Alice found herself in the forested are near her house, her dad walking her through while teaching her what plants were edible and how to test them for poison. She remembered this day less and less as the days passed, and it frightened her. She felt like at the rate things were going she would forget everyone she knew before long.
Despite her foggy memories though, there was one thing she was sure wasn’t there before: the clawing darkness at the edge of her vision. They danced around, never showing themselves directly. A growing unease settled heavily in her stomach, she tried to tell her dad something was wrong, but he continued on while the shadows laughed at her. Until suddenly his head flew off and the shadows engulfed them.
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Alice woke with a start, wishing the morning could come earlier. Sadly, it did not, and she was forced to stay huddled up in her web sack turned sleeping bag. She tried going back to sleep again, but the shadows kept taunting her.
Unable to sleep and unwilling to wait for sun rise, Alice made a ball of mana aspected heavily to fire. It glowed with a warm orange heat making Alice feel more comfortable, but the way the light danced off of it made the darkness feel more alive.
She tried further empowering the orb but it was stuck at the level of a campfire. Alice had no idea whether the shadows were actually snaking towards her or she was imagining it. Starting to hurry up she continued pushing the image of a fire but there was little change. She thought of shifting the orb to an image of sunlight, but that would need her to leave the darkness to spread.
Adding mana to the ball did work to make it brighter, somehow not affecting its density or volume, and making it denser made the additional mana more effective. Despite that discovery though, the upkeep was still too much for her to keep it up. Alice was sure the shadows were moving closer now. She could feel them crawling under and over her, tendrils harshly stroking her. In a bout of fear and panic, she pleaded for help. For anyone to do anything that would help, subconsciously targeting it to the goddes of Fate who had helped her before.
Somehow that counted as a prayer, but instead of any choir or fanfare, instead she felt more comfortable with her situation. The shadows couldn’t hurt her, they were just inanimate silhouettes created by her own light. Whether they could have hurt her before was unknowable, but Alice felt safe enough to stop the lights an go to sleep.
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A familiar looking woman sat in a green plain leaning under a tree with a rabbit laying on her stomach. She gently stroked the rabbit with her dark brown skin as it started falling asleep. Before fully drifting though, a frankly gigantic rabbit hopped to her side, dragging with it some scaled beast. Somehow the now tiny looking woman barely reacted, instead chastising it in the sleepiest voice imaginable.
”Hmm. Come on QuiQuian, you should learn to be quiter, your grandson is trying to sleep.”
She said this with the same cadence as a sleep talker, presumably to avoid waking the smaller rabbit.
”Then let him wake. He may very well learn something.”
The woman let out a long sigh. “I hope you know you don’t have to do this right? The tributes are very sweet but there’s not much I can do with them. Just knowing you love me is enough.”
”Regardless, if I may do anything to make that love more apparent my hand shall be forced.”
”Fine then, two can play that game. One wish granted in the spirit of the wording, as long as I agree to it and it’s reasonable.”
Somehow the frankly ginormous hare looked miffed at being rewarded somehow, but he still stated his desire without missing a beat.
”For all those you call your children to receive the world as their inheritance.”
”Nope. I refuse. This is meant to be for you, not for everyone else. Also, they’ll get what they get because they deserve it. Not because someone else asked nicely for it.”
”Then to protect my kin for the rest of time.”
The woman furrowed her brow in further annoyance.
”Are you trying to waste your wish? Not only is that one vague enough to be inactionable, it also has the exact same issues as the first one. Not to mention that your wish has already been done for you! You have one more try before I just think of something for you.”
This time QuiQuian looked deep in thought, contemplating what a good wish could be. He held a resigned look on his face when he finally spoke. “Truthfully I have nothing to ask for. I am content with life as it is. I want for nothing, and have everything I could ever need. I do not even fear death! So long as I can spend my life by your side, and continue to grow myself, I have nothing to ask for.”
”Be that as it may, I still have to do something for you in return. Therefore, I say to you QuiQuian the faithful, that fate has decreed you to stand above all mortal creation.”
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The snow white giant lowered his head in thanks, and everything started dissolving.
But before that could fully happen, the brown skinned woman looked straight at Alice with a smile.
”Learn”
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Morning came with Alice barely remembering last night. She remembered being scared and then something about a giant rabbit. She was tempted to say she dreamt of a rabbit trying to eat her but… no matter how much it would fit the pattern of her nightmares that just seemed entirely incorrect in many ways. Well if she couldn’t remember what happened she’d leave it like that.
As Alice saw it there were three options for what to do: Practice magic, no matter how frustrating it got sometimes; get some food, preferably meat for longer term storage; or actually do something with the large amount of stat points she had. Having just woken up, her hunger clearly affected her decision making as she decided to find something to eat.
