The chattering of a forest critter brought her out of her sleep. She didn’t move for quite some time, keeping her eyes closed and allowing herself to bask in the warm warm sunlight caressing her bare skin. Eventually reality began to intrude and with a deep sigh she opened her eyes and sat up.
The world that greeted her was still the one that had so confused her the day before, still just as distressingly purple. She knew that she needed to figure out what she was going to do now that she no longer had any imperatives to guide her actions. She contemplated this while taking inventory of her body’s current state. The mud layer that she managed to acquire yesterday was now dry with a great deal of cracking running throughout it, and she realized, it had also turned her hair into a mess. Large sections of her hair had fused with the mud that covered her chest, while the rest was stuck in mud caked clumps that pulled on her scalp in an increasingly uncomfortable way.
Paying attention to the mess brought on an itching sensation, frowning she began to break off the dried earth with her hands, squinting as her actions tore up a small cloud of dust. She was almost mud free when she reached her hair and discovered that this part of her wasn’t going to be freed quite as easily. She managed to break up the majority of the large clumps amidst a coughing fit and tearing eyes but found herself defeated when it came to getting the finer earth out of her hair. Searching her mind for a solution to this new dilemma she found the answer. Water, water could get the mud out her hair and now that she thought about it further water was something she wanted for other reasons as well. She could now identify an uncomfortable sensation as being thirsty, and water would solve that problem as well. Pleased with with her new goal she stood up taking several steps, determined to find water. Then she came to a halt, because how exactly was she supposed to find water?
Her scattered knowledge eventually gave her a satisfactory answer after having studied her surroundings for several minutes. She couldn’t find any water within her sight, but far away in the distance she could see a large mountain range with snow tipped peaks. While the snow itself was made of water she was struck with the knowledge that even if she was somehow able to climb a mountain she would probably collapse and die of thirst before she even reached the foot of a mountain if she had read the distance correctly. Especially if she took into account her difficulties the day before.
But that didn’t mean the mountains weren’t useful to her, the snowmelt´s runoff would flow downhill into small streams and as the streams met they would become larger rivers that would continue colliding and expanding until they eventually ran out into a body of water. Putting this into practice she knew it was highly likely that many rivers and small streams flowed through the forest on their way to wherever they were going. As long as she moved in a direction parallel to the mountain range she was highly likely to eventually come across water. Now she only needed to to ascertain that she was going to be able to move in as straight a line as possible. The best way she had at her disposal was establishing the cardinal directions using the sun.
The sun was not an option. It only took a few seconds of staring up into the sky while having what seemed to be her entire being tremor as a sensation of dread came over her to decide differently. Instead deciding to navigate using the mountains as a fixed point. The information in her mind utterly incapable of providing her with an answer of how to deal with two suns and whatever else was in the sky. Most of all some part of her refusing to even contemplate how to possibly go about it. In fact she was refusing to spend any more time thinking about the sky as it just caused discomfort. Mind made up she turned her attention back to the mountains, she now had to make the decision to go either left or right, on a whim she decided to go right, because well, it sounded right, and for the first time in her short memory she left the meadow.
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She had walked for a while now in the very much still purple forest and was beginning to come to some very distressing conclusions. It all boiled down to the fact that her body was off, not entirely wrong the same way the purpleness of everything around her was but still at least partially wrong. This had begun making itself clear with the way she continuously stumbled her way through the wilderness. In the beginning she kept misjudging the length of her limbs and continuously stepped on twigs and rocks along with managing to trip over any exposed roots in the vicinity. In the end she had been forced to acknowledge the fact that her body was slightly taller than her mind was used to. Soon she had subconsciously begun compensating for this as she got more and more accustomed to it. But she found that she couldn’t compensate for the way that her feet were far to soft for the rugged terrain. She had discovered this when her aching feet had demanded that she stop to investigate the pain. Beneath all the dirt the skin covering the underside of her feet had been smooth, there were no difference in the skin on her feet that made contact with ground and the skin of her palms. As a result of this walking for any significant amount of time hurt, something that wasn’t helped by her penchant for stepping on sharp objects. Unable to do anything to change her situation she had felt forced to keep on walking, which brought her to her new issue. Her body was capable of dealing with less strain than she had expected, far less than her knowledge had expected of it, and she was forced to take the first of many breaks when her legs began to tremble.
This slow advancement continued as the daylight began to disappear. During her journey her original objective of getting the dried mud out of her hair had been overtaken completely by the increasing need to quench her thirst. Her mouth was now dry and she had a growing headache from what her tired mind managed to identify as dehydration. As the time between her breaks grew shorter and the light dimmer she had begun losing hope about finding any water before nightfall, for without daylight she had no way of knowing which direction she was heading in and would be forced to stop.
Just as she was preparing herself to give up for the day she heard the sound of moving water. Without even knowing what her new way of moving was called she began running, uncaring of what her aching and and bloody feet stepped on. She didn’t come to a stop until reaching the riverside where she sank to her knees. Heart beating rapidly in her chest and breathing heavily she found herself with the overwhelming urge to laugh as cold river water rushed by her. Managing to remember her reason for being there she leaned down to have her fill of the water. It tasted oddly metallic but she couldn’t find it in herself to care as it doused her thirst. Eventually she was too full to drink any more and on a whim instead began wading out into the knee high water, careful not to slip on the slimy river rocks beneath her feet.
The chill of the water soothed her aching feet and she found herself sitting down in the midst of the rushing river water to begin scrubbing away at the dried mud that had plagued her ever since she woke. Water seemed to work wonders and soon not only her skin but also her hair was completely mud free. She marveled for a while at the way that her hair looked without the mud in it but soon got up and out of the river when she found that her teeth began chattering slightly, something that her short memory told her was a very bad thing indeed.
Back on the riverbank she watched as the two suns slowly set, one after the other. She was struck by the thought that she had no idea what she was going to happen in her future, everything seemed so uncertain and fleeting in her mind. She soon abandoned these thoughts though as a yawn overtook her. She was tired and such worries could wait until another day. After spying a particularly soft looking patch of purple grass beneath a tree she bedded down.
The woman slept away the night, still unaware of the golden tree etched into her back. She didn’t know of the way it had continuously affected her journey during the day. Several times it changed her path so she wouldn’t encounter the denizens of the forest and once even particularly insidious plant that lured amongst the undergrowth. Somewhere else in the purple forest a being with antlers grinned up at the night sky.