the source of the water.
His stomach twisted. Every part of him screamed bad idea.
"No," Jace said firmly, pulling his hand back. "I'm definitely not interested in crawling in there."
But the tunnel waited, its dark mouth gaping like something that had been expecting him all along.
"Reject quest [Secrets of the Well]?" the voice in his head prompted.
"Sod off," Jace muttered without hesitation.
He tilted his head back, staring up once more at the bright, shrinking circle of sky overhead. It looked so far away now, a perfect little window of freedom he had no chance of reaching without climbing straight back into cannibal territory. Then he turned his gaze to the other circle—the yawning black mouth of the tunnel carved into the wall beside him. One symbol of escape, the other of entrapment, and both were equally unappealing.
Jace groaned, long and theatrical, like a man condemned. Still kneeling in the icy ankle-deep water, he shuffled closer, his hands reaching out reluctantly to explore the opening. The stone rim was damp, slimy under his fingertips, the chill of it sinking into his skin. He probed deeper into the pitch-dark passage, sweeping his hands cautiously along the walls as if half-expecting them to snap shut like the jaws of some colossal beast.
"Brilliant," he muttered under his breath. "Absolutely brilliant. Let's all go poking around the creepy hole in the bottom of a murder well. That's a great idea."
But his hands kept moving, because in the end, he already knew—he didn't really have a choice.
Jace squeezed into the tunnel, inching forward in an awkward shuffle that forced him to scrape along the walls. The passage was nothing more than a circular pipe of aged brickwork, each surface slick with condensation and a film of slime that clung to his skin. It was technically wide enough for him to crawl, but only just. His shoulders brushed constantly against the clammy sides, his knees and elbows bumping and grinding as he wriggled forward.
The faint glow from the bottom of the well vanished almost immediately, swallowed whole by the oppressive dark. In less than a dozen feet, the last trace of light had disappeared behind him, leaving Jace with only the sound of his own breath and the damp rasp of skin against stone.
He advanced by feel alone, fingertips dragging across wet brick, sandals slipping on the slime-slick floor. The smell was unbearable—thick, stale, a rancid mix of mold and stagnant water that seemed to ooze from every surface. He wrinkled his nose in disgust, then tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth. If only I could switch off my sense of smell as easily as my vision's already abandoned me.
"This is definitely not what I planned to do with my day," he muttered into the darkness.
The possibility of a dead end gnawed at his nerves. If the tunnel simply ended in a wall, he'd have no choice but to crawl backward—blind, scraped raw, and half-drowned in slime—all while praying the cannibals didn't come poking around to check the well.
"Granted, my plans for today weren't exactly carved in stone," he said, voice muffled by the tunnel. "But still, 'cannibals and spelunking' aren't exactly things you casually slot into the schedule between lunch and gaming."
His own voice didn't do much to ease his nerves, but the silence without it was worse. The well above had felt suffocating, but this pipe was a different beast entirely. The blackness here was absolute, the air close and heavy. Every shuffle forward made it feel as though the tunnel was tightening, pressing inward, trying to squeeze the breath from his chest. Panic licked at him with icy fingers, whispering that he was trapped, that the walls were closing in. He knew it wasn't true—rationality screamed that the tunnel hadn't changed size—but rationality was a flimsy shield in this cold, wet void.
His nerves stretched thinner with every movement. The urge to retreat clawed at him, telling him to scramble back and take his chances with the cannibals. At least they were out in the open air.
Then his hand landed on something unexpected. Not brick. Not slime-slick stone. Something different.
Wood.
Jace froze, every muscle locking tight. Slowly, carefully, he probed the surface with his hands. Rough grain met his fingertips beneath the slime, confirming it wasn't just his imagination. Planks. Solid, wet planks. A hatch? A barrier? A door wedged into the wall of the tunnel?
He pressed against it, testing, though the darkness gave him no clue of what lay beyond. The air around him felt subtly different—less stifling, more open. Or maybe that was just his desperate mind conjuring illusions of space and escape.
In the suffocating dark, even hope felt like a trick.
Jace's exploring hands found something new—flat, solid, and definitely not stone. Wooden planks. They were damp beneath his palms, slick with slime, but when he pressed down they held firm. Relief flickered through him; whatever this was, it was sturdier than the treacherous bricks he had crawled across.
The surface of the wood was rough, almost abrasive, like sandpaper. Running his hands back and forth, he realized it wasn't natural grain—it felt as if someone had deliberately coated the planks with grit, glued or tarred into place to keep footing steady even when wet. Jace had seen something like it before on hiking tracks, walkways designed for muddy slopes or moss-slick steps. Great, he thought. Somebody built this deliberately. Because nothing says comfort like finding out the creepy murder-well has amenities.