Lucky?

He came to.

His eyes flattered open and slowly adjusted to the moonlight.

He was staring at the sky... and it appeared to be moving, the trees around him were moving too and a soft swish graced his ears as the skin of his back felt warm and sour, his whole body was sour.

He was being dragged over the ground!

He forced his eyes shut to shake of the mental fatigue and the nascent ringing in his ears. The fog that was clouding his mind cleared slightly as he recalled where he was and what had happened.

Terror.

Like a flash flood, terror and fear embraced him in a cold sweat as he remembered his life was in danger.

He was being dragged across the ground; a vice grip on his leg. Desperately, flailed his arms around in a futile attempt to grab on to something that would slow down his doom, uncaring of the screams of his battered and bruised body.

His bloodied palms failed to grab hold of the local vegetation, grass and bushes slipped through his grip with equal ease.

Helpless.

His ragged breath caused a pain like no other at his chest, his ribs were cracked or broken he was certain of that, but he was still alive if only barely. He might have a chance, he thought in desperation.

Panicked, he fought harder, his survival instincts kicking in and the adrenaline in his blood dousing his mind and slightly numbing his pain. He had to survive, he wanted to survive. In the face of death, he chose life. Ironical.

His fingers dug into the ground, stones and splinters pierced at their tips and dove even deeper with each attempt, it was painful, but he gritted his teeth through it.

However that attempt proved futile, he switched targets and reached over his leg, to tear the tentacles grip off and escape.

His face grimaced as his hands ran over the callous ugly skin of the tentacles. It was not the time to be grossed out, he fought through the disgust, burrowing his fingers between his leg and the tentacle.

Strong; the grip was powerful—his feeble, broken arms unable to match it—and it grew even tighter once he tried to pry it off himself.

Suddenly he was being dragged faster.

He panicked some more and forced his muscles to contract even further.

Pain.

The tentacles had small needle like protrusions that had dug deep into his flesh.

Grunting, he summoned all his strength his new—if mangled—physique afforded him. The tentacle budged, and with that, a new world of pain as the needle extensions struggled to maintain hold of his leg, digging deeper and thickening to increase their hold.

He shrugged off the pain, at least he tried, it was hard, but he had to. Dying was not part of his to do list, at least not among the top priorities.

Strenuous; it was mammoth task, but he managed, he felt his whole body get invigorated by a strength he didn't posses earlier, maybe it was always there or maybe it was his adrenaline doing all the work, he didn't mind.

Finally he managed to pry the tentacle off him and the world around him stopped moving. He enjoyed the relief for only a second before painstakingly trying to get his battered body of the ground in an attempt to escape.

His foot was covered in blood, he slipped and he felt a tentacle coil over his battered leg. More panic ensued.

Despair.

He wanted to cry, all that effort and he still couldn't get away. This really was his end. He hadn't even enjoyed a day of his new life and he was already meeting his end. He screamed—cried almost—like a trapped beast, fighting more desperately against the tentacle.

Then another one slid over the ground and wrapped around his arm, then his other arm was restrained, then he felt his whole body immobilized under the heavy grip of multiple tentacles, the needle protrusions piercing at his skin adding to the already overwhelming pain that threatened to rob him off his sanity.

He cried, wailed, screamed and shook himself fervently. It didn't work, nothing worked, he was going to die. Despair turned him weak and he lost all sense of reason. It was futile to struggle.

Lucky.

Blue light filled his immediate surrounding. He stopped his flailing only briefly and his eyes peered through the broken trees and over the giant craters.

The air around him appeared to be filled with... blue disks. He was confused and then he was terrified, was this the doing of the abomination, was this it's final trick before it ended his life?

The disks were made up of a varying number of concentric circles that spun around themselves. The space between each circle was filled with letters that seemed to aligned themselves as the circles spun. It was as if they sort order and clicked in place once it was achieved, waiting for the other letters to fall in place; it appeared to be a preparatory process, but for what?

Michael couldn't even begin to guess, his mind was in disarray to process this new turn of events.

He shook his body even more like an earthworm covered in salt, as his body approached the chasm.

Then, the air around him starred to become colder and colder until his breath fogged up with every exhale.

Before he could register what was happening, a blizzard short forth from the circles at tremendous speed, aimed for the chasm that the tentacles came from.

He almost sighed in relief, until he begun to worry over what was powerful enough to attack something so overwhelmingly powerful.

Responding to the attack, the beast of the chasm flung Michael through the air as the grip around him loosened.

An inhuman shriek field the air as the chasm became covered in ice and wisps of darkness filled escaped from it.

Michael hit the ground with the grace of a falling meteor and promptly passed out.

He was too exhausted to maintain a grip on his consciousness and the hit was the last straw.

The beasts tentacles flailed around and burrowed back into the ground, escaping the ice that threatened to freeze it to death.

Michael lay unconscious as the beast retreated it's massive appendages and the blue circles shimmered out of existence.

Then in mid air, space was distorted and reality appeared to warp and fold as a rift opened.

Adorned in a hooded cloak, a man stepped through the rift and made his way to where Michael lay his body a mangled mess covered in blood and tarted clothes.

The figure bent over and scooped Michael up like he weighed nothing tossing him over his shoulder.

He stepped through the rift that had remained open, closing only after he cleared it.

The forest was again shrouded in a somber silence that signaled the end of an especially ruthless one sided battle.

There were no animals in sight, only the revolting bugs crawled over the floor; some headed for the patches of blood others scurrying into the chasm. The eerie white light of the moon continued to illuminate the forest from high above as it charted it's path through the night sky.