The blackness you wake up from feels ragged, and you sit up with a groan. There’s a sizable lump on your forehead that’s tender to the touch, the wounds inflicted on you from the brambles have begun to clot. It hurts to move.

You try to take stock of the situation. In some physics breaking way, the upwards path always leads back down into the hill. You shakily toss the same forehead denting rock in a gentle arc up the path and it is miraculously mirrored and lands next to you.

You guess that your self-inflicted knockout was one whole day as the sun is in the roughly same place as when you woke up in this strange valley on your first day. Either that or you’ve been comatose for multiple days but that seems unlikely. Impossible mirror barrier or no, you need to take a piss, a dump, find some food and drink, and probably in that order too.

Speaking of the mirror barrier, a smirk crosses your face and you stagger up to the top of the path and pee - at an angle!

You find a thicket of bushes for the second business though as some acts of privacy are hard to break.

In terms of food, you seem to remember that brambles have fruit. There’s huge tangles of brambles everywhere, some so high that they’re smothering the smaller trees. You approach one warily, mindful of your scratches. Hanging in small clusters amongst the leaves are some bramble berries. Or is it blackberries? Some of them are still small and red, but there are plumper, black ones dotted around. You try both types and quickly discover that the red ones dry your mouth out with very little juice, whereas the others just burst with juice. Even plucking them from the branch has stained your fingers, but you just greedily lick them clean and go back for more.

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You notice that not every branch has fruit, and that some of the fruit tastes mildly alcoholic.

“[Bramble discovered; novice]”

You whirl around, looking for the speaker. It is a strange voice, as though leaves in the wind were trying a sentence on for size.

What can you do about this, really? You’re having auditory hallucinations, experiencing impossible topology and you would be willing to bet your pyjamas that the cliff face on the far side, and the hills to your left and right have similar ridiculous tricks.

So you turn back round and keep eating berries.

The sun is now shining above your head, and you’re satiated and quenched from the bramble fruit. Your head is pounding, and you want to lie down. You are probably just overwhelmed from the ongoing prank but you decide to play along, not least because you are exhausted. You wish you had your bed - uncovered by brambles - but settle for a swarth of soft-ish grass underneath a spreading tree and immediately fall asleep.