The lights twinkle on the wall far ahead of you, like stars in the blackness, and you feel drawn to them—their peacefulness calls to you as a haven from the hunters, so you step towards the edge. The cliff falls away to your left into a set of stairs, shabbily carved into the rock face but smoothed by use over time. You've already gone down the rabbit-hole, so you figure "why not?" and step ahead down the narrow staircase. It does not occur to you—yet—who carved the staircase, or by whose use it has become so worn over time...
The long climb down has worn on your weight-strained ankles and your chubby fingers are cramping from grasping the cold stairs in some of the more vertical parts, but your weariness does not dull your sense of urgency and the feeling of adrenaline coursing through every vessel in your body. Shaking, from both fear and exertion, you finally step off of the staircase and see at last the white caps of rapids on the cave's river that is flowing before you. A small boat is moored upstream a ways and you stumble towards it, praying you will find a bridge or some land-based alternative. You've always hated boats. And caves for that matter.
Unfortunately it seems the small row-boat is the only option you have—that or a steep climb back up the cliff and a squeeze out that land-sphincter at the base of the tree that sucked you in here in the first place. You hate climbing steep cliffs more than you hate boats, so the obvious choice is before you: you untie the boat and push off from the land praying you've given it enough of a shove to allow you to cross to the other side of the river, back to the safe haven of solid ground.
As the current takes the boat, you sit, unsteadily, and grasp for the oar that is handily waiting at the bottom of the craft. Your pitiful shove did not do much for your transverse progress across the river, so the presence of the oar is lucky. Your tired arms feel more like flippers than anything else, and your tired hands have difficulty grasping the oar, but you somehow manage to paddle across the gentle current and throw yourself out of the boat onto the other shore. Without a place to dock and tie the boat, it rolls away with the current into the depths of the cavern and your only choice now is to head closer to those twinkly lights that adorn the far wall. Which isn't such a bad option, given that your curiosity has been piqued... What are they anyway?
You eventually step close enough to the wall that your nose is nearly touching it—you can smell the warm, sticky, cinnamon stronger now. It's not the enjoyable, Cinnabon scent, that you have come to appreciate on those infrequent... admit it, more frequent than they ought to be... occasions that you "indulge." No, it's a stifling and oppressive odor, despite the coolness of the rock that surrounds you. The lights twinkle in front of you, those closest steadily emanating a blue-white light like stars in the night sky. You reach out to touch them, to feel if you're really staring at a wall or into space studded with far away stars—
And you pull your hand away, disgusted and horrified. Those pretty lights are the glittering anuses of glow worms, with their little beaded strings of saliva hanging in wait to catch whatever unfortunate insects, like you, that are attracted to their sick luminescence. You try to shake the worm-goo off of your outstretched hand and instead end up brushing your entire arm across the wall of spit-strands and sparkly, wormy back-sides. Shocked and now coated with worm-spit you start to gag and wretch and fall against the worm-infested wall, emptying your stomach contents as you feel the writhing bodies of offended worms against the side of your face. You're disoriented, confused, and mostly angry with yourself that you didn't remember that Cave episode of that David Attenborough show you loved... You fall to the floor in the pile of your own vomit, a hopeless, pitiful wretch, and begin to cry.
But you can't stay there forever.
Should you rally, pick yourself up, and continue on your journey?
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