Blood. There's so much blood.

Trying to find the source, Rayne stumbled around the den, hands out in front of her, trying to identify anything in the darkness. The only things she could tell though, were the hot sticky liquid coating everything and the cool walls of the cave she was in.

"I wish there was some sort of light in here," she thought.

In the distance, there was a crash. Was it an animal? She wouldn't doubt if it were, drawn by the copper scent enveloping her.

After a few minutes, she realized the source of the bleeding was not coming from her, but instead the walls themselves. Rivers of red flowed from an unknown origin point, and while she was glad to have not been hurt in any way, at least from what she could see, now there was a bigger problem: what was causing the walls to bleed so much? And if it were some creature, it would have had to be huge, and the thought of something even bigger was terrifying.

Rayne's fingers scrambled for purchase against the blood-slick stone, laying her palm flat against a wet, fleshy expanse. It pulses beneath her touch, slowly, up and down, like some monstrous lung. Rayne's stomach lurched. She wanted badly to pull away, to retch, to wipe off the rancid fluids on her jeans, but she found herself unable to even move. Behind her, the pervasive stench of rot and iron flooded her lungs, choking, making her chest tight and eyes water.

She forced her feet forwards, willing her body to move despite the growling sounds coming from deep behind her. She shut her eyes, imagining what beast the sound could possibly belong to, a beat with thousands of teeth and slime covered tendrils, a deep black maw, snapping and drooling at the prospect of fresh meat. Rayne forced herself forward, each step a battle against the cave’s suffocating grip. The growl behind her deepened, vibrating through her ribs like a warning. She didn’t dare look back.

The floor lurched beneath her boots.

The fleshy wall she’d touched earlier shuddered, the pulse beneath it quickening, syncing with the low, cavernous rumble that now rolled through the den like thunder trapped underground. Rayne’s breath hitched. Her mind scrambled for logic, for anything familiar, but the truth pressed in on her with the same slow inevitability as the blood sliding down the stone. The air thickened, vibrating with a deep, resonant groan that came from no single direction. The ceiling and floor rippled walls convulsing, squeezing inward just enough for Rayne to feel the shift, to understand the shape of the place was not fixed stone but something pliant, something alive, something that had been sleeping.

Something that had woken up starving.

The blood on the walls surged, rivulets changing course as though pulled toward some unseen center. Rayne stumbled, catching herself on a protrusion that she found, with dawning horror, to be cartilage.

The cavern grumbled again, louder this time, a deep, resonant sound that rolled through her bones. This was a vast, living stomach of stone and flesh, groaning for a meal.

And Rayne was standing inside it.