The Cave In a dream, I wandered to a maw of stone where my light danced the rocks and my feet carried deep into the lonely dark. Tunnels twisted in the granite and I walked them like a pilgrim lost until I found the centre of the veins and arteries in a chamber where water dripped from wet walls and cried in the gravel. A creature lay shrivelled in the dark, its form twisted and bestial and it stared into the light with eyes dead and as white as the achromic bones that shone through its translucent skin. A heart thumped in a bloodless chest. A brain throbbed in a nerveless head. The creature shook in the cold and let out a pained moan. I asked: ‘will it always hurt?’ It did not hear. It did not speak. It turned its sightless eyes from the light and raised itself on wasted limbs to limp deeper into that lonely dark.