The post below is written in a horror style and contains upsetting themes relating to claustrophobia and thalassophobia. This warning box includes a blacked-out synopsis of the post for the benefit of those who are unable to read the post through. It contains spoilers, so don't read this unless you feel you need full advance warning of the triggers in the post. Highlight the blank space below to read the synopsis.

At the beginning of the post, Lorraine and Charlton are alone on a desert planet called 'Tartarus'. It's known as Tartarus because it is a planet without life, and because its only distinguishing feature is its deep underground pit. Lorraine and Charlton are here because Charlton's "freedom sense" (which highlights to him when there is injustice or oppression) has drawn him here. Lorraine is sceptical, pointing out that there can't be injustice on a world with no life. Nevertheless, they both descend into the pit.

In the pit, Charlton and Lorraine travel through a cave system, guided by light which Charlton magically conjures. The tunnels they travel through get increasingly small and narrow. Eventually, while crawling through a tunnel, Charlton's light flickers out and both deities realise they cannot access their magic. Since they are close to the source of whatever is setting Charlton's sense off, and going forwards is easier than going backwards, they press on. They come out into a cavern with a strange green-blue light source. While Charlton is investigating the light source, something grabs Lorraine's ankle from a pool of water and drags her in. There is an elongated scene in which Charlton tries to save Lorraine, but she ultimately drowns. After she dies in the water, whatever had dragged her in lets her go, and Charlton is able to pull her back out. He is unable to resuscitate her.

Tartarus

“Remind me again,” Lorraine purred, her voice dangerously low, “Why, precisely, we are descending into the deepest circle of Hell?”

Charlton ignored her. She knew why; they’d discussed this at length. He held out his hand, palm-up, and focused on his magic. A small glob of blue-tinted light appeared and grew to the size of a tennis ball, hovering a few inches above his fingers. It cast a cool glow over the blood-red desert stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction around them.

When one imagined a desert, they usually conjured images of cacti and camels in their heads. This place was a desert in the more literal sense: completely devoid of any life or landmarks, it was simply… deserted. The whole planet was like this, and always had been, as far as anyone knew. A dead world.

Lorraine glanced around it, her lip curling in distaste. They were about as far away from high society as could be, out here in the middle of literally nowhere. “Allow me to correct myself. Why am I here, pursuing your ridiculous quest?”

Charlton turned, shining his light towards the only geological feature on the whole planet: the gaping entrance to the pit which had given this world its name. It was both eye-like and mouth-like, lidless and watchful, gaping and greedy, inviting and forbidding. It held him motionless for a moment, before sending a shiver down his spine, like a rabbit quivering before a fox. His light grew unbidden, sensing his need for it. Charlton swallowed, hard, steeling himself.

“Because,” he answered patiently, “it might be an animal down there.”

She was stood behind him, but he could almost hear her rolling her eyes. “Ugh. Charlton, nothing lives on this planet. Especially down there.” She stepped forward and gestured at the entrance to the pit. “Can you even sense any life?”

Charlton bit his lower lip, not wanting to give the answer. He could see Lorraine’s triumphant smirk out of the corner of his eye.

“No,” he admitted after a moment. “But my other sense is going crazy. There’s something down there. Something fighting for existence.”

As if to back him up, a cool wind whispered over their faces, rustling their hair. It was as though the cave itself had exhaled. In the flickering shadows cast by the light in Charlton’s hand, it almost looked like the walls of the pit had expanded and contracted, like lungs.

“Oh yes, the old freedom alarm.” Lorraine retorted nastily, apparently unaffected by the eerie wind. “How very American.”

Charlton ignored the familiar jibe with a tired sigh. Holding the ball of light out in front of him, he stepped down into the cave, his boots scraping against the loose sand blown in from the desert. The rocky floor dropped into uneven steps which became increasingly concealed by shadow the deeper he went. Only the water was visible, glinting blue in the light. Charlton’s boots slid a couple of times, and it was a relief when the floor evened out. He turned and glanced back at the entrance, taking care to commit the image to memory. The bright light of the outside world burned his retinas and cast everything else around it into shadow. Lorraine, silhouetted against the entrance, was a couple of steps behind him and moving with unnatural fluidity. She must have been doing her little trick of hovering an inch above the ground so as not to let anything touch her. She knew as well as he did that once they passed a certain point the pit would snuff out their magic like the wind extinguishing a candle’s flame, but he refrained from pointing it out.

