Hero Rising. Shane Hegarty

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      Finn woke.

      He was trapped in a small space, so dark he could see nothing at all, not even the hand in front of his face.

      Hold on, he thought, maybe my hand is missing.

      No. He wiggled his fingers and it felt like they were all present and correct. But he still had no sight. No light. Only a sandpapery surface at his back and a gooey, ribbed roof he could feel inches from his face.

      Panic grabbed him, even as his mind was slow to get moving, heavy, dopey, unable to quite fix on where he was or how he had got here. He tried to stay composed, to figure it out.

      The sharp sting on his neck. Passing out. He must have been drugged, Finn thought, and dragged here. Wherever here was.

      The smell was so deeply terrible it was invading every pore in his body. He would need a change of skin if he ever got out of here. He tasted it on his tongue, wanted to pull his tongue out in disgust.

      It would be pointless trying to find a way to describe the stench in Earthly terms, because there was nothing on Earth like it. It was a smell that belonged only to one place.

      The Infested Side.

      Finn’s breath quickened. He groped for a wall either side of him, and found bars of some sort, surrounding him on at least three sides. And those bars were wedged into a hard but slippery surface. The fourth side was narrow and soft and his hand couldn’t quite find the wall.

      It made his stomach crawl. Or maybe that was the movement he now realised he was feeling in jolts. He was moving. In fact the whole room was moving.

      Up. Drop.

      Up. Drop.

      A damp breeze blasted through each time it rose, heating his ears. There was also a deep, unnerving gurgle from somewhere terribly close.

      Finn wriggled on to his tummy, feeling the roughness against his face, giving him the shudders as he reached out and pushed his hands through the bars, whose dark outlines he could just make out against the redness of the walls.

      He prised open a gap in his prison, working it wider with his fingers, just enough for grey light to pour into the space and show him the bars were, in fact, large fangs.

      He was lying on a tongue.

      A pink tongue, rough and pulsating with each of the breaths pushing up from the throat at which his feet dangled.

      A giant tongue, in a giant mouth.

      Finn allowed himself to panic some more. It had been a bad day already but now he was something’s lunch. Could this day get any worse?

      Pushing his face towards the crack in the mouth of whatever creature was carrying him, Finn saw water rushing past outside, a blur of dark waves, getting closer. And closer. He retreated just before the creature hit the sea, brine leaking through the mouth as Finn breathed hard and shallow.

      Yes.

      His day could get worse.

      Up. They were out of the water.

      Drop. Whooosh. Back into it.

      A few seconds later, the creature hit something hard, slid to a sudden halt. Finn gripped on to a long tooth to stop himself being thrown back into the deep cavern of the creature’s gullet.

      Blurpp. A rumble was building from deep within the throat, getting louder, closer.

      Oh no, thought Finn, at the precise moment a belch hit him.

      The mouth opened and he was propelled into the grey light of the Infested Side.