The girl still walks, with all the energy she can muster. Though every part of her body was sore, she holds her head high, observing the birds, the trees, the sky and everything in between.

Every painstaking step a mission she’s unsure she’ll be able to complete again.

Blood dripped down from her left hand, each drop falling rhythmically, leaving behind a trail quickly obscured by the dirt. The pain had left her hand just as numb as her mind.

The sun is ever closer to setting, but before the girl can even worry about it getting dark, she spots something glistening in the distance. Something she needed, something she was hoping to find: a river.

A nice stream cuts off the path she was following. It’s a bit shallow, but quite wide, and a wooden bridge had been built, even looking well maintained.

As the girl approaches, however, instead of going through the bridge, she walks parallel to the flow of the stream, away from the path and deeper into the woods.

She stares intently at the river, paying close attention, and eventually sees what she’s looking for: fish! She stops in her tracks and takes her robe off, unsheathing the dagger and stepping into the water.

She watches as fish pass by, trying to devise a way to catch one. She crouches and, when the timing is right, she brings the dagger down... Missing.

So she tries again. And again, and again... Every time she does, she gets a little closer, until finally, she succeeds. She stabs right through a fish, taking it out of the water and watching with content as it squirmed. It was sizeable, and she determines it should be enough for now.

Eating too much would likely cause great discomfort, or worse, since her body was already used to being sustained on scraps, so she kept to the single fish, prioritizing getting a good night’s rest.

She sets the fish down near her robe, stabbing it in the head to kill it.

Then, she takes off the cloth wrapped around her hand and washes the wound. The girl watches as the blood seeps into the clear water for a few seconds, entranced.

She cuts off another strip from the spare cloth around her hip, and once again wraps her hand with it. She also washes her face, cleaning the blood off it. There were no injuries on her head, the blood staining it wasn’t hers.

She takes the canteen and fills it with the river water, taking a swig and then setting it down once again.

Her focus goes back to the fish, as she realizes she doesn’t know how to start a fire, and if she intends to eat the fish then, she’ll have to do it raw.

It’s not like she’s given much of a choice.

One by one, she uses her dagger to tear off chunks of the fish and takes them to her mouth. Sat beside a tree, she watches as the sky grows darker.

She tries to imagine what the world looks like. The real world, the one she hadn’t yet experienced.

When she’s done, she throws whatever’s left of the fish back into the river.

She finds a comfortable spot behind the tree and lays down. Overcome with exhaustion, the girl falls sound asleep.

Nothing but emptiness surrounds the girl, a blinding white light as far as the eye can see. A vaguely familiar woman kneels in front of the girl, and begins caressing her hair, tears streaming down from her face. Tears stream down from the girl’s face as well, though she can’t understand why. The void consumes the woman; the light becomes too much to bear, and the girl closes her eyes, waking up.

The birds sing, trying to attract potential mates. Or just because. As the girl wakes up, she feels a bug crawling on her face, so she throws it away. She gets up, feeling reinvigorated, though hungry. She picks up the canteen and drinks some more from it. Walking out from the shadow of the tree, her eyes take a second to get used to the light.

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She looks up, the sun standing almost exactly above her. She had slept a lot.

She scouts her surroundings. Everything looks the same as it did the day before.

The girl strips naked, taking off the old torn apart robe she had been wearing all that time. She walks deep into the river until her body is almost halfway submerged and begins cleaning herself.

She takes her time bathing, washing every part of her body as best as she can. Getting rid of all the blood, dirt, and general filth, her pale skin shined under the sunlight, her veins visible through the skin of her arms.

She uses the canteen to wash her hair, filling it with water and then pouring it on her head. Her hair had been especially dirty, and washing off the filth took some effort—it was clear she hadn’t done it in a long while. She doesn’t do a perfect job by any means, but when she finished, her hair returned to its lustrous, almost golden color.

Her long hair, reaching down to her hips and into the water, with her pale skin and bright blue eyes combined with the glistening of the water current, it was as though her body itself was glowing.

Satisfied, she walks toward the shore, but doesn’t exit the water just yet. She sits on top of an exposed rock, her feet still submerged in water, and ponders her situation. Was it wise to keep walking? Should she conserve her energy and wait by the road, hoping someone will find her?

Unable to decide for sure what to do next, she sits there, deep in thought, for some time.

Then, she hears a weird sound. Panting? She looks back at where all of her stuff is, and standing there is some wolf. It’s huge, having a black coat of fur and two large white horns on its head. It’d usually be pretty intimidating, except it stands there with its mouth open, panting and slobbering all over the ground, wagging its tail, looking like some kind of oversized puppy.

Before the girl even moves, it picks up her dagger and makes a run for it, running deep into the woods.

The girl doesn’t visibly express much shock, keeping the same tired gaze she had. Calmly, she muttered.

“I needed that...”

Indisputably, the dagger was vital for her survival. She couldn’t just let it go like that.

She had the options to either go back to the site of the carriage and get a different one, or follow the wolf, hoping to reacquire hers.

Promptly getting out of the water, she puts on the black robes, wraps her left hand with the last bit of spare cloth remaining, refills the canteen, and begins walking into the woods, following the wolf.

A foolish decision, perhaps, but the girl trusted her instincts. She also had different goals which aligned with this decision.

She has no actual idea where the wolf has gone by that point, so she just walks into the general direction she saw it heading. While making her way wherever it was she was headed, she finds a large bush with a different type of fruit, one she actually recognized.

It was black and round, as big as her hand, with an exterior like that of an apple. It was a fruit she was very familiar with and knew was safe to eat. Almost immediately, her decision to go into the woods was fruitful.

She picks one and bites into it. It tastes like... nothing, really. The fruit’s flavor was impressively unremarkable, almost completely flavorless, with just a hint of sweetness. It was a plant known to be very easy to grow, yielding fruit in almost any climate, at any time of the year, and for that reason it was a common part of the diet of most villagers, though its nutritional contents were as lacking as it’s flavor.

Once she’s finished eating the fruit she’s picked, she picks another one, and eating it as well. And then she picks up another one, and... you get the idea. The Nothing Fruit was at least still better than actually nothing, and she wasn’t very pleased by her recent experience with eating raw fish and would rather avoid doing so again.

Finally, remembering why she’s even there, the girl drops a half-eaten fruit and wipes her mouth, then continues walking the way the wolf went, assuming she still remembers which way that was.

Walking through the forest, the girl finds the amount of animals strange. There really wasn’t a whole lot of them. She was expecting to find a few, but other than the goblin and the wolf, she hadn’t encountered anything. Well, there were also the birds, but she wasn’t as interested in them.

The forest is full of fruits and plants she had never seen before. She doesn’t dare try consuming or even touching them, if she can help it. There were many tales, of those who tried to flee to the woods and died poisoned by trying to live off its resources. The peaceful greenery of the forest wasn’t to be trusted.

Wandering deep enough into the forest, she’s once again struck with a familiar smell.

That same foul odor…

Pinpointing the exact location of the odor’s source wasn’t really in her arsenal of skills, so she takes a while, but she finds it.

The corpse of an adult woman. Her naked body battered and bruised, blood coming from every orifice in her body, part of her scalp missing, while the remaining hair is so tainted by blood you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s supposed to be an elegant indigo blue. Her right arm was broken, bone protruding through the skin, and she looked to have been stabbed several times in the gut.

Such a scene was even more familiar to the girl than that of a bunch of dead soldiers.

Such a scene was truly not the work of any beast. Not even goblins.

Such a scene did not draw any reaction out of the girl. She simply stood there in silence, understanding. The picture had become clear now.