Turning his back on her, he took another couple of steps forward, getting a feel for the slippery rocks underfoot. The light from the entrance didn’t extend much further than this, and the darkness ahead seemed to swallow the light from his hand so he couldn’t see very far. He took it slow, moving his hand carefully from side to side to check for side-tunnels. Overhead, stalactites glistened like knives on the ceiling, patient and silent. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but they looked like they were hanging in deadly rows, like the teeth of a white shark. The ground to his left vanished into a vertical tunnel with sheer-drop sides and no clear bottom. He and Lorraine paused next to it for a moment before dismissing it and continuing along the main tunnel. Another gaping chasm had chewed through the rock at the far end, but the main tunnel curved round, narrowing and dipping sharply. Charlton shuffled up to the edge and shone the light down as far as it would go, Lorraine peering over his shoulder. It looked like more steps, but each one was so steep that the drop was at least three feet. Only two steps were visible before the rest curved round a corner and it was so narrow that there was only space for one to go at a time.

Charlton cast Lorraine a quick, bracing smile over his shoulder. Her lips thinned. He turned away from her and sat down on the edge of the step, his feet hanging over the edge. The rock beneath him was uneven and fragile, crumbling where his fingers met the edge. Keeping his elbows pressed firmly against the walls for stability, he dropped down onto the next step and promptly sat down again to repeat the process. A throaty rumble somewhere deep in the cave made him pause for a moment.

The wind, he told himself after a few seconds of silence broken only by his heart pounding in his chest and the dripping plunk of water from the stalactites. Just the wind from outside. The echo makes it sound like it came from somewhere else.

Lorraine must have been affected too, because she didn’t scold or cajole him. Her top lip curled in disgust as she dug white fingers into the fissures of the rock. They looked skeletal in the blue-tinted light as she skimmed them reluctantly over the stones. Suppressing a shudder, Charlton pressed on. At a couple of points where the step was big enough to support two people, he turned to offer Lorraine a hand down, but she swatted his help away. Presumably her hovering trick was getting her through the worst of it, because her face was twisted into a grim expression but she didn’t look panicked.

They dropped down, at last, onto a lower level. The cavern expanded into endless darkness above them, but directly ahead it tapered inwards. Water dribbled down the slimy walls and vanished through barely visible cracks in the uneven rocky floor. Charlton only made it a few steps before his shoulders started to scrape against the edges. A few more steps and he had to turn sideways and shuffle along like a crab. He had to wiggle awkwardly in a few of the tighter spots, unwilling to let go of his light and use both hands, and ended up skinning his knuckles against the rock’s rough underside. Pain flared. Charlton ignored it, ignored the way the rock pressed in on all sides and made him feel as though his lungs were being crushed. Only a sharp intake of breath behind him made him pause and glance back. Lorraine, who had also turned sideways but was facing the opposite way, was staring upwards. Above them, a lip created a new, lower ceiling, dimly visible by the light in Charlton’s hand.

“Look,” she whispered, the sharpness gone from her tone. She pointed upwards, straight at the ceiling. “Shine the light there.”

Obediently, Charlton lifted his hand above his head and squinted. The light didn’t extend very far, as though the shadows in Tartarus were thicker than the ones from Earth, and for a moment he couldn’t see what she was pointing at. He stretched his fingers a little higher, pushing the light as far as it would go. His eyes naturally honed in on the welts and reliefs of the rock surface, until finally he realised what he was looking at. There, tiny in the hills and valleys of the rock, the largest no bigger than his smallest fingernail, were familiar shapes. Some were perfectly spherical with spiralling patterns; others had rows of parallel lines; some were long with shallow grooves. None were the kind of shapes formed by wind or rain. It took Charlton a few seconds to find his voice.

