The path was chosen. All that remained was to walk it.
Jermal wanted to. Truly, he did. But a crushing weight pressed on his body, forcing him down every time he tried to rise.
After his first venture outside, he had retreated into the cool heart of the cave. He spent the next few hours or days resting. He had no way of knowing which.
When he finally awoke, he forced himself to stand. That alone took two full minutes of struggle. It felt as if the world itself was pushing against him, as if the air had grown heavier and wanted him on his knees.
Jermal had no explanation. His body worked fine when he lay still. Yet the moment he tried to stand, something unseen seemed to press down on his shoulders and spine.
Standing up did not mean standing straight. His back was bent like an elder's, but it was progress.
He could stand up. But he could not walk. So he collapsed and began to crawl toward the entrance of the cave. He had some scouting to do.
The first thing he noticed was that it was nighttime. Or so he believed. The dim-lit sun was still present, hanging in the sky like a dying ember, yet stars now shimmered faintly around it.
He peeked down, trying to find some sort of path that might lead back to his cave.
He quickly realized that he could not even see the bottom of the canyon anymore. Everything below was swallowed by darkness. It had to be nighttime, then.
"Pst, pst…"
Jermal pressed himself against the rock, trying to shift into a better angle. The stone scraped against his arms, the sound loud in his ears. Other than that, he heard nothing but the slow, stale wind brushing through the canyon. His heart was still unsteady from the crawl and from the oppressive silence of this world.
"PST, PST…"
He froze. That was not the wind. Every muscle in his body tightened. His breath caught in his throat as he listened, afraid even the sound of his lungs might drown out whatever was calling to him.
"Clack, clack…"
A sharp, unnatural rhythm. His skin prickled. There was no universe in which the wind created such a noise. Something alive was down there. Something with teeth or nails or bones that could strike stone.
He forced himself to look down into the black pit beneath the cliff. The dim sun could not illuminate it, not anymore. It felt like staring into the mouth of the world.
He squinted, eyes burning.
There. Something moved. Not the shifting of dust, not the sway of shadows. Something real. Something crawling or climbing or waiting.
Jermal felt his stomach twist.
He was not alone in this world.
Squinting further, he made a chilling discovery. The dim sun was not the cause of the darkness at the bottom of the canyon. It was, in fact, illuminating the ground.
But there was something on the ground, a mass of creatures, millions strong, moving through the shadows. Beasts that thrived in the darkness.
Such a huge number was almost impossible to believe. Jermal once again doubted his sanity.
He immediately ducked behind a rock, safe from the eyes of the void below. Sweat poured down his face, his heartbeat thudding in his limbs.
The situation was dire. Very dire.
He had originally thought giants had carved the grooves in the canyon. Now he knew the truth. It was whatever lived down there that had eroded the stone, like water shaping rock over millions of years.
He hadn't seen them during the day, though. That was something, right?
Now, the thought of going down seemed like suicide. He could barely walk, let alone fight. Even one of those creatures might have been too much for him in his prime, and there were millions of them.
Was there any point in fighting at all? Whoever had brought him here clearly wanted him dead. The odds were so impossibly stacked against him that he almost wanted to laugh.
He turned his gaze to the left, far off into the distance. The green looked like salvation, a place the beasts could not reach. He felt himself drawn to it.
Jermal quickly revised a plan in his mind. He would head left, following the canyon toward the greenery. Obviously, he could not travel at night.
He would move along the canyon walls, like a mountain goat keeping balance on steel rock. Going to the ground would be his last resort.
But first, he had to learn how to walk again.
"I'm just an infant. Truly, I am."
Back to square one.