Author: Candid Corvid Productions

As the man at last fully hoisted himself out of the mine’s ruined bracings, he firmly and briskly slap-brushed off the outer layer of encrusted shaft dust from his clothes while taking in huge gulps of fresh air to help restabilize his ragged breathing.

Then, he stood up broad and tall to face the caravan’s crowd that had gathered around the mine’s safer outer edges after hearing the initial yell of alarm from his fall.

“I have survived a brush with death, and The Devil did not come claiming,” he announced with full intention in his voice swelling.

“I now claim The Right to have The Devil do my bidding!” and as he opened his muscled arms wide, a shockwave boomed from within the mine’s depths, blasting hot air past his form to knock back the gaping onlookers as a rippling dark, ephemeral mass emerged and infused itself into his body.

As he fell when the angled, long-rusted gate suddenly gave way and snapped, gravity’s advantage hurtled him at speed, dragging him down across old track rails heading deep into the jagged, pitch black chasm.

His desperately grasping hands trailing after his plummeting body just managed to grip onto the last bit of a dangling, hefty chain and abruptly interrupted his fall, leaving him swinging and gasping on the edge of a drop off into a void of vast nothingness.

Did I mention profiteers and criminals posing as interested business parties?

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”

There are always corrupt men who crave power at everyone else’s and the world’s expense.

Of course, there were the usual players in the party: tourists, scientists, some families and military interests, as well as the guides who spoke of legends and hired native laborers mumbling uneasily, as they all traversed canyons along high cliffside escarpments with the fabled and cautiously revered monument towering over everything farther off in the distance.

She wanted to call her youngest who had been terrified of volcanic flows that she had discovered that lava can cool down to the consistency of warm pea soup farther out along the edges so that the child would not dwell upon fear’s absolutes.

“Last night (early this morning), I thought quietly to myself that I seem to mostly have uneventful dreams that just play over similar looping, mundane yet sometimes uncomfortable scenarios.

I also sensed at the time that acknowledging this thought might fortunately or unfortunately drastically shift this, as the subconscious is often listening and might take such thoughts as an ok to release some instinctual self protection barriers.”