“Fossils,” he breathed, trying to keep his voice low. The cave spat the esses back at him, a scolding hiss echoing off the walls.

As if in response, a cool wind blew through the tunnel, rustling his hair. It smelled musty and stagnant.

The light flickered in Charlton’s hand as they continued further down the ever-narrowing passageway. The ceiling sloped downwards. Lorraine was silent behind him, but Charlton could imagine how pale her face must be and how her fingers might be trembling as they clawed their way over the damp, slippery surfaces touching her on every side. He should try to talk - make conversation - give her something to sneer at, anything to take her mind off it. His brain drew a blank. The lower the ceiling got and the more he had to angle his neck and side, scraping his knees against the walls, the further away normal conversation felt. All he could think of were the tricks of his own imagination: the ghastly faces cast in shadow by the light in his hand, the way the wavy formation of the rock made it feel like the cave was breathing, the stifling stench of the stale, damp air.

The cave widened a little - not much, just enough to let him fill his lungs again - but his mouth felt dry as he regarded the space ahead. Immediately in front of him, the cave forked. To the left, it opened out into a bigger cavern. The faint sound of gushing water - an underground river, perhaps - echoed off the walls, so distorted that it sounded like a wounded animal. To the right, the cave narrowed into a small tunnel, just big enough to crawl on hands and knees if he kept low to the ground. The gaping entrance way was almost a perfect circle. An artery, leading to the heart of the beast.

His inner ‘freedom alarm’, as Lorraine termed it, was pinging like crazy towards the right. There was something down there - something stirring against captivity and injustice, something determined to exist.

“I still don’t sense any life,” Lorraine’s voice floated from behind him, inches from his ear. She tried to sneer, but there was an underlying quaver to her voice.

“Me either.” He answered, his eyes locked on the entrance to the tunnel.

No life, and yet… something needed to be free.

Charlton took a deep breath and, before he could chicken out, dropped to his hands and knees. Behind him, he heard Lorraine swear under her breath in Russian and do the same. He pushed his light in front of him, using his willpower to make it drift along of its own accord just ahead, and crawled inside. Blackness snaked ahead; the shadows seemed even darker down here, the light unable to shine as far. It flickered warily as he crawled forward, one hand in front of the other. A droplet of ice-cold water slid down his neck, forcing a shiver. He couldn’t have gone much more than a few feet when the tunnel narrowed further, pressing in from the top and bottom and forcing him lower and lower. The light flickered again. Charlton’s heart pounded in his chest as he reached forward, hooking his fingers around anything he could get a hold of, and pulled himself forward. Still, the ceiling tapered down. Beads of sweat formed on his brow, sliding down the side of his face. What if there was a dead end? What if he was stuck, unable to reverse with Lorraine behind him?

Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself, you have magic. You could just teleport out.

As if on cue, the light flickered rapidly and extinguished. Charlton blinked in total darkness.

“Charlton!” Lorraine called behind him, her voice half-questioning, half-scolding.

Charlton inhaled as much as he could and concentrated, willing the light to restore itself. He felt a tugging in his gut where his magic should be, but it was… unreachable. Not gone - he could still feel it - but it was as though a giant vacuum was sucking it out of his grasp every time he reached for it. He still had the power, but trying to use it was like trying to light a bonfire in the middle of a thunderstorm. Whenever he tried, the wind and rain extinguished his efforts.

Lorraine must have felt it too. Her hand on his ankle was trembling, slick with sweat. Her breathing sounded shallow. Down here, trapped under tons of rock in the belly of Tartarus… Charlton couldn’t think of a worse place for a panic attack. He wasn’t sure he could coax her into going backwards if he tried.

Besides, whatever was down there was still there, pressing against its cage. Somehow, Charlton could feel it even without magic.

