The world had been safe and ordinary one step ago. He’d been walking the ordinary bridge from one place to another when his foot had caught fast and refused to follow him another step. It wrenched painfully against the turn of his hip and his intentions to keep on walking, tripping him over his own momentum, and so, of course, he reached out to catch himself as he fell.
It was the natural thing to do, to try to save his face from an impact with the treacherous ground. Not the sort of thing at all that was supposed to be a fatal mistake. Maybe, if he’d had time to listen to the slow voice of good, cautious sense rather than the much quicker one of his reflexes, he’d have realized his mistake before his hands stuck fast as well.
He’d caught himself on his knees as well, and rocking, then wrenching, from side to side did nothing to free them. Pushing and squirming and refusing to believe did nothing. It looked like ordinary ground, all of it, but what was under his hands and knees and one badly torqued foot distinguished itself by simply, absolutely refusing to let him go.
Panicking did nothing, but what else could he do? Twisting and panting and straining to escape the impossible, to argue it out of existence with his body. So strenuous was his argument, he didn’t even notice at first when another sound joined it.
Not the sound of another voice or struggling body. No, it barely fit in the definition of a sound at all. It was a noise, stretching slow and thunderous across the sky, like a storm speaking nonsense. It roared and racketed through him, stunning him into even more abject helplessness, even before something came out of the thunder to prod at his side.
Not a limb. Not another body, it couldn’t have been, nudging at him with such enormous force that his right leg and arm strained in their sockets. Nothing could both live and move at that size. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see it, to tell it so, or to scream that it was hurting him as it kept jostling at his trapped body.
The thunder didn’t roar. It might have destroyed him if it had, shaking him to pieces, but it mused and rolled smoothly around his torment. He tried to curl down as small as he could without sticking more of himself to the traitorous ground, but the thunder rolled through him regardless. The instrument of its will, whatever it was using to push at his strained side, was relentless, and the world had been normal, it had been completely, kindly, safely normal just-
The thunder spiked up to an impatient shove. Something in him separated from itself, almost too quickly to hurt. Almost too easily to recognize as a part of himself, not a fraying string or snapping twig, but an arm, his arm, lying mangled and separate from where he now lay full-length and hopeless on the sticking ground.
His arm and the place where it had been attached bled towards one another as if those feeble red puddles could pull them back together. The ground clung to his chest, his cheek, holding his gaze straight and his breath shallow, unmoved by the blood it made him watch or the tears he shed on it.
He lay there knowing how a dying animal must feel, dumbly uncomprehending of the mechanisms that had killed it, and the thunder sounded almost apologetic in the moment before it moved away from him into silence.
–
All of which is to say, I feel rather guilty about the beetle I mangled while trying to free it from a piece of double-sided tape, and almost every insect tragedy becomes eldritch horror if you move it up by one scale of magnitude.
