He lands with a smack so hard that he sees stars- not the good kind this time. He finds himself in an odd state that lies somewhere between being conscious and being knocked out, unable to see, but able to hear. He felt like he heard twigs snapping and the general crackling of fire feasting on wood.
That made no sense... Where was he? He took deep and measured breaths, closing his eyes to make his lack of vision feel more normal. He began to smell smoke, or maybe he did already. He had never felt so disoriented and confused, and he had been in some pretty crazy, topsy-turvey scenarios before.
He couldn't help but laugh hysterically at the absurdity of it all. Of this whole thing. His eyes flew open as if he'd been given a shot of pure adrenaline. Suddenly, he could see again, but it took him some time to fully process what it was he was seeing.
It looked like he was inside a giant gravel pit, but it was just one big rock instead of gravel.
He rolled his eyes at himself for that thought. He was in a cave, he was guessing. What else? With a wince, he forced his gaze from the ceiling to the wall, his freshly injured neck screaming in protest as he lifted his head. He was so deeply surprised by what he saw that he almost couldn't comprehend it.
Fire. Fire was licking up the walls of the cave, arcing delicately around him. That's when he remembered he had hands, flattening his palms and stretching out his fingers, trying to assess what he was lying on. It felt cold like a driveway in the wintertime, which seemed weird, being surrounded by fire and all.
If he knew anything at all, he knew pain as one would a lifelong friend.
Despite every limb screaming in protest, he quickly sat up, using his palms to support the position. He groaned a bit as he attempted to blink the remaining lingering blurriness from his vision.
He felt confused. Despite there being no wood present anywhere in the mysterious cave, he could not only hear it burning, but he could smell it as well. He turned his body to the side, swinging his legs over the edge of the stone slab he had found himself on, gritting his teeth and growling at the pain.
His head turned to the side and his eyes were met with more of the same. Fire. Circular fire, he noticed, as he turned his head in the opposite direction. Oddly enough, he was delighted. He appeared to be in the middle of some sort of ring of fire!
Ropes of thick black smoke shot out from the area of the circle nearest him, wrapping around his ankles. Before he even had time to process how it could be possible for something like smoke to behave that way, he found his legs being yanked upwards and to the other side, back onto the stone slab.
As a result of the smoke manhandling, his head was harshly smacked into the stone slab once more. No limbo between the conscious and unconscious this time; He was knocked out cold.
*
He was startled awake, cinnamon and smoke instantly greeting his nose. He caught a concentrated whiff of firewood as a curtain of auburn hair fell over his face.
The air crackled with surprisingly cold energy despite the elevated temperature in the cave of fire. The curtain was lifted and the face he saw was very familiar, but her eyes were that of strangers, almost.
Her amber gaze was cold, her once delicate features now appearing sharpened and somehow intimidating as she scowled down at him. She was in a sleek, scarlet robe, one that reminded him of lonely housewives and secretive witches all at once.
In her slender, red-nailed hand, she was tightly gripping a nastily jagged-looking knife that appeared to be carved out of bone and somehow given finely pointed ruby teeth. Without so much as a word, she drove that blade down, right into the center of his chest and into the slab underneath him, cracks spiderwebbing through its entirety.
The wind is almost instantly sucked from his lungs before a sense of cold consumes him that runs further than bone-deep level.
He heard a deep rumbling, like glass beginning to crack, but rock against rock. It started as a soft shuffling, almost, and grew into a deep splitting, cracking, rumbling noise that vibrated his body to its core.
He watched as the flames licked up higher, almost enclosing the two of them inside of a dome. The womans amber eyes almost looked like they'd changed to match the citrine amulet that sat in the dip between her collarbones. Her eyes looked tastefully smudged with the ashes gathering around them, dark lines further accentuating her sharp gaze.
Her gaze held not only fiery rage, but yet, there was something cold about them. Cold like dry ice.
He should have been scared, and maybe he was. He didn't care about it though, he was so captivated by her. Her fiery red hair flew wildly around, perfectly mirroring the energy she held in her eyes and the air around her. Her eyes, though as nastily as they may be looking at him currently, were so easy to get lost in.
The agony he felt was as if every nerve were set ablaze in a never-ending flame, but all he could think about was how he just wanted to touch her face, feel her cheek against his fingers as he grazed her flushed cheek.
The rumbling of the crumbling rock beneath him turned sharply aggressive, a sharp crack snapping him out of the spell he felt himself falling under.
Falling seemed to be a recurring theme for him.
That was his last thought as the rock seemed to suddenly crumble to dust, he fell right through it as if the particles themselves were afraid to touch him. Instead of a green light, this time he found himself surrounded by smoke. Behind the smoke, he noticed a distant-seeming redness, like the last dying embers of a fire.
That was all he had time to notice before he was again landing on something, there was no bone-shattering sharp impact this time, but he did belly flop and that's never fully pleasant. He seemed to have landed in a bed, he noticed, as the impact of falling into it caused him to bounce out of it and land on the floor next to it on his back.
The house was burning down around him, making intimidating creaks and groans all around him. Menacing pops from the flames could be heard coming from the floor below him.
How did he know it was a two-story house?
Inconsequential, didn't matter right now.
He heard her singing, and he had to find her.