He reached forward, closing his hands around the slippery rock, and pulled himself forward. His back and belly were now compressed by rock, which also rubbed against his shoulders. After a couple of pulls, he heard Lorraine shuffling behind him, presumably following on autopilot. The tunnel wasn’t as smooth as a manmade one: even in this impossibly tight space, they had to negotiate their way around loose pebbles and outcrops of rock. Once, Charlton hit his head so hard on an invisible dip in the ceiling that he couldn’t tell if the subsequent slither of liquid slipping down the back of his neck was water, sweat or blood. They crawled blindly, with no way to reference how far they’d travelled. Charlton guessed that one arm’s pull was probably about six inches. By that logic, they must have gone about eleven foot when a faint green light finally gleamed into existence up ahead. It felt like longer.

Pull, shuffle. Pull, shuffle. The light ahead grew stronger, casting Charlton’s hands in a ghoulish blue-green, the colour of a water-bloated corpse. Pull, shuffle. Finally the tunnel widened out, the ceiling tapering upwards, and he was able to crawl the last yard on hands and knees and finally sit back onto his knees and look forward properly. What he saw sucked the breath from his lungs.

The tunnel opened into a cavern which in some ways looked like the inside of a tent, with the walls on each side climbing up to a central point. The rocks around the entrance to the pit had been a rusty-red colour, the same as the sandy desert beyond, but down here they were a greying blue-green. The stalactites were different too. Rather than hang in knife-point cones, they twisted and writhed from the angled walls like grasping tentacles. Gleaming drops of water slid down the slick, shiny edges - much shinier, Charlton realised, than any of the other rocks he’d seen so far. The stalactites, the walls… they were burnished and angular, like crystals. The dim light reflected off them, so whenever he shifted positions the flashes of light made the walls look like they were moving.

He scrambled to his feet as Lorraine emerged behind him, ducking his head to avoid the reaching tendrils of the stalactites. The room spun as he moved. Although it no longer felt as though he were being physically crushed, his lungs still wouldn’t expand fully. His head throbbed and the ground seemed to shift dizzily below him.

Oxygen, he thought. Charlton pressed his hands against the slimy green-tinted wall above the tunnel, spread his legs and tried to steady himself. After a moment, the ground stopped feeling like it was a rug being pulled out from under him, although he still felt light-headed. He reached down to offer Lorraine a hand as she scrambled out of the tunnel.

She looked even worse than he felt. Her turquoise eyes had a more greenish hue in this light and they were spread wide, with lots of white showing. Clearly past the point of sneering at his touch, she scrabbled at his hand for a moment before clinging to it as though it were a lifeline. A knot twisted in Charlton’s stomach and he half-pulled her up, bracing himself with his other hand against the wall. Lorraine was unsteady on her feet, her breathing fast and shallow. She wobbled, and Charlton pushed her a little unceremoniously against the wall to stop her falling over. With her damp, limp hair sticking to her dirty, sweat-slick face, and her garments mud-caked and shredded, she looked unrecognisable.

Before Charlton was able to get his breath back and ask if she was alright, she raised a trembling finger and pointed down the cavern. As he turned, his foot splashed into a puddle of fetid water and he almost slipped. Keeping one hand against the wall for balance, he peered through the dim light towards the centre of the cavern.

The light source itself was bright enough, he realised; it just couldn’t fully penetrate the shadows. In the centre of the cavern, a huge, flat-topped stalagmite rose from the ground like a natural pedestal. It cupped a glowing green-blue orb, the source of the deathly light. Water trickled down the orb and the stalagmite, pooling a little at its base before running off down natural channels in the rock to the larger ponds encircling the room. The black water glistened like oil in the light, perfectly still. Its flat surface and dark colour were the only visible contrasts to the uneven, greenlit floor. The nearest pool of water was less than a foot from where Charlton was standing. If he’d turned fully, he’d have sunk his boot into it.

He took as much of a breath as the oxygen-depleted air would allow, glancing sideways at Lorraine. Her pale skin was bathed in a sickly green glow. She brushed a lock of hair from her face with quivering fingers and nodded, which Charlton figured was about as much of a level-headed, conscious response as he could expect from her right now. He moved away from the wall, watching carefully where he put his feet, and took a couple of steps towards the orb. A few stones skittered across the cave floor as he kicked them. One fell into a water pool with a distinctive plop which echoed back tenfold. Was it the light or his imagination when the stalactites seemed to coil an inch closer?

