FMH ~ 6!

Luke flew out the portal, landing heavily on his back. Luckily, the pack he was wearing took the brunt of the fall, saving him from shredding his skin on the rough cave floor. Gasping in an attempt to regain his breath, he looked around wildly, trying to understand what had gone wrong. There was very little light, but he was able to see that he was in a cave of some sort. He could hear water running nearby, leaving him with the hope that he would be able to survive long enough to find help.

Something had clearly gone wrong; this wasn't the world that he had intended to step into. Luke forced himself to his feet, unsteadily standing and trying to find a way out of the hole he was in. There were many paths, but even from here he could see that most of them were dead ends. 

He started down a likely tunnel, one where light was filtering in. He walked further and further, the sound of rushing water increasing as he moved. Finally reaching the mouth of the tunnel, he saw daylight coming through what had to be the most blue waterfall he had ever seen.

“Of course.” Luke put his hand out, trying to see how far the water reached, but the pressure forced his hand down before he could reach past it. His hand also tingled unpleasantly as he shook off the water, but he chalked that up to the sudden and massive pressure. “It’s never easy, is it?” 

He snorted, annoyed that he had been forced into a situation like this by the ‘Archmage’. Determined to find another way out, Luke backtracked and spent several hours searching for another point of egress. Sadly, he could find nothing else, and the light in the cave was beginning to fade. He raced back to the only exit and decided to camp next to the roaring waterfall for the night. 

Luke pulled a carefully folded bedroll out of his pack, and as he laid it out… a folded note fluttered to the ground. In the fading light he could just barely make out the words ‘We love and miss you already, son. Never doubt how proud we are of you’. Luke teared up, but only allowed a few drops to squeeze out.

“I’ll make it back to you.” Luke whispered his promise to his family, who were now both only a step away, and also impossibly far. A restless night passed, and morning came quickly. He awoke feeling filthy. While eating a breakfast of dried meat and some of the limited stores of water that had been stored in his pack, he tried to think through his options. 

Luke believed that he had searched the connecting tunnels in their entirety. If he was correct, then there was only one way out without tunneling through the stone, and at best he only had another few days of food. Certainly not enough to create a tunnel through solid rock with no tools. Packing everything as carefully as he could, he tensed the strap on his leather pack to make it as watertight as possible, and tried to prepare himself for the pain of water crushing him.

“Survival is what matters. Get as far as possible from where the water lands, because there are likely rocks at the bottom. Try to cannonball; cross arms and protect your head.” He coached himself, psyching himself up for the jump. “Now, stop thinking so much and do it!”

With that, he ran at the wall of water and jumped out as far as possible, getting pressed down by the torrential downpour as he passed through. Upon his escape from the falls, he dropped at most two feet before hitting a large pool of water, belly-flopping painfully.

“Merlin’s saggy wand!” he gurgled while still under and clawing his way to the surface. Luckily, his bag acted as a floatation device, dragging him to the surface faster than he had any right to be there. Sputtering, Luke made his way to a sandy beach located only a few feet away and finally looked up to see his surroundings. The view took his breath away more effectively than the water had; all he saw was an enormous vista that boggled and confused his mind.

The land he could see was only about a half mile wide, but there were distinct edges to the terrain. Luke was standing near a field that stretched for miles to the east, sloping downward to a point on the horizon. He could see some kind of animal playing in groups, but the distance and long grass was too great to see them clearly. To the north and south, the land vanished. He couldn’t understand how, but he would go see for himself. The strange cut-off was only about a half mile away. 

However, the most stunning aspect of the landscape was the color. Everything was violent shades of blue. He looked behind himself and gasped again; this time in panic. Behind the waterfall was nothing. The land ended at a cliff, another drop off. In other words, the cave he had come out of didn't exist. Luke was trapped on this new world, and as far as he could see... 

He was alone.