On a day like this, when she didn't have to go to work, Tiara loved to go hiking through the forest and up the small mountain near her hometown.
That was, of course, a lie. If she were wandering around the scenery close to Wormborg at all, it wouldn't have mattered if she'd had to go to work that day or not; she only went wandering, "hiking", if she had problems to deal with that she'd rather not. The forest and the mountain were her hiding places, and she'd been itching to run and hide for a few days now.
So there Tiara was, halfway up the modest mountain of Joggberg in boots she'd started to realise weren't actually very suited to long, hard walks at all about an hour ago. She dropped her backpack on the ground and sat next to it. She took one of the two bottles of water she'd brought with her out of the pack and drank. She thought she promised herself that she'd try to be a little smarter about water this time, but this little break she was taking used up the last of her first bottle. She sighed after emptying it, then shoved the litter back into her backpack and checked her phone. Tiara's lock screen told her that it was 11:02.
No wonder I'm starting to feel a bit hungry,
she thought to herself as she put her phone back in the bag pocket she'd taken it from. She'd brought sandwiches with her for lunch, but she didn't want to dig into those until it was at least noon. Another sigh.
It didn't take Tiara much longer to decide she wanted to spend the rest of this break with her boots off. After she'd stripped them off, her socks were next. She tucked the socks into her boots, next to her pack. Getting air to her feet was a relief after the torture walking in her boots had turned out to be. They were bright red in a few places, and large blisters had already formed on her heels. Other than that, she was just sore. That was a relief to her at least. She tried rubbing and massaging parts of her sole to ease the pain, but she wasn't sure if the effect would matter once she put the boots back on. She stroked the grass next to her, then wiggled all her toes against it too.
Soft enough,
she thought, and decided that, if only for a bit, she'd rather try going some of the way barefoot from here on. She tied the laces of her boots together and hung them through on one of the straps of her backpack, then set off on up the mountain again.
Not 10 minutes later and Tiara was beginning to feel nature's call. The nice thing about being out in nature so far from other people was that you pee just about anywhere. Still, she liked to pick a place with a little privacy anyway, just in case. There was an erratic boulder that would be easy to crouch behind, so she made her way over to it. Once there though, as she hooked her thumbs under the waistbands of both her leggings and her panties, she began to get a strange feeling in her head. It was almost as if someone were calling out to her, only stranger, more intrusive.
"Is someone there?" She shouted nervously, moving her hands away from her bottom layers.
"You are suitable. Come down to me,"
the voice echoed in Tiara's mind, reverberating silently, somehow, inside her head.
"Wha?" Tiara said aloud to no one at all before catching herself.
I've gone crazy. I've come up to this stupid mountain with a little stress and ended up cracking.
She turned around to walk away, walk all the way back to her shitty apartment in the centre of town, to forget this happened and hopefully not be crazy anymore after a nap. But as she took a step away from the boulder, the ground gave way beneath her feet, and she tumbled down into a cavern within the mountainside. She let out a short, sharp scream as she fell, then hit something of a slope. Although her feet touched the slope first, she crumpled onto her back straightaway, and made several grunts of pain as she rolled sideways down a stony, dirty ramp and into a corridor of rock.
After a minute or so of laying where she'd come to a rest just to try and get over the pain her fall had caused, Tiara heaved herself back up onto her feet. Her boots had unhooked themselves from her backpack strap somehow and now laid about two thirds of the way back up the slope she'd rolled down, made visible only by the small amount of sunlight coming through the same hole she had.
Her clothes were a mess. Her leggings had ripped in several places, and she was covered in dirt from head to toe. At least her top seemed to at least survive, unlike her leggings. She put down her backpack to investigate any damage there; both the pack and its contents were fine, even if the pack had become as dirty as her clothes.
A sudden pain made Tiara realise she'd grazed both of her elbows fairly badly in the fall. They were bloody and covered in gravel-sized stones and dirt. She cleaned them as best as she could with just her spit and her hands, but that would have to do. After all, the closest thing to first aid she'd brought with her was a pack of adhesive bandages, and those weren't exactly ideal for the situation.