A primal scream reverberated off the walls, filling the chamber. Charlton whipped around, just in time to see Lorraine’s chest hit the floor. Her mottled green-blue fingers scrabbled uselessly at the rocky floor as she was dragged backwards along her stomach towards the pool Charlton had almost stepped in. Forgetting the slippery floor, he charged back across the chamber towards her, ducking under the twisting stalactites as they scraped against the top of his head and caught his hair. He felt his feet slide under him as he hit a wet patch of floor and used the momentum to throw himself forward. He hit the ground hard, the rocks and pebbles which littered the floor biting deep into his hands. Lorraine stretched her fingers towards him, her jaw clenched, eyes bulging, nostrils flared. The little breath left in Charlton's lungs had been knocked out of them and all he could do was stare in horror and revulsion at… at the…

Later, much later, he would never be able to describe it properly. Something was curled around Lorraine’s ankle: something long-fingered and angular like the stalactites above his head; something mottled green-blue and bloated like a drowned body; something snakelike, something… very much alive.

Lorraine screamed again as her legs disappeared into the water, tears burning in the corners of her eyes. Charlton lunged forward and grabbed her clammy hands, slick with sweat and water. Far from anchoring her, his heart thrashed in his ears as he was dragged along the floor of the cavern as though he were weightless. Ignoring the pain, he rammed his knees and elbows into the ground, desperately trying to find something to wedge himself into. His movement slowed, but one of Lorraine’s hands flew out of his grip. She was now underwater up to her chest.

“Don’t - !” He started to shout, but something from the black depths yanked her sharply. Charlton lurched forward. Lorraine’s other hand shot out of his, her nails raking his skin as she went. She plunged fully into the water.

Charlton stumbled forward, grabbing hold of a solid-looking rock with one hand and thrusting the other into the black water. Miraculously, he felt Lorraine’s grasping fingers snatching at him and grabbed hold of them. With superhuman strength, Charlton hoisted her upwards, tugging hard against whatever held her at the other end. Her head broke the water, coughing and spluttering. The thing yanked her down again, pulling her head back under and forcing her fingers to slip in Charlton’s hand. He gave her a sharp pull and let go, quickly snatching her again to try and get a better grip on her wrist. He managed to grab hold of the heel of her hand and heaved her up, just enough so that part of her head was above water. His arm trembled. Lorraine was thrashing in the water, her face invisible, but her mouth must have still been underwater. He could hear her muted screaming and gasping, trying to snatch the air. Charlton pulled harder, just enough to lift her face fully above the water. She didn’t even have time to inhale before she was sucked under again.

Her hand was slipping. Charlton stared in horror at her face, ghostly green-white under the surface of the water, mouth open and eyes half-closed. Silvery hair floated around her like a halo. She inhaled, choked, her body convulsing. Her fingers went limp in his hand and slipped through.

Abandoning caution, Charlton let go of his anchoring rock and thrust both hands into the water, searching desperately. He felt her slick, unmoving fingers and grasped hold of them, yanking her upwards. This time, the only resistance he met was from her own, water-logged body. Charlton tried not to think, dead weight.

He pulled her up higher, got a better grip on her arms and dragged her lifeless form fully out of the pool.

“Lorraine!” He flipped her over, half-choking on her name. Her eyes were wide, staring, glossy. Water trickled from the corner of her blue lips.

Charlton pressed against her chest, expelling water, and bent over to give her mouth-to-mouth. Or, what he thought was mouth-to-mouth. Charlton was a divine fairy, for crying out loud - he had never had to resuscitate anyone before. He pressed air into her water-filled lungs for several minutes, then shuffled backwards in shock as her body started to twitch and writhe beneath him. Her skin had turned a nauseating shade of blue. She bucked and jerked, her body convulsing forcefully, before finally falling still. Her head had fallen to one side, staring unseeingly at Charlton with dead eyes.