Darius woke up by some random bird sound outside of the cave. *Oh yea, the cave*.. His mood took intense dive into the dark while remembering what had happened. He had lost everything other than the items and materials looted yesterday.
*Hmm, looted. I guess I didn’t technically steal anything because the owners of the items had died.*
Darius felt no regret for stealing, but he regretted the most that he could have carried his father inside the house. Maybe he would not have been eaten by monsters. Perhaps if he had come sooner back to the village. What. What anything other could have possibly happened other than immediate death? No. There was no second-guessing about it. But Darius still felt a hint of regret that he could not even carry his father’s body to safety or treat his wounds, for that matter. And where was his mother, or anyone for that matter? Darius had not met a single soul, not even Forest witch.
While Darius stood up, he had a dull aching body. Mindlessly and numbly, he circled around the crooked cave floor while trying to make sense of things. He cried. Then he tried to think positively that he had finally found so much material and something to read. He cried again. Darius tried to pick up a random letter but could not focus his eyes on the papers. After a few minutes, a letter got thrown on the ground with force. The vast unknown anxiety loomed on Darius. He didn’t fear being alone. In essence, he had always somewhat been alone most of the time. But he had still lost his family and future in the village. It was an agonizing parody that he had first wanted so badly to get away from the village, and now that he had the chance, instead of celebrating, he was wallowing in regrets and fear. Regrets hurt, but the fear came from within him, suffocating with a cruelling hug of cold iron strangling on his hearth.
After a while of madness, Darius snapped back to focus. My body had started to hurt more than yesterday. He looked at his left arm, and there was an angry red wound on it. The bleeding had stopped, but it did not look good. Despite washing it with river water yesterday and cleaning the grim and dirt from the wound in the best possible manner, it didn’t seem to heal that well. With some difficulty, Darius lifted his ragged shirt, and the jolt of pain from his chest stopped the movement. Shakily he forced the shirt over his head and looked at the chest area. The right side, next to his heart, had all manner of red, violet, and blue bruises. While touching these parts, some parts resulted in more pain than others, and one part felt loose inside but also buffy and swollen.
Since Darius couldn’t do anything to it, he put the shirt back on. Something had to be done to the wounds, though. In the shadowy cave, Darius once more looked around the items he had looted and laid them all over the sizeable flat table of rocks. The table was the production of boredom that he had built a long time ago. It had cracks everywhere, but Darius had managed to select stones so that the surface had only a few minor cracks and differences in elevation.
After sorting out the items, Darius took Navarroroot from the small pile and added water to the pot. After mixing the root with water, he carefully moved outside and walked to his campfire place between large boulders near the cave entrance. Darius leaned and put the pot over the fireplace built with hundreds of medium size rocks. He had had far too much time for these things, but now he felt more urgency because of infected wounds. His body had already started to heat while moving around the cave. Just before starting the fire, Darius remembered monsters. The wood he had put into the fireplace was not suitable for this purpose. Darius needed highly flammable tar woods to keep black smoke from damp firewood away for a hotter flame. When Darius had collected some wood nearby, he returned and boiled water for half an hour while changing water little by little a few times. Navarroroot was not just medicine. It also had poison and had to be boiled before medical use. The challenge was to keep the medical part of it in the pot while pouring out poison foam gathering on the surface.
While the fire was crackling, Darius searched his belongings and found a tattered, ripped-off alchemy book from yesterday. It was a significant relief that the book was written with letters and language that he could speak. Darius had imagined that there might be some impossible ancient languages in it. But some words were new to him, like pro-se-du-rality? Darius assumed it had something to do with process but could not know how. Similar problems plagued him while he was trying to read the damn book. While reading, adding firewood, and cooking, reading got easier little by little. Some weird words started to make more sense in their relation to the topics, and from detailed explanations, Darius could know if he had been correct in his assumptions. It was not perfect, but he could memorize parts at a time.
