Abaddon

The ground opens beneath you with a roar and you tumble down into the hot depths of the earth. Hands of granite slow your fall, then open wide. You grab at them helplessly; gravity sucks you down like a banquet of oysters.

You come to an open space where your screams echo and die in vastness. You fall raggedly silent. Heat buffets you from side to side; your head rings with it. You catch fire; the light from your crisping, crackling body lights a vast and moving plain, dark shapes of beasts curling and snapping upon it. One of them, greater than the rest, raises a blurred and monstrous head and fixes you with ill-matched eyes. You are a cinder, a brief flare of nothing, and it hunches deformed shoulders together to reach for you. You scream, still burning, as that shifting, protean claw draws you in.

You are caught on a palm the size of a city block. It lifts you up, glares at you through the ragged pupils of a squid. You tremble and flake away; you have run and dripped like a candle but somehow you live on, in perfect, unendurable agony.

“My little fly,” it whispers, “my untruth. Welcome to Dark; what will you do?”