Day 568

He'd been swimming through the pitch black tunnels ever since his original tunnel collapsed. The canary hadn't made a single sound of warning, hadn't given him any time to escape before the walls sent him hurtling down into the murky black waters of the streams that ran throughout the mines.

As often as he could he'd poke his head through whatever air pocket or breach to the surface he could find. Sometimes he'd find another tunnel and walk it as far as he was able. After that tunnel went down he'd found it harder and harder to leave the water, air burned his lungs and made his body feel like it was made from cotton and damp rags.

Before long he grew utterly unable to leave the water, stuck gazing at the surface from just below. He saw small fish pass him by, rodents come and go from what he assumed were old entrances. Every time he tried to reach them any part that left the water only ached to be back within its lightless depths. What little light reached him was blinding. It felt like staring straight at the sun, if the sun was inches away from your face and smelt like living things, like warm skin and sweat and dank breath all rolled into a somehow delicious aroma that drew him close and burnt him away all at once.

He hadn't seen any humans all this time, was beginning to forget what they even looked like save for the fact that they too came into the tunnels like him and for the same reasons. Sometimes names came back to him and flashes of faces. Timothy had a bear like his, thick and grease soaked from the morning rashers. Elijah was young, barely had any scruff to call his own but worked just as hard as the rest of them. And then there was Joseph who smoked every second he wasn't in the mines.

Had any of them been with him when the tunnel collapsed? Has he been swimming right beside them all this time without being able to see them in the inky waters? No matter how many times he called for them or how long he called for he neither tired nor heard any reply. He did find someone though, whatever was left of them. He'd recognise Joseph's tobacco tin anywhere - even in the clutches of a skeletal hand.