“Where am I?” Nur whispered as he opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, the sun was up shining at his face. The terrain looked like a mountainside, complete with trees, grass, and the dirt.
Then, he saw that his hand was clutching his chest. When he removed his hand off his chest, he saw dried blood. “Right” his mind flashed back to what happened to him, and how that white haired goddess had stabbed him in the chest with her fingers. “It doesn’t hurt as bad as it looks, but damn, she had some crazy sharp fingers.”
“There don’t seem to be any people nearby.” As he kept walking, he saw a gigantic rock that had signs pointing in different directions. Pointed back for a neighboring kingdom of Arak, leftwards was a way for a port, rightwards was the so called ‘Dangerous territory’, and moving forward meant going towards the city of Oran. “I don’t seem to have much of a choice.” His stomach growled. If there is a human city nearby then there might be food there.
“Master Desolai! Desolai! Where are you?” Nur screamed at the top of his lungs, almost expecting her to materialize out of thin air, but she never appeared.
“Where in the world could I be to have an angel of death not hear me? I must be too far away. Did that white haired girl teleport me or something? Anyways I need to find my way back to Desolai and Kunjarik pronto!” his stomach growled again, somewhat louder. “As soon as I find some food to eat.”
Looking at her orb, inside the realm of the Time God, separate from the space and time of the real world, Chronos sat, observing the actions of the human being she has sent nine hundred years into the past.
“This is weird, definitely weird!” She kept peering at him with piercing gaze as if trying to find the answer to her dilemma.
“Your Eminence, what seems to be what you call ‘Weird’?” A bowing form of a gentleman, dressed in a suit, said respectively. His black eyes were cast on the ground, as if fearing looking upon his master.
“Oh, Mrakus!” Chronos looked at her servant in an annoyed manner. “Would you like to take a look at this?” she made the orb float in the air, allowing it to float towards Mrakus. He looked at it curiously.
“Is it a human?”
“Correct, is there anything else you see about him?” Chronos asked him while thinking to herself ‘Why angels are so stupid even though they are secondary deities?’
“Sadly, I don’t see anything amiss with this human, your eminence.”
“You angels are as imperceptive as you are foolish.” Mrakus said nothing, but the left hand he held behind his back clenched into a fist. Luckily she couldn’t see it.
“Then allow me to enlighten you.” She said smugly.
“As you already know, each mortal is bound by fate, therefore deities such as ourselves can perceive not only their present, but their past and future as well, thereby allowing us to have them follow our whims.” She continued. “But this human is strange. When I look upon him I only see him in the present, I do not see his past or his future, just the present.”
“That indeed is unusual, your eminence.”
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“But worry not, I shall make sure he regrets ever serving Desolai! Haaaa-ha-haa…”
After her laughter ended, Mrakus asked her.
“Your eminence, why to let him live? If he needs to be punished why not give him death?”
“Your way of thinking truly is childish, Mrakus. If I just kill him, where is the fun in that? I want him to feel regret with every fiber of his being, to curse the day he pledged his loyalty to her!” After a slight outburst, she calmed down and said. “I will make sure he will be tormented endlessly, not by death, but by life. When he will wish he was dead, he will find himself unable to end, cursed with life. But worry not, I am not uncompromising Goddess. If he abandons his loyalty to her and quits being hers, then I shall grant him his end.”
“Is his fate to be stuck in the present or the future?” Mrakus asked.
“Neither, he will meet his doom by the hands of the past. It will be entertaining to watch, Mrakus.” She said while smiling. Mrakus couldn’t help but feel somewhat sorry for the human; he would suffer greatly for his allegiance to Desolai, the angel Chronos held a grudge against.
“As you command, your eminence” He said while on his knees, bowing. He was an angel who pledged his loyalty to Chronos, a secondary deity. But before her, he was just a slave.
“Man, what have we here?” Nur approached a tree that had a small trap set under it. Obviously someone wanted to catch an animal, apparently successfully.
Underneath the branch of the tree, all tied up in a net was a white dog. It was looking at Nur with alarmed gaze. The dog’s legs were tied up preventing it from moving.
“It’s perfect! Now I just need to prepare bonfire!” Nur proceeded to collect wood from wherever he could find. He was still a long way from the city. According to the signs it was at least another day worth of walk involved. Until then he needed to eat something.
He took about half an hour to make a fire by furiously rubbing wood against each other. Now, finally, he managed to get the fire to flare up. Now he hesitantly looked at the creature that would become his meal.
“Well, I have never eaten a dog, but desperate times call for desperate measures!” Climbing up the tree, Nur approached the rope to which the dog was tied to and used a stick to hook the end of the rope to the end of the stick.
Now using the rope attached to a stick he tried to have the dog move somewhat closer to where the bonfire was at. The rope that held the dog still was attached to a tree but Nur managed to move the position of the dog using the stick. The dog was squirming madly.
“Well, it will take a while to cook it, so I suppose I will wait.” Nur said nonchalantly while watching the dog furiously shaking from side to side, trying to avoid the flames. Nur on the other hand, completely forgot that the animal has to be killed before being cooked.
Not knowing his own mistake, Nur sat down on something soft, kind of squishy, somewhat scaly.
When he heard a hissing noise directed at him, Nur squeezed his fingers around the body of what he was sitting on. It was dark so he couldn’t see too well, but with his sense of touch he could tell one thing for sure.
He was in mortal danger.
The thing he attempted to use as a sitting place was a snake, coiled up into spirals. Now it’s head was steadily approaching Nur, mouth open, stretched out jaws about three times as large as Nur’s head.
“SNAKE!!!!” Nur ran away from the bonfire place into the forest.
He ran like crazy. Not stopping for a second until he ran out of stamina.
He ended up near a lake.
“Hopefully there is something I can eat here, oh!” he found his foot touching the water. “Right, I need to drink as well!” he used his hands in order to scoop up cup’s worth of water and proceeded to drink to his heart’s content.
Then, he found himself sitting on top of the den of ants. He jumped up and plunged into the water, trying to get rid of the ants in his pants.
“Well, Desolai’s books did say ants are a good source of nutrition, so….” He hesitantly used a stick to prod the ant den, having several ants stuck to the stick; he proceeded to swallow them whole. Stinging sensation lasted only for a few seconds; he kept chewing, and thus nullifying any last hope ants could have had for their lives. “Wow, ants are unusually tasty!”
Just like that, he ended up sleeping after the first day of his life in this weird place that resembled his world, but was so unfamiliar, all the while not realizing it was the same world but not the same when.