★ WINNER OF THE AIM TO ENGAGE 2019 ADVENTURE PROMPT ★

Boom. Crack. Crash.

These noises echoed in my head as I awoke on a frozen ground. It was hard to tell whether I was alive or dead, because an eternal darkness encompassed my body.

I instinctively reached out and was surprised when my gloved hand found something. Within moments I discovered that it was a flashlight and a smile cracked across my frozen face. As I clicked it on and a welcoming light filled the daunting room, memories suddenly came back to me.

I had been on an expedition up Mount Everest when an avalanche swept my team and myself away. My team! I called out into the darkness, hoping against all hope that I wasn't alone, but I was quickly disappointed. Silence was the only thing that answered me.

I pushed my aching body to its feet and the beam of the flashlight danced around the room as I tried to figure out where I was. It appeared that I had been trapped in a cavern.

An impenetrable wall of snow and ice stood to my left, and a never-ending path of nothingness stood to my right. It was a hard choice but ultimately I decided on the latter, since I could still feel the exhaustion in my bones from the fall. Perhaps it would lead to an exit, or even better, my team.

The path was so long that the beam of my flashlight only reached part of the way. As I trekked down it, I became weary of all the strange noises my ears picked up. I tried to dismiss it as paranoia, but something deep down told me otherwise.

After I had been hiking for a while, my flashlight started to pick up strange markings on the wall. I stopped to investigate and was blown away when I discovered that they were cave paintings.

I was still disoriented from the avalanche but based on the thinness of the air, I surmised that I was too high up for any civilized peoples to have lived. Not only that, the subject matter of the paintings was baffling. Mysterious creatures decorated the stone walls. They didn't look like anything that had ever existed on Earth.

I held out my finger to trace the paintings and became startled when I left a smudge of black paint on the wall. The paintings were fresh. I was examining the paint on my glove when a loud noise further up the path frightened me and I dropped the flashlight. The beam flickered out as it hit the floor.

I scrambled for it in the darkness and sighed in relief when I found it. After smacking it against my leg a few times, the light finally flickered on and I aimed it towards the sound. My face turned as white as the snow around me when I found a humanoid creature at the end of the beam.

Within seconds it disappeared as the light went out again. This time, permanently.