three steps from hell / wrench monkey, day 2.

Felicity beds down for the night in a warm alcove she finds just behind an old miners cart. Nimble fingers investigate the wheels, the tracks, the little simple machines that seem to operate the breaks and the steering. They ache from hours spent in the cold, even tucked into the deep pockets of the brown fur jacket she clutched around her hadn’t been quite protection enough from the winds; down here in the mines though, she can feel like life sinking back into them, leaving them tingling and aching as the feeling returns.

With a shudder, she settles for tugging on the cart as hard as she can, just for assurances the thing isn’t going to roll backwards and crush her while she’s sleeping, you know?

“C’mon, Vik,” she says around a wide-mouthed yawn, stretching her arms above her head. She unfurls the brown jacket, laying it out beside her sleeping bag for the monkey to curl up on. She hesitates only a second before running her fingertips over his silky, white fur; the chipped blue polish stands out so brightly against the white fluff, even in the dim light of the oil lamp. “No one is going to find us down here.”

Sleep comes only fitfully for the girl pretending to be from Three. She’d been right to fear the things that lurked in the recesses of her own mind, the nightmares she could conjure in the daytime had nothing on the things that hid in the dark.

Blistering winds whips at her cheeks, feeding the well of roiling, fiery anger that consumes the pit of her stomach. A knock comes, echoing as if from the sky, and Felicity realizes the simmering mist that lifts off the scorched ground beneath her feet rises as steam only to hit glass. Looming, heavy droplets of moisture collect on the sky above her, nasty and soiled by the soot and ash lingering in the air and across the ground. They fall as black droplets and transform into those wretched, winged creatures, one and then another until a dozen becomes a thousand and they are picking Felicity up with their long talons over and over and over again, dropping her back toward the sand-scraped rocks below. They let her fall time and again, making strange chittering sounds while catching her with ugly claws dug into her gut that leave behind black, festering wounds.

When she wakes, it’s with a gasp, before she spits up bile.

Her vision blurs immediately, the tent slipping sideways as everything spins. Nearly stumbling, she catches herself with her palms on the warm stone, breath heavy as the chittering follows her into waking. The noises bounce off the walls, no longer dimly lit by the oil lantern as they had been when she first stepped foot in this cavern system.

“Viktor,” she manages to hiss, ears starting to ring when she reaches out around her and doesn’t catch drift of the monkey’s soft fur. “Viktor,” more insistent, more desperate, concern creeps into her voice. “I swear to fuck I will use you to make a hat if you do something stupid right now...”

A low groan, the telltale sound of metal creaking against metal; something once held in place by rust, freed from its stasis. Then the familiar, excited sounds of a monkey laughing and clapping his hands, before Felicity feels the cart they’d camped behind begin to move.