‘Is this is?’
Leo stood frozen, staring at the dark figure with half of his body peeking out of the doors.
He was in the person’s plain view, and yet…
The figure didn’t move, frozen in its relaxed pose. Not even the tiniest twitch.
A load of spit sank down Leo’s throat followed by a shallow, silent breath.
‘Is it merely an illusion, or is it sleeping?’
A thousand thoughts traveled through the young man’s head at a pace making it impossible to seriously consider anything. And yet…
Somehow, it was all too simple.
The shadowy figure didn’t move, frozen in its comfy spot on the waist-high stone fence.
With his heart in his mouth, Leo pushed the doors a little bit wider, just enough for him to slip through.
Leo wasted no time following up on the thought, sneaking his full body out of the building.
‘Now then…’
The shadowy figure still didn’t move. So Leo decided to simply not think about it too much.
‘God almighty, bestow me with your blessing and grace,’ Leo silently prayed, every fiber of his flesh trembling in terror. But still, he made a step. Then, his eyes swayed, scanning his surroundings.
It was late into the night. And by some mercy of fate, the night was just dark enough to hide Leo’s silhouette while sparing him with just enough starlight to navigate his way around the area.
Or rather, to take notice of the place’s general layout.
‘A small path leading to the building, a bunch of buildings fair distance apart from each other, one major path running across,’ Leo gathered together what he could scrap with the little light left in the world.
In fact, it was so dark, that only the light of an occasional torch allowed him to notice buildings that would otherwise hide in the night’s deep darkness.
‘This place doesn’t seem to be directly by the river. And I can’t see any well,’ Leo thought, following by the checklist of every lost soul that dared to gamble their life away down the probability well.
All humans needed water, more likely in greater quantities than what they could gather from rain and rain alone.
‘That means, there has to be a smaller path, the route they take to get more water,’ Leo deduced, while conveniently opting to ignore the possibility that… there was a well around and that he simply couldn’t notice it in the darkness.
And as if to compensate for all of his foul fortunes up to this point, even with the sparse light of the night darkest hour, his nanites-reinforced eyes made out what appeared to be a small yet heavily worn-down cut in the otherwise well-maintained fields around.
‘Well, it won’t hurt to try,’ Leo thought, gathering his strength to take a step to what could potentially be his route to not only escape but also find his way back to that bloodied hill…
Only for his body to freeze.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The shadowy figure… didn’t move. But taking a step towards a possible way out also meant…
It meant giving up on the help Anlay offered.
Definitely and finally deciding to push her helping hand aside and face the dangers of this foreign world on his own.
‘Shit,’ Leo’s face darkened, matching the darkness of the eyes. Yet, contrarily to the foul state his soul fell in, the young man’s lips trembled and then curved up.
A deep breath later…
‘Yeah, I would rather face whatever terror this world can throw at me over the main plot-line of this world’s conflict…’
Shaking his head a little over his own vulnerable self, Leo calmed his breath and took a step.
And then another. And bit by bit, he first closed to the shadowy figure… only to pass the sleeping man without any trouble and step upon the rough grains of the pathway leading to the main axis of the village or whatever else this place was.
‘Don’t you dare relax,’ Leo warned himself the moment he gained enough distance from both Anlay’s place and the sleeping man for his guard to fall down a bit. ‘Relaxing like that is exactly how people get caught!’
Gritting his teeth to the point his jaws started to cry out in pain, Leo focused on carefully treading ahead, all the way to the path. Then, down the narrow path situated between two fields of some sort of cereal.
Despite Leo’s great efforts, the more distance he gained down the path, the more his excitement started to get to him. And by the time he had to make his first stop to catch a breath when the exhaustion of what he recently went through caught up to him…
Leo found himself standing right at the shore of a sizeable river.
For as far as he could see between the sparse starlight and the nanites in his eyes, the river was rather deep for its width, with its rather strong currents crashing into an array of huge stones and boulders scattered all over its jagged course.
‘Assuming it’s the same river…’ Leo looked down at the rapidly flowing water before taking a deep breath and gritting his teeth.
“I’ve come so far already.”
Finally, for the first time since waking up, Leo dared to openly use his voice.
He uttered a mere whisper… and yet, he made his presence known.
And as stupid as it was, this short sentence filled Leo’s soul with a sense of liberation.
‘Let’s keep going!’
Riding on the high of making a major step in the right direction, Leo chartered a course from what little he could see before pushing even further ahead, treading against the river’s current.
Soon, though, this task grew increasingly difficult when Leo reached the end of the area where the locals trampled all of the vegetation. And soon, a leisurely walk turned into an actual struggle to make another step.
‘Nothing could be too easy, huh?’
Sparing but a single thought to self-reflect on his situation, Leo gritted his teeth and continued ahead.
After only the heavens knew how long, the river started to gradually widen. Its current grew calmer now that the water had more space to flow through. But most importantly… the shore turned from an absolute torture to cross into a comfortable, sandy beach with only an occasional stone poking out from the gray sands.
‘Now, that’s… better?’
Not sure what to think about the change, Leo took a breath and… kept going.
The path surely turned a lot easier to cross… but Leo’s steps left clear imprints in the sand. And while the winds would soon spray the sand around and cover his tracks…
The young man shrugged.
‘I knew I wouldn’t like it…’
And yet, Leo continued. With nothing better to do and no better hope to bank his desperation on, he persevered. Soon, right as the first rays of the sun started to disperse the darkness, the young man finally managed to get a better look at his location.
Looking back, he couldn’t see a single hint of the village he came from. In fact, he could no longer even see the sands of the beach, now traveling by a grassy shore, a few feet above the surface of the running water.
Out in the distance, a forest front ran diagonally across what would otherwise be a massive plain.
And smack-dab ahead, the source of the noise that kept upsetting him ever since god-knows how long.
A messy waterfall that fed the river Leo traveled along. A waterfall that started at the top of a huge cliff, roughly between one and two hundred meters high.
And at the top of the cliff, just like far-off in the distance, near the edge of the forest…
Leo saw the light of torches.
‘I made it back,’ Leo thought, slowly falling down on all fours and then pressing himself down to the ground.
He was still relatively out in the open, with nothing but some sparse bushes to break the contour of his silhouette.
And then, there was a roughly three-hundred-meter-long stretch of a perfectly open field with absolutely nothing to hide behind that separated the young man from the face of the cliff.
That, and a glister of reflected early daylight coming from…
The clip on the strap of Leo’s missing backpack!