“Don’t call up what you can’t put down.” Usually that is good advice. Circumstances vary, though, and sometimes you have to do the very thing you were told not to do because if you don’t, worse things happen.
The abyssal cave mouth swallowed all light neatly. The preternatural torches before it revealed all that I was to anyone that was watching. No mask could hide my face from them. But not even that light could reveal one inch into the cave itself.
I shifted my slung drum into playing position, took a deep breath, and called [something] out.
No response. I didn’t expect any just yet. The calling wasn’t complete.
Using a rhythm that two hands should not be able to play, I started on the drum. My feet traced a pattern in the dust before the cave, walking out symbols layered upon symbols. I lifted my head and started calling again with my voice.
The darkness answered first. It reached out of the cave in animated tendrils that wrapped around my feet. For a moment I had a fear that it was trying to snare me. I glanced down to see it was tracing my steps. Lifting the symbols I was marking out so that even my footsteps did not remain. Darkness flowed into these symbols, illuminating them with un-light, then flowing back into the cave, taking the symbols with it.
Still I played.
Another voice joined mine. She who was master of this realm. Hers carried a power with it. Mine was just the frame of the calling, to show how to match the drum and the movements. My voice would never enter that cave. Hers will pierce to the very heart of what was within.
I had been warned that [what was within the cave] might draw me to itself. [Her] voice would wake it, but I was the beacon to direct it. I was not afraid.
The tendrils of shadow increased. Now they did wrap around my legs. Slowly they exerted a pulling force on me. Not enough to completely distort the symbols I was dancing out, but enough so that with each step I was a millimeter closer to the cave than before.
I danced and played the drum at the boundary of the cave mouth. My head weaved between All-Light and All-Dark. Dimensions bloomed as my sight lost the point of reference.
[She] shrieked.
I was pulled into the cave completely.
~~~
I stand at the mouth of the cave facing away from it. The cave is empty. [She] waits before me.
“It is done.”
I nod as best I could through the exhaustion. I mean to bow to the monarch. All I can do is close my eyes. The worlds shifts around me as she sends me away.