She opted for the simple strategy of finding some berries and roots to sate her hunger. She couldn’t wait for fruits to start growing and ripening, the edible plants she knew of were getting boring. Then she started looking around for any animals to eat, she didn’t expect to find any nearby as the forest was just as sparsely populated as normal. Or maybe it just felt that way since the animals were to stealthy for her.
Her next course of action was to go to a water source and start trapping the area. She got to a small stream that went into a river further downstream and started. She made the same compressed dirt pitfall trap, noticing that even when she covered it with leaves and twigs and grass it still looked plenty suspicious. Especially if a breeze were to blow them all off.
Having found out why it didn’t work last time, Alice found herself stuck. Her ‘hunting’ lessons were more focused on wilderness survival than actual hunting, and it was starting to show. Hence why she more or less stuck to baiting wolves, which was unfortunately not an option anymore. For reasons she still couldn’t remember. She barely even saw wolves anymore despite how omnipresent they used to seem.
Alice continued down that line of thought for a while until she saw some grass moving out of the corner of her eye. That was nothing strange by itself, except it was moving completely differently from the grass everywhere else. She turned to look at the grass and a few seconds after the grass entirely stopped. Time seemed to slow as she saw a shimmering distortion in the air, invisible if she weren’t looking at it. Then a loud bleat came as the distortion did two things: become more obvious, and run away.
It took a second for Alice to realise what just happened before she took off after the strange distortion. Alice could already tell it was faster than her, whatever it was, and that wouldn’t do. She activated [Eyes of Fate] and started making a ball of solid-enough mana.
It was plenty distracting while she was running, but she was thankfully perfectly fine because of [Eyes of Fate] suddenly facing the ground when she would have tripped.
If at the start the distortion was about eight metres away, now it was aproaching 15. She was done with the ball at this rate though so it was just a matter of throwing it. She started it off as close to her as she could do that it could pick up speed while in the safety of her own aura of control, adjusting her aim based on many visions of the ball missing in one way or another.
Once it hit the distortion another bleat went out and the invisibility flickered for a moment revealing a knee high creature Alice had never seen before. It looked like a knee high white blur with how long Alice had to see it. The shock of seeing something like it almost had Alice stumbling. However it also revealed that the ball was doing something as the distortion was noticeably slower, and slowing.
It wasn’t that fast though so Alice had to do quite a bit more running before it was slow enough that Alice was easily outpacing it, then a bit more until it could no longer use its slow size against her.
When the distortion vanished completely she thought she had somehow failed but it seemed the strange creature had just fallen completely still. The only reason she even found it again was because of the slow bleating it occasionally let out before entirely stopping.
Since she had a good idea of where it was now, and it wasn’t going anywhere, she used her mana sense on it. That was apparently uncomfortable enough for the creature that it continued screaming out while struggling away from Alice, not making any progress.
Alicd chastised herself for forgetting what she was taught: Always make it quick. Not having a weapon to stab in a convenient location, and failing to find some other way to kill it relatively painlessly, went for a simple neck snapping, hoping that killed it instead of just paralysing it. Thankfully that did the job and Alice found herself apologising to the now dead; and revealed, animal.
She found her appetite suddenly gone, but decided to figure out what had happened to the poor animal. With her mana sense she could see nothing particularly strange, other than the split in its mana about halfway through it. The mana went from being about what she would expect, to something very familiar to her. It seemed her ball of rock mana had in fact converted most of its mana into further rock causing some kind of paralysis and heaviness in its limbs.
She also saw the creatures mana rapidly leaving it as its skin stopped being an effective barrier. Alice turned off her mana sense and instead looked at the animal with her eyes, not realising she had closed them at some point. It was looked like a really tiny, squat deer, with pure white scales.
Feeling quite sad with how the hunt ended, she thought about taking the creature, now named a screer due to the fact it was a scaled, clear deer. Unfortunately her joke wasn’t enough to lift her spirits but that was fine by her. She picked up the screer, finding it much lighter than she thought, and almost effortlessly took it back. Being very careful not to get lost.
She took it back to her old campsite to dress and drain the kill before taking it back to her hut in the village. On her way to her hut she was surprised to hear some of the goblins talk about someone’s pregnancy. It shouldn’t have surprised her since apparently there were new goblins born every month, but she still found it odd to think about.
She prepared a small breakfast, and found herself inexplicably making two portions. It seemed like an honest mistake, until she found herself thinking of dedicating the extra portion to the goddess. This was approaching dangerously close to forcing her to do something in Alice’s opinion, but she figured it was fine just this once since she had been very helpful in past.
The meal ended, and Alice found the dedicated meal just as she left it. She couldn’t help but wonder what she’d been expecting.