The Ground Gives Way

There is a sound like a green branch snapping — sharp, wrong, deep in the stone — and then the floor is simply no longer beneath you. A whole slab of it tilts and drops away into a blackness you had no idea was there, and the entire world lurches hard to one side. Dust and loose grit pour past your face in a stinging curtain. Your stomach climbs into your throat as you fall, hands flung out on instinct, scrabbling for anything at all.

Your fingers find an edge that crumbles away to nothing, find another that holds, find a jutting root, find the sudden bright white pain of your whole weight snapping taut on four fingertips. You hang there over the dark, arms screaming, boots kicking at a wall that offers nothing to stand on. Far below, the broken stones you dislodged are still falling — you hear them strike once, and then strike again much further down, and the gap between those two sounds is long enough to turn your blood cold. The dark down there is deep, and patient, and waiting to see whether your grip will last.