Topics of the book ranged from the basics of magical plants to alchemy processes. Apparently, magical plants were only available in nature, and sometimes incantations were needed to make potions. The basic form of potion was to take one or more ingredients and use them according to the findings of some studies to make some potion that was desired. Potions were handled with the concentration of magic value of the plants, but nothing really told Darius in the book how magic would work in alchemy. It seemed that magic plants could only be found in the wilderness, and there was no way of growing them.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
After gazing through the minuscule pictures and reading basic introductions of several hundred plants, Darius had to compare some of them. Every plant had either unique or combination effects. Some names of the plants were written with different colours, but Darius could not make any sense of them. There had to be some reason to use such an expensive way of writing.
The fire crackled. With sluggish movements, Darius stewed the water until its colour changed to white and collected white floating foam carefully with sticks. He could have collected the poison, but it would have been far more tedious in this worsening condition. Still, reading the book kept him awake, and he could finally focus on something else.
Much later, by the sun's direction, Darius could tell that the boiling had taken several hours already. He kept adding water, but there was always a bit of floating white foam forming on top of the water.
*Shit, the water is too cold for separation!*
Darius started adding more medium size sticks into the fire to make it hotter and kept reading the book.
After some time liquid had turned from light red to yellow with a hint of orange, and foam had stopped forming. Darius stopped adding water and boiled the rest of the water away. While this lazy part of the task was going on, Darius started going through the pictures of each plant. Maybe he could find out if he ever had seen any of them. He found some plants but didn’t remember where they grew. There was no telling whether the plants were the same as in the pictures. After his frustration with the basics of alchemy, the water had boiled out of the pot. Carefully, Darius gathered yellowish crumbs from the pot and collected them into the folded first page of the book he had ripped for this purpose alone. He would not be able to bring these books with him, so he might as well use them somehow. After gathering crumbs left of Navarroroots, Darius went inside the cave. He started pulverizing them with stones until he had a very fine powder mixed with some crushed coal and a pit of water to create a medical paste. The coal was necessary for the chance that there was still poison within the powder. After a bit of struggle of undressing and cleaning every part of his body wounded arm was hurting even more. For his left hand, Darius put Navarro paste into the wound and closed it with ripped and boiled rags. After storing the rest of the rags into a medical purse, Darius noticed that his clothing was filthy, and he went hesitantly outside to wash them next to a nearby spring. The chilly water was not best for washing, but it did something for his rags of clothes. Darius managed to put them to dry next to the fire, opened the sack, and took handfuls of letters and papers out that he had gotten earlier.
From the letters, Darius could tell that the forest witch had a grudge against not as local lord Novast. There were 35 letters only arguing about resources and threats to the village. It was baffling how the witch had seemed to clash with officials of the province on medicines, iron, and some more rare materials for magic, maybe. One argument was about local corpses that needed to be cremated and sent to the city. It seemed that the witch had taken the corpses, but the cremated corpses never arrived in the city of Novast. Darius found it peculiar, but then his gaze found something exceedingly fascinating in the pile of papers. Old-looking parchment scroll with red stamps. Darius had only seen such a scroll twice and could tell it to be an official document of some sort.
While opening the scroll carefully and glancing, Darius started to laugh. In all madness of it, he was now officially the owner of the witch’s house and lands attached to it. He continued laughing and shouted
”Welcome, welcome every noble of the country. We are now gathered here to auction a pile of the broken building built in the land middle of nowhere. Count your offers! Did I hear one stone, ok two rocks, that’s better oh no, no takers. Oh well, the land and building go to Duke Scamworth.”
Darius laughed so hard that he almost rolled on top of the fire.
While glancing at the fire, Darius almost threw the scroll into the fire. But he decided to keep it. The scroll wasn’t nearly as heavy as a book; if he could sell the land, it could be worth something. Maybe someone would buy the land to build a lamb farm on top of the witch’s house. Darius smirked at the thought of it and put the scroll inside the bag.
While the fire was running out of wood, Darius did not feel as cold. That only meant that he already had a fever. With a hint of resignation, Darius hunched his shoulders and went back inside the cave. After trying to glance at another book, he could not focus anymore. Instead, he ate and admired the sweet taste of stolen apples. After downing some water, Darius huddled on the bed made of branches and leaves in the last corner of the cave. Darius noticed that his blanket had holes in it but could not really do much for it now.
Darkness came slowly, and fever overtook him. Darius knew he had to leave the cave, but he was not ready yet. But not only because of normal flesh wounds but because of mental ones.