Chapter 2 By a hair's breadth

There was absolute silence in the hole and all that could be heard every once in a while was the grunting of the boy and sound of dirt being moved.

"Did I make the correct choice? Maybe I should have stayed back at the lake? How long have I been in here crawling?" thoughts like these spun in his head like a tornado that couldn't be stopped threatening to rip his determination into pieces.

There was even moments where his vision would start to flicker.

"Is the oxygen in the air thinner?" he wondered again where and why this alien terms kept popping up in his head but as soon as he started thinking more deeply about it he would be subjected to the curse that was the torturous throbs of agony in his head.

He was on his last breathes and thought back to the short life he had in the cave, his vision had now become obsolete as the blurriness in the darkness did not really help the already depressing situation.

The boy's determination was starting to waver as he continued trying to crawl in the cold,silent and dark hole.

"How ironic my first thoughts were in the cold and dark and so would be my last." he thought while he started to flick into and out of consciousness. He closed his eyes one last time and decided to rest for eternity.

But, fortunately for the boy as luck would have it, it would not be his last day.

"Light?" the boy wondered if this was a hallucination, maybe a dying creatures last pitiful attempts at trying to survive. But no it was not a hallucination.

"Better than kicking the bucket." they boy wheezed without understanding why he thought it. The headache started to form but he grit his teeth almost shattering them and started to scoop the dirt to the side once again and move to the source of the light.

Slowly, inch by inch he moved, covered in the cold dirt and his skin being poked and scratched by the sharp rocks, luckily there were not deep wounds.

The light was now coming into focus and he could start to feel the heat of the source. "Almost there!" he yelled in his mind. His tempo started to increase and in a few minutes he would reach the opening. After a said minutes had passed he squirmed through and eventually fell out.

"OOF!" he cried out as he fell flat on the cold cobble floor.

"Wait not dirt?" he said as he looked down, "YES!" he exclaimed in his head.

The boy had not had a long life yet it felt like a roller coaster of joy and despair. "Roller Coaster?" again with the weird words. He winced at the sharp pain of the ache but quickly looked up and around when he remembered his was in unfamiliar territory.

It was tunnel of some sort and the everything from the ceiling to the floor was hard cobblestone.

What looked like wooden sticks that were covered in a wet cloth burned along the walls. The boy was curious and tried to touch the source of the glow but retracted his hand when he felt the hot flames of the cloth.

'Torch' that new thought popped up in his head and he grit preparing for the inevitable agony that would soon come, but oddly there was no such feeling. He blinked in shocked and stood there stupidly dazed at the new turn of events.

"No pain this time?"

He stared at the torch on the wall for a few seconds wondering what could be different about this item. "Not the place or time to be dazing out though." he scolded himself.

There were two directions that he could choose from, to his left or to his right. "Right" anxiously, he chose right and decided to walk steadily while holding on one of the walls. "Hopefully, it's not bad like the hole was..."

* * * * *

Shuffle

Shuffle

Shuffle

The boy's feet rhythmically hit the floor as he dragged himself through the tunnel.

"Huge" was all he could think of, the tunnel itself had a width that could fit 10 humans side by side and the length was mind numbing. He had walked for what he felt hours and nothing had changed. The lights were still the same and all that could be heard was his footsteps and rough breathing.

"Wait nothing has changed…" he stopped.

"Am I in an illusion?" he thought this but the headache started form. This time though he curled his fist into a ball and squeezed it tight as he tried to bear through the headache and remember what 'illusion' meant as his gut told him that it would help in knowing.

Piece by piece information started to form in his head and he could start to remember something called 'magic' that could trap people without their knowledge. He tried to squeeze just a bit more but by this time he was holding his head on the floor.

After almost passing out he decided to stop, he could at least try and bet on his slim luck that this method would work.

"I just need to focus on the path and notice every little detail. Concentrate!"

He continued walking but this time he did not spare even an ounce of concentration, every block, every torch and its details from the size of the flame, to the size of the wood and amount of cloth wrapped around the stick, all soaking up and analyzing the information.

Suddenly he felt a rush of air blast his face! And when he shut his eyelids reflexively he felt his body become nauseous. He felt to the ground helplessly limp like a sack of potatoes.

'Foul' was the first thought that came to his mind when he got his bearings, he wrinkled his nose and tried to open his eyelids so he could see the source of that putrid smell.

When he managed to open them he was greeted by a strange, new sight. He was longer in the musty cobblestone tunnel and was instead in a forest, But not any old forest, the trees were massive! Spanning roughly around 60m tall and the leaves were long forming a canopy that ensured that no creature underneath could have even a glimpse of the sun.

The vegetation in general gave of a dominating presence, so much that one would feel the need to bow down. Peculiarly though, the leaves were a dark purple and some of the veins in the bark seemed to give off a slight glow like the crystals only this time it was less vibrant and purple. The roots were even more weird as they stretched down the ground but the top part bulged out making it overall a very uncomfortable place to move in.

He had to traverse carefully less he trip and fall on the freaky roots. He decided to search the area for anything he knew,which honestly was not a lot.

"The small plants are the source of the horrible smell." he concluded after a little more analysis. Most small plants seemed to have miniature pores which released an unknown gas that stunk.

Oddly, one plant had the opposite of the purple foliage he had gotten used to, it instead had a very bright red colour and released a sweet scent. He kept sniffing the plant and it seemed to release all of his fatigue and anxiousness that had built up previously.

He plucked the fruit from its stem and inspected it cautiously, well that is until he felt his body move on its own.

"Guess there's no choice but to try" he thought up this excuse in his head as he took a big,juicy bite out of the fruit. The texture was slightly rough on the outside but chewy and juicy on the inside. Once he had reflexively swallowed the first bite, he went for another and then another until the fruit was no more.

Swallowing the last pieces and licking the juices off his face and on his arms. He decided to search for another, it was simply to addicting.

"Addicting?"

Thud!

He found himself on the floor paralysed.

"What?" he tried to move his fingers but even that slowly turned into a challenge.

His vision started to wobble and he couldn't tell if he was facing up or down. He started to slowly lose feeling in his body parts, first the legs and slowly up the waist until his neck was stiff. He also started to fade in and out of consciousness.

"No...was", "I too…careless" he thought slowly.

"I don't want to die…" were the boy's last thoughts as he passed out.