Welp, this is my first story, and I hope there will be many more to come. Please comment or criticize, both are welcome if they are constructive. I realize it is a bit OOC for the land, but this was written for a school assignment and I had to dumb it down quite a bit so my teachers could understand it. Hope you enjoy it, and have a nice life!
Once upon a time (and by a time, I mean sometime around the present) there existed a land. Now this land is not one you would immediately think of, as your land may be smaller and greener and probably might even be described as magical. But we are not talking about your land, so it is not any of those things. This particular land is one full of raging rivers and seas made of boiling magma, flowing and swirling on its way, winding around precarious heaps of gears the size of small towns, which serve as a kind of steampunk land mass for the inhabitants, if there are any. All in all, it looks very much like a giant, indestructible clock which someone had accidentally dropped into a volcano whilst going about their business in the area. Which I suppose is a bit magical, but that's beside the point. The point is, that like a clock, the gears and cogs and springs which made up the land were all tick-tick-ticking away as one wordless drone, a constant form of white noise in the background of this new world. A world in which you now find yourself, confused and rather alarmed , as you were simply... actually, you don't remember what you were doing before you wound up here, pardon the pun. Get it? Clocks, wound up? Never mind. There's no one around to laugh at your little joke anyway, as you are completely alone and surrounded by lava. You really wish you knew how you get yourself in these messes.
As you explore this land, a blur catches you eye, and upon turning, it vanishes. You dismiss it; surely it was simply a spark springing up from the white-hot abyss below you. A small voice in your head tells you that it was definitely something more, danger is approaching, and that something else is out there besides heat and clockwork. You push it aside, no one ever listens to those voices. That would make too much sense, and then we wouldn't have a story. But the blur returns, and again disappears as you turn to look at it. You sort of wish you'd listened to that voice, but it's too late now. It suddenly dawns on you that a consistent noise in the background has been growing louder as you've been thinking, but it's not the clocks. Are those footsteps? Yes, light, quick footsteps. Something is following you, probably the unusual fauna which may or may not exist and were mentioned earlier in the story. Upon pondering the existence of such creatures and the origin of the footsteps, you fail to remember that the gears upon which you tread still move, as that hasn't stopped being a thing, and you unceremoniously fall to your knees. Now you can practically feel the deliberate, skittering movements of whatever is out there, pulsating through your hands, contrasting from the tick and clank of the moving platform. Standing up, you realize that what ever it was following you it now standing directly behind you. Turning quickly, you disorient yourself and stagger to find your footing yet again. And as you find it, you can clearly see standing in front of you, are hundreds of crocodiles. Or alligators. You never could remember the difference anyway, and when you're standing in front of one, it really doesn't matter anymore, let alone three hundred. And you suppose that second rule goes double for bright red, bipedal alien what-ever-they-ares. Quite strange creatures indeed, that's what you think to yourself, and oh look they just disappeared again.
But this time, as aforementioned beasts and their footsteps meld into the timepiece's drumbeat and fire, you manage to follow one of them. It's better than just standing around slack-jawed at your new volcanic home, right? The flashes of red appearing and swirling and darting and evaporating into the smoke and noise of running feet and ticking clocks is overwhelming, but you try to focus on where ever it is that you have decided you are going, still sprinting past endless stretches of mechanical landforms and HOLY COW THAT THING IS HUGE.
A dragon. Of course it's a dragon, snapping at your flailing limbs as you half-jump, half-fall out of the way, scrambling backwards from the gaping maw. More of the croco-gators are darting away and back and around the beast, not contributing much except to be in the way of the teeth and jaws of the same monster, earning them a few threatening blows of the tail and forearm. Turning back to you, or at, to where you would have been, because by now you're halfway across the platform at a dead run. And as is natural, the beast gives chase, running, then flying, hunting you down like an oversized cat stalking a mouse. Despite your rather large head start, the colossus is rapidly catching up to you, having the advantage of fewer obstacles in the sky. But up ahead there is a collapsed pile of clock parts, if you could only dive beneath it in time…There!
Your dive into the jumble of gears was legendary. Or at least, that's how it seemed to you, before you discovered that appearances can be deceiving. But how were you supposed to know the safe pile of large metal objects was actually a not-quite-as-safe cover of large metal objects guarding a well-concealed hole in the ground. Err, you mean platform. But ground or not, there's no avoiding it, and you're falling into darkness.
Waking up, you don't know how much time has passed, or where you are now. You appear to have fallen into an underground cavern of some kind, with a vast pool of molten sea bubbling up in the center. Glancing up, you can see the hole you fell through, and the smoke-stained sky beyond. The ticking is still audible, though strangely faint, as if the planet's supposed heart beat was merely a cover-up for something bigger. But all that matters now is finding your way out of this hole and getting off this land and back to your own. So you do the only thing you can at this point: you start climbing. Clutching at the oversized mechanical pieces, you slowly work your way up, navigating around stream of lava crashing like so many waterfalls into the red ocean below.
Heaving yourself up onto a larger platform to rest, you suddenly hear the footsteps approaching yet again, though they sound different from before. Looking down, you see another few hundred or so of the same reptilian beasts you followed earlier. But instead of sneaking around as they were before, these seem to be engaged in a dance of some sort. Maybe that's how they communicate, bee-like, dancing out a conversation. It seems plausible, as you don't know the sound a normal crocodile would make, or even if they make sounds at all. But who would they be talking to?
Your train of thought is unceremoniously derailed by the dragon, who seems to have discovered your location and is tearing apart large hunks of metal to get at you. If it can maintain that pace, it will undoubtedly reach your location within a matter of seconds. There's nothing to do, but maybe… The entire chamber is made up of interlocking gears, maybe if you dislocated one, they'd all go down. You seize the nearest one and strain to heave it out of place. It grates forward after a few tugs, then pops out of place. The chamber quivers for a few seconds, then gears start falling.
The dragon looks almost startled. Then he slips and starts to fall alongside the clockwork, which would hit the pool of lava with tremendous splashes, spraying the molten rock everywhere. In an effort to escape, the beast spreads its wings, but they are struck by more falling pieces of the cavern, and the beast is consumed by the land.
Unfortunately for you, even though the dragon has been taken care of, you are now trapped in the collapsing cavern. You probably could have given your plan a little more thought. Too late now. But maybe you can crawl up and out, that is, if you think you're fast enough. You move like a machine now, your arms and legs on a hyper autopilot, scrambling and dodging and jumping to reach the top. You can hear the lower parts of the cavern go down, sounding like the footsteps of a giant thundering after you. Glancing down, your suspicions are confirmed, gear rubble is being pushed aside by more red beasts who regain their light, quick steps to flow from the gaps like blood from an open wound. And upon glancing in the opposite direction, you can see something at the top of the cavern that you didn't see earlier. A blue, pulsing portal, much like the one you must have entered through. You have to reach that portal before it closes again and leaves you trapped in this land. A new burst of speed and strength overcomes you, and you persevere and stand gasping at the top while the rest of the underground room falls in on itself, then exploding from the pressure. Lava spews up like a volcano, showering everything with clockwork and magma.
But you're not there to see it, you're already gone.