Leonis was starting to get a little angry at Bird. He was still clueless about what had happened, and Bird's pale face was not helping his curiosity.
"Bird! Snap out of it. What happened? Where are we?"
Bird slowly composed himself. He quickly came to terms with the fact that there was nothing he could do about this creature. The only thing he could do was run. He then vaguely filled Leonis in on what had happened and where they were before finally saying.
"That's why we have to leave now."
Leonis's mood grew dim after hearing their situation.
"Okay, which way leads toward the exit?"
Bird looked around the room. There were four paths now instead of the original two. Bird tried to focus on the shape of the openings. He was trying to decipher which way they had been pulled from. For all he knew, they could be another 5, maybe 10 rooms deep. He quickly suppressed this thought, knowing it was of no help to them.
Eventually, he narrowed his options to two of the openings, one of which was large, and the other looked just small enough to fit through.
"Shine your light toward the small path leading upward. I need to check something."
Leonis nodded and complied, shining his orb into the small opening.
Looking into the smaller opening, Bird immediately knew it was the wrong path. The opening looked small from their side, but led into a very small room with a much larger entrance into another part of the cave.
"Is it the right path?"
"No, shine your light into this opening."
Pointing to the larger opening that was higher up the cave's wall, Leonis followed his finger and held his orb near its entrance to let Bird study its insides. The opening was larger than the one from the original room, but looking closer, it was only large from the side they were on. It really shrank in size the further you followed it.
"This has to be it, follow me."
They slowly entered the larger opening and followed it until it shrank into a crawl, and after a while, they reached a much, much smaller opening that led into a medium-sized room.
"This is it! This is the room we started in!"
Bird frantically looked for the exit of the cave, but it was proving difficult thanks to it turning night. There was no more light coming from the entrance, so Bird had to rely on Leonis's light to see what was around him. It only took a couple of minutes to spot the small exit. With this, the two could now leave the cave behind, along with the strange and sinister creature that lurked in its depths.
Bird was the first to head for the exit, but right as he started to crawl through the opening, he felt something.
'Huh? The cold from before is back. so inviting and soft.'
"Bird hurry . . ."
Leonis paused in the middle of his sentence to yawn before finishing.
"Up."
Bird looked back at Leonis and blinked, and then he blinked again, and then again. He slowly started to embrace the cold, rocky floor. Leonis was doing the same. He, too, started feeling rather heavy and slowly fell to the floor, falling into a comforting snooze. Once again, the cave had filled with silence.
Bird began dreaming again. This time, the dream was very goofy. Absolutely nothing in the dream made sense. At one point in the dream, Leonis appeared in front of him with a rather large red nose and danced around.
'Classic Leonis.'
At another instance in the dream, Bird seemed to have grown to what must have been a thousand feet tall. He enjoyed being a giant. Under his feet was a massive body of water, cold and seemingly endless. He splashed around in the endless water before warping into another whacky scenario.
On the outside of their dreams, a six-armed creature was dragging them deeper into the cave. This abomination used four of its arms as legs while holding Leonis and Bird in the middle two. It moved quite slowly through the cave, slipping its flat body through the openings. Actually, the creature only had a body and six arms, no legs, and no head. This did not mean it didn't have a face. The creature's face was situated in the middle of its furry blue body, with beady black eyes. Its mouth brimmed with extremely thin, razor-sharp teeth. It breathed. It breathed slow. A very controlled breath. Cold escaped from its maw, and an almost transparent fog seeped from its mouth, filling the room, spreading every time it breathed.
The creature traveled through four different rooms before simply dropping Bird and Leonis and leaving. The creature eerily crawled back to the depths of the cave, brandishing a wide grin across its entire body.
Bird was the first to wake up this time, unlike last time, he did not burst into a cold sweat, but instead, he woke up in an elated mood. That mood was instantly torn down by the sudden realisation that he was surrounded by absolute darkness and could only feel the cold stone beneath him.
Bird tried looking through the darkness and then whispered.
"Leonis. Where are you? Wake up."
No one responded. Bird tried calling out louder.
"Leonis, wake up. Leonis?"
No reply. Bird decided against yelling and began to crawl along the rigid rocks, hoping to find Leonis sleeping. The room wasn't that large, so it did not take long for Bird to bump into the sleeping Leonis.
'Huh? Leonis!'
Bird started to shake Leonis in hopes of waking him.
"Leonis. Leonis, you have to wake up. We have to leave. We fell asleep again."
Leonis started to slowly open his eyes, and then not so slowly his eyes jolted open.
"What the hell!"
Leonis could see clearly through the dark, so he knew that they had not made it out of the cave, infact it looked like they were deeper into the cave than the last time they were kidnapped.
'What is going on? Why in the Cone would we both fall asleep at the entrance?'
Bird started to ponder what could have possibly made them fall asleep. Meanwhile, Leonis pulled his knife from his waist and chipped a fairly large X into the wall.
"What are you doing?"
"This is for if we get lost, X stands for the starting spot, we will mark which ways go, and if they don't work, we come back the way we came and mark another until escaping. Also, if we fall asleep again, these should help us out later."
Bird did not like the idea that they could and probably would be falling asleep again.
'Just if we knew what was causing us to fall asleep. Maybe we could stop it.'
After discussing their plan of action, the two started to go through the paths that looked to be leading toward the surface. It had taken a couple of hours, but eventually they found themselves looking into that familiar room. The exit was just one room away. They could even see the light beaming into the room from the sun outside.
Neither of them wanted to waste any time. They swiftly squeezed through the opening and were headed for the exit when Bird started to have déjà vu.
'We just did this, did we not?'
Right as he thought this, he could feel a cold breeze slide past him, except this time it loomed over him like a curse. It did not feel comforting or welcoming, but instead, an overwhelming amount of foreboding drowned his senses.
"Leonis! Its the cold, the cold is putting us to sleep!"
Even though Bird desperately warned Leonis, he had already fallen fast asleep. Bird then fell from the exit. His eyes were heavy, he was trying his absolute hardest to resist sleep, but he couldn't. It just felt so right, like he had to sleep.
'NO! I need to stay awake, I can't sleep now, we are so close. . .'