We were trapped in that darkened tunnel, crawling forward ever-so-slowly, needing to stop and feel before every step, for days. Weeks. Months. Years.

  Or maybe it was like, an hour, I don’t know. It was dark, and I didn’t have my phone with me to check the time. So sue me.

  The light ahead of us continued to guide our way, but it was growing brighter far too slowly for my taste. By the time the sounds of the shadow monster thrashing behind us faded, leaving us unclear if it or the crystal had given out first, the light was barely any brighter than it had been when we started out.

  But still, step after stumbling step, we continued onwards, Fallon shocking me by keeping up not only with the pace of my steps, but with the pace of my curses.

  I know, right? She looked so cute and sweet, who would’ve guessed she had such a mouth on her?

  Eventually, after somewhere between twenty minutes and twenty years, the light grew bright enough to light the way, a diffuse incandescence that cast everything in disorienting shades of gray. With the help of the gentle illumination, we were able to move faster, and as we became increasingly confident that no shadow monsters were dogging our steps (Lizarding our steps? I don’t know.) our anxiety slowly started to dwindle.

  Still, the hard truth was that we were no better off than we had been before. Shadow monsters or no, we were just as likely to die of hunger or dehydration as ever, and the brief struggles combined with the long creep through the hallways had left my throat about the same texture as firewood, dry and splinter-y.

  We kept moving anyway. What else could we do?

  Finally, the tunnel ahead of us opened up into another large cavern, all but identical in shape to the ones we had each woken up in, though with its own peculiarities.

  The hole we emerged from was one of six that studded the wall of half the room, each as craggy and dark as the others. The light we had been chasing came from the other side of the room, where a seventh tunnel entrance, this one perfectly circular, was overgrown with a thick crust of glowing crystals, like moss clinging to a burrow, or barnacles filling a pipe. There was barely any passable room through the jagged, crystalline overgrowth, and all of the shards seemed to feed off of each other, resulting in a brilliant glare that hurt to look at for too long, especially after so long spent in the stygian abyss of the tunnel.

  “There’s so many of them,” Fallon said, obviously as fascinated as a kid in a pet store. She walked from our tunnel without a moment’s hesitation, eyes locked on the crystalline mass.

  I gave a furtive look around the room, confirming that the other tunnels were still and quiet before I darted out after her.

  “They’re not like any crystals I’ve seen before,” Fallon was saying as I approached. She was bent forward at the waist, inspecting them carefully. “These lines, the way they cluster, the clarity of their facets…”

  “They also glow like a flashlight,” I pointed out. “If this is some sort of other world, it might not be playing by the same rules as ours.”

  Fallon looked over her shoulder at me. “You think so?”

  She said the words with such perfect, simple sincerity that it took me a moment to figure out that she was teasing me. We had literally fought two lizards made out of solid shadows. It was fairly obvious at this point that, wherever we were, the laws of physics we grew up with were loose guidelines at best.

  “Still, I can’t help but wonder…”

  Whatever Fallon couldn’t help but wonder would remain a mystery, as her words were suddenly cut off by a distant cry. Her face blanched, and I whirled around, looking at the tunnels in alarm.

  The sound, whatever it had been, had been distant, but it had also been unspeakably loud. Where the lizard-shadows had never made a sound louder than a hiss, even in their death throes, this cry been as much a roar as anything else– a roar that was more suited to some CGI monstrosity in a summer blockbuster than anything that existed in the natural world.

  Worse, even if the roar had been distant, we clearly hadn’t been the only ones who heard it. A susurrus of worrying whispers started from many of the other tunnels in the room, as if no small number of things were moving, unseen in the darkness, disturbed as if by the cry of a predator.

  My mouth went dry as I realized what was happening.

  “Fallon,” I warned her, not taking my eyes from the tunnel. My hands clenched futilely, leaving me wishing, for the millionth time, that I still had a weapon, even one as improvised and desperate as my little crystal shard. “I think we need to move.”

  “Where?”

  I turned the full force of my panic on her at the traitorous question. Where indeed? If there were more of those shadow monsters, and if they were all disturbed by that roar, then even the tunnel we had just come from wasn’t necessarily safe anymore. “I don’t know,” I told her, my vision wobbling at the sudden surge of panic that shot through me. The susurration of the approaching, rasping sounds was getting louder.

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  “Okay,” Fallon said, her voice much more solid than mine as she apparently took the baton of rational thought from my increasingly hysterical brain. “Through the crystals, then.”

  “What?” I turned to look at the jagged maw of razor-tipped crystals. There was some passable space between them, but all it would take was a single misstep and…

  “The shadows don’t like the crystals,” Fallon told me. “You saw that as well as I did. I don’t know if it's the light or just something about them, but it's the best option we have.”

  I turned from the crystalline-lined tunnel to the other darkened cave mouths–and then I noticed the dim red shapes rapidly becoming clear in the shadows of the other tunnels. “Okay, fine!” I told Fallon, hating how jerky my entire body felt.

