I crashed through the forest heedless of any obstacles in my path in a desperate attempt to escape. Countless times I had nearly fallen as my feet had gotten caught on thick tree roots, and my body was almost numb from exhaustion. Almost, since hot flashes of pain constantly slashed against my body from branches I couldn’t avoid. Those were minor concerns however, as opposed to the yipping war cries of my pursuers growing steadily louder behind me. I didn’t know how long I had been running, it could have been a few minutes or an hour, but I was growing more tired and beginning to slow down, while the little green monsters had only been gaining ground in the few desperate looks back I had afforded myself.

The only name I could come up with them was “goblins”, but that was purely insane. A bunch of short, green people with long pointed ears, big yellow eyes, and even bigger teeth. Most of them were clad in ragged clothes and leather armor, but I was more concerned about their rusty knives and swords. I had read more than enough fantasy books to know what a goblin was supposed to look like, I practically lived on the things, but none of this was supposed to be possible since earlier that morning I had been enjoying life at my university. I had been walking home from the cafeteria when the entire world shuddered and the brightest light I had ever seen nearly blinded me, and then nearly lost my stomach as the universe folded in onto itself. When I had blinked the spots out of my eyes, I was standing in a meadow surrounded by trees and the little things that looked just like goblins.

They stared at me, and I stared back at them. They were just as confused as I was at my sudden appearance, but with that infernal yipping war cry they had charged at me with almost no hesitation. Some had fired arrows, but most had simply drawn their rusty weapons and sprinted at me. For my part I turn and ran and had been running ever since. I used to run track and field back in high school but running on a nice track was different than running for your life in a forest, and the whips and cuts from tree branches attested to that fact.

A fresh pain announced itself in the back of my shoulder with an impact that made me stumble and almost fall. I didn’t know anything about what was going on, but deep down I knew that if I fell, I would die. Those things would swarm all over me, and that would be it. So, I corrected from the stumble and kept running. The pain in my shoulder didn’t go away however, and I craned my head around, trying to see what had happened. I immediately wished I hadn’t, and it was all I could do to stop my mind from spinning dangerously out of control as I saw a black feathered arrow sticking out of my left shoulder.

I did lose my stomach then, acidic bile burning my throat and splattering on my shirt and jeans, but I didn’t care. I had been shot with an arrow. A freaking arrow. That only happened in the books! My arm started to grow heavier and less responsive, my once decent running form ruined as the left side of my chest stopped doing what I wanted it to do. Stumbling over another root, I cried out in pain as the arrowhead grinded against something in my back, and the yipping from behind me grew louder and changed pitch. I was starting to lose the chase, and the goblins knew it. Another arrow landed with a meaty thump into the small of my back and I let out another desperate cry of pain, and with mounting horror my legs gave out from under me, and I fell.

The only reason I wasn’t killed by the goblins was because of the river that cut through that part of the forest. I had been so focused on the arrows and goblins behind me that I hadn’t even realized that there was a river there until I started tumbling head over heels down the steep bank, landing in the freezing cold water. All the air in my lungs had been forced out of me when I had crashed down the slope, and I just lay there, gasping for oxygen as I floated in the river. Thankfully it wasn’t shallow enough that a rock had bashed open my head, but that was little comfort when the cries of my pursuers kept growing louder. Finally getting some air into my lungs, the terror pushed me to get up and keep running. Ironically the cold water helped give me a second wind of sorts, a jolt to my system that reset my brain. Splashing and wading to the other side of the river was painful, but as much as I wanted to collapse on to the bank I forced myself to keep going.

Salvation greeted me when I scrambled my way up the opposite bank of the river. Just there, perhaps four hundred yards away, was a collection of boulders. Something about their placement bothered me, the weird way they were arranged and how they formed one side of a hill, but all I was concerned about was safety, not the strangeness of the local geography. In the middle of the boulders was a roughly door shaped hole that led into the pitch-black interior of a cave. Normally that would have been deeply unnerving and I wouldn’t have gone in, but right now it looked incredibly reassuring.

I risked a look back and saw that the river had bought me time, with the goblins hesitating at following me through the river. The water was deeper for the shorter creatures than it had been for me, but even as I look more arrows began to whistle through the sky towards me. None of them hit but I got the message and turned back towards the boulder covered hill. My breath burned in my lungs and every muscle in my body was screaming at me to stop, but I pushed through it, desperately making my way towards the gap in the rocks. Safety beckoned to me in the darkness, and I ran into it, relishing in the safety that the surrounding stones offered.

The cave was colder than I thought it would be, which was a comfort against my sweaty skin. Although I wanted to do nothing more than just sit down and sleep for a week, I knew I wasn’t safe yet. Those monsters were still behind me, and I was going to put as much distance between them and myself as I could. The frantic energy given to me by the cold water began to wane however and I allowed my pace to slow, letting my eyes to readjust to the darkness and the new environment, although somewhere along the way everything had gotten somewhat blurry.

It was immediately obvious now that I was in here that this cave was not a natural formation. From the outside it had just been a pile of rocks forming a weird cave, but inside it was an entirely different story. The walls, floor, and ceiling were cut flat, and I slowed even further to a light jog to avoid slipping on the smooth floor. The ground sloped downwards almost immediately from the cave entrance, and while it wasn’t steep enough for me to lose my footing, it was clear that I was going deeper into the earth. That felt like it should be more concerning, but I was too numb to care. The corridor, it was clearly a corridor now, curved and snaked downwards, and I passed several doorways cut into the rocks.

As I began making my way through a series of larger rooms, I started to wonder how long I had been in the cave. It felt like it had been a while, but it couldn’t be, right? I had just run in here; I was just tired and confused from running so long. All I needed to do was just sit down and rest. My eyes began to flutter close, but I snapped them back open again.

No, I thought to myself. I have to get away, I have to keep running.

Over the course of the next couple of rooms however everything began to blur into obscurity, and my body really began to protest from the pain. As a compromise, I decided that in the next room I would finally stop and take a rest. It was probably far enough away from the goblins. That sounded like an excellent plan, and I managed to stumble the rest of the way across the rest of the large chamber I was in. It was odd that I was stumbling, but I chalked it up to being tired from the run. My back and legs were still sticky with sweat despite the cold, and when I adjusted my shirt my fingers came away wet with some kind of fluid. Blood? No, surely not. Arrows didn’t make you bleed that much. People didn’t bleed when they got shot in the books.

I pushed open the rotting wooden doors, which were so old they nearly fell apart at my touch. The room beyond was almost invisible behind the blurriness and my tears, and when had I started crying? At the end of the room there was a tall chair, and I could just make out a figure starting to move.

“Help.” I croaked as my legs gave out from underneath me and I collapsed onto the freezing ground, my body numb. “I think I’m really hurt.”

As blackness started to close in around me, I heard a woman’s voice echo in the chamber.

“… What?”