Zalia saw as within the blink of an eye the approaching wave enveloped her, a single thought in her mind,
"Well shit."
What followed was a confusing sensation of movement, rushing and spinning. Her mind couldn't understand the feeling but her body was telling it they were in motion making her feel incredibly sick. All she could see before her eyes clamped shut was a blur of white, dark green, black and brown as the colours swirled together. The sensation stopped with a feeling of sudden deceleration and a sound akin to a water drop hitting a still pond, only magnified a hundredfold.
Zalia opened her eyes to see the same thirty metres of land she remembered yet it was as if it had been dumped on-top of another area of the snow laden landscape. The trees were half fallen, the land beneath split to the sides as it settled. Some trees from what the area used to be stuck out the top of the strange phenomenon, half buried beneath the new chunk of earth.
Zalia looked around to gather her bearings. She couldn't identify any familiar landmarks at all, which was quite concerning considering that she was no longer in a valley apparently.
"Well fuck. What the ever living shit was that. Looked like some full blown magic, maybe an explosive or something," Zalia muttered.
She quickly followed up her statement by throwing up on the ground, still sick from whatever had happened. She then checked and found her bow laying nearby, two arrows missing from the quiver at her hip. She still had her emergency bag, something she kept on herself when leaving the cabin at all times. Inside the thin backpack was a small assortment of her remaining nuts and berries, enough to last a day or two if she stretched it. Alongside the food was a lighter, a tightly compressed sleeping bag and a light, water resistant tarp. Hanging on the side was a few metres of rope, a single metal pan and a small handaxe she could use to cut down saplings or branches.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Zalia identified where one of the missing arrows was, quickly finding the deer dead with a single arrow sticking from its chest where its heart lay.
"A lucky shot," she thought, "must have flinched to the side when that odd… explosion went off."
It was closing in on night time, which was odd to Zalia since she left her cabin in the morning and it had only been about two hours since then to her reckoning.
"Maybe I got knocked out?" Zalia considered.
As she inspected the dead deer, however, she realised that was not the answer. The body was still warm as it had been in life, though cooling quickly. With a frown, Zalia used her knife to retrieve the arrow, thankfully undamaged having missed any bone. She quickly field dressed the deer and buried the pieces before tying the legs together, putting the tarp around it as much as she could and hauling the animal up over her back.
Zalia walked for about an hour in the direction her cabin should be before accepting that yes, she was no longer near her home. She backtracked ten minutes to a nice camp location she had found earlier. A small burrow cutting under a large tree's root system, while not the most comfortable place in the world, would provide a nice reprieve from the night's cold winds.
All the equipment and clothing Zalia had on her were designed to camouflage in to a snowy forest environment to some degree, so after covering the deer body with her tarp and some snow over that, she rugged up in the sleeping bag, feeling at least a remote level of safety as she prepared to sleep.