Her feet were almost as bad as her elbows. Less bloodied by far, but just as dirty, and covered in those small, gritty pebbles. She dusted them off, then looked down into the cave she'd found herself in. Despite the expected darkness down the corridor under the mountainside, there was a faint, pale yellowish light deeper in that caught her attention.
"Yes. You are almost here. Walk."
That voice again. Voice? Feeling? Tiara couldn't decide, but this time, instead of fearing for her sanity, she found herself willing to obey. After all, that light was right there; she was clearly close to
something.
If she was going to fall into a cave, she might as well investigate it too, otherwise it just wouldn't be worth the pain. So she walked, leaving her backpack and boots behind. She walked towards the light, following the underground corridor as it continued on and on. She feel it still sloped ever-so-slightly downwards, even if that angle hadn't been enough to keep her rolling down. The tunnel was surprisingly large too; probably around double her height. Almost perfectly circular too, and smooth compared to the ramp that had first greeted her when she'd fallen down the hole. She wasn't an expert on caves or geology in general, but that seemed very odd to her.
She realised very soon that the shape and smoothness of the cave tunnel didn't matter very much at all. Not compared to what she had just found anyway. The source of that dim, yellowish light was a large disc-like shape at least two metres in diameter lying at the end of the cave with root-like tentacles sprawling out from underneath in just about every direction. From one part of the disc, pointing almost to the back wall of the tunnel, sprouted a near-conical, upward-turning growth that wasn't covered in the same glistening, luminescent skin as the rest of whatever this thing was, but was instead closer to white fish meat in appearance. It also had three rings around it of what appeared to be smooth black eyes sunken into little indents. So it was probably the "head" of this thing, and if that were the case, then opposite it on the disc, slopped on the ground but still pointing more or less at Tiara, was a "tail". It looked like it had two tubes, one on either side, that ran down it from where the edge of the disc merged with them all the way down to where they met in a wrinkled nub at the end of this "tail". Where the tubes weren't, the surface was ribbed and bumped in a wavy, almost sickening way. Tiara also noticed that this tentacle was the only part of this monstrosity aside from the "head" that wasn't faintly glowing, despite being covered in the same shiny, wet, yellowish skin that most of the rest of it was. Did that mean it was more important, like a head would be? Maybe less important, somehow? No, did she even know these were a head and a tail? She had no idea
what
this thing was.
"You have come,"
the "voice" now felt so loud and strong in Tiara's head that she fell to her knees clutching her head, squashing it between her arms to try and contain the pain, the discomfort. She was also only vaguely aware that she was screaming.
"Apologies,"
it echoed emotionlessly, clearly ignoring her suffering despite the apparent attempt to show some remorse.
"We are close now. You will have to become acclimatised to my starker presence."
Tiara was in tears, cradling her head in her hands and rocking back and forth. At the very least she wasn't screaming aloud anymore.
Presence!? Is that a joke?
"It is not. I am attempting to communicate with you."
Tiara's eyes widened. It had responded directly to her thoughts. She looked up, back at the thing that lay in front of her.
"Is that... you?" She slowly asked. Her head still felt like it could split open, like the worst, most-sudden onset migraine that could ever happen, but it might've been starting to recede just a little now.
"The creature before your eyes now is indeed me, yes,"
the voice in Tiara's head answered.
"But... you're not speaking. It's like..." Tiara trailed off as she tried to think of a way to word what this thing "communicating" with her felt like.
"Almost like you are being made to think things, though you can tell they are not in fact your own thoughts,"
the thing said it for her just before she had a chance to voice it herself.
"Stop that," Tiara breathed. "
Stop. That.
"
"I cannot. We are having a conversation."
"No, we're not," Tiara stood again, and was about to turn around to leave the cave when one of several of the creature's tentacles snaked along the ground until one of them leapt at her and wrapped itself tightly around her arm. She yelped in disgust and fear as she was yanked back onto her knees by the creature.
"No!" She cried out instinctively. "Let me go, let me
leave!
" She tried to pry the tentacle off her arm without even a hint of success. She stopped fighting. As much as this thing was slimy and vile, it was also far too strong to fight off. "Please. I want to go home."
"You cannot. You must help me."
"What's
that
supposed to mean?" Tiara spat at the creature. "And why would I? You're a
thing
in a
cave
and you're holding me captive!"