  Without another word, the more slender girl began to move into the tunnel, her every motion careful and purposefully balanced. I couldn’t help but admire the shape of her arms and legs, revealed by her dress, as she showed off just how flexible her own improved body was. She twisted between two particularly large crystals, requiring her to arch her back and twist her head, then suddenly she was standing straight up.

  “Come on!” she urged me. “There’s plenty of room over here, you just need to get through the entrance!”

  “Okay…” I took a step into the maze of jutting crystals, feeling vaguely like an action movie hero slipping between laser beams, and desperately wished that my arms and legs would stop shaking. Unlike Fallon, who had gracefully slipped between the jagged spires, my movements were jerky and uncoordinated. Not only was I panicking, I was simply larger than my petite companion, and for all the improved strength of my trembling muscles, I didn’t have the experience to move with the grace needed to avoid the crystals.

  “It’s okay,” Fallon reassured me, her voice quiet, like she was speaking to a startled animal. “You’re almost there, it’s fine.” My left arm slipped along one nearly-horizontal crystal, and I felt it slice my skin in a small, clean cut.

  “You’re fine,” Fallon insisted, her voice only slightly higher pitched with alarm. I tried to keep moving, as slowly and carefully as I could manage, and she kept encouraging me. “You’re fine, everything's good, you’re so cl–”

  I heard her voice suddenly cut off, and I knew what must’ve happened. Despite myself, I carefully turned to look back towards the cavern, and saw three shadow-lizards emerge from one of the tunnels. Their heads flicked from side-to-side before locking on me, and somehow, I knew that they had smelled my blood.

  “Okay, you need to keep moving,” Fallon told me. I tried to do so, even as more lizards joined the first three from the other tunnels, all their eyes locked on me, all approaching me, slowly but ceaselessly. “Maybe a little faster?”

  I glared daggers at the girl and twisted a little. I had gotten to the last two crystals, jutting from the wall at conflicting angles, when one of the shadows lunged towards me.

  The monster was thrown back from the crystals as if repelled by the light, but I still flinched, and this time, a crystal ripped along my leg. “Fuck!” I swore.

  More lizards were crowding the entrance of the tunnel now, but I was done being careful. It earned me a couple more razor thin cuts, but I jerked myself past the final crystals and made it to the other side, all but collapsing to the ground.

  “Are you okay?” Fallon asked immediately, crouching next to me.

  I nodded, the motion jittery from sheer nerves. The cuts were thankfully shallow, and while they stung and oozed blood, they weren’t particularly threatening, even added to the numerous scrapes from my earlier fights.

  I noticed, as she tried to check me over, that while Fallon had made it through the crystals unscathed, she had a deep bruise on her wrist, already darkening from brown to purple, where the second lizard had bitten her.

  I looked back at the cavern we had left behind, where what looked like a couple dozen lizards were now pacing restlessly beyond the crystalline barrier, circling as if they were trying to find a way through. Another tried to scurry forward, but the motion dragged its back along a crystal. The monster jerked, but that motion jabbed it with another razor-sharp tip, and the resulting thrashing literally tore it apart until it finally dissolved into black smoke.

  “I think we’re safe,” Fallon observed with no small amount of satisfaction. I felt the same way–seeing the first monster die had finally given us a hint of relief, not to mention some revenge for our earlier terror.

  Turning away from the apparently stalled monsters, I looked at the rest of the tunnel.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed, my voice quiet with awe.

  The floors, wall, and ceiling were all equally coated in a thick layer of crystals. Unlike the entrance, the only jutting crystals were up by the top of the tunnel, feet above Fallon’s head. The rest was as smooth as polished glass, despite the appearance of glittering facets below the top layer. I couldn’t help but run a hand over the almost ice-slick surface.

  Fallon nodded. “I don’t understand this, either. If there was some flowing water, I guess it would make sense, but those ones by the entrance would’ve been washed away too…”

  “Magic,” I told her simply, too tired to bother thinking of a better explanation.

  Fallon frowned at the simple answer, and I could see her force the questions she wanted to ask out of her mouth for now, leaving her with a pinched expression.

  “There’s only one way forward,” she told me, pointing further down the tunnel.

  I quickly saw why she seemed unexcited by the prospect. I hadn’t noticed, in the dazzling gleam of the crystals, but ahead, the tunnel slanted downwards at a harsh angle. I crawled a little closer to it carefully, and quickly confirmed my suspicions. With the floor polished so smooth, it was as much a slide as anything else, one that could easily terminate in a wall of crystals that would slice us to ribbons or a drop that would kill us in a cleaner, but no less sudden, way. Not good.

  “A rock and a hard place,” Fallon understated, her eyes back on the lizards cluttered around the entrance.

  Still on the ground, I nodded in silent agreement, not sure what to do next. Idly, I leaned back on my palms, not noticing that my left hand had gotten a light coating of blood from the cuts I had picked up sliding between the wall of crystals. My hand went out from underneath me, and before I could recover my balance, my weight shifted down the tunnel, and suddenly I was falling, Fallon’s surprised face vanishing in an instant.