Birch rubbed his eyes. He moved his hand in front of him. Nothing. The wooden panel refused to reappear.
It must have been his imagination. His eyes had to have been playing tricks on him. How could a wooden sign just hang in the air? And why would he have been given a score for throwing a stone? It just didn’t make sense. It couldn’t have been real.
Still, there was only one way to find out for sure.
He scrambled over the boulders, collected any loose chunks of rock he could find, and piled them by his feet in the same spot he’d stood when he’d hit the target.
His first throw missed to the right of the blackened tree. He paused, staring out across the clearing. The strange wooden panel didn’t appear, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d only seen it before after he’d hit what he’d been aiming at.
Birch picked up a second stone. This time he managed to get it on line, but he didn’t throw it hard enough and it crashed into the meadow a few yards short of the tree.
He took a breath. He was rushing. He had to focus.
This time he didn’t just reach for the first stone his hand touched. He selected a fist-sized chunk that looked a bit smoother than the others.
Concentrating on the target, he raised the stone. He pulled back his arm, reminding himself to put a little bit more power into his throw than he had last time, and let fly.
The stone zipped high over the meadow and hammered into the tree’s trunk.
Immediately, the wooden panel appeared in front of him. Once again, it was covered in carved writing.
Throwing Small Projectiles +0.01
Birch reached out for it. Just like last time, his hand passed through it, but something was different. It was almost as if the panel was slightly more real. More tangible. He might not be able to touch it with his hand, but he felt as if he could somehow connect with it in his mind.
The panel started to fade. Birch focused on it. Clamping it with his mind. It remained where it was. He kept it in place for a couple of heartbeats. Then his mental grip began to slide, and the panel disappeared.
Almost straightway, another panel appeared to take its place.
It looked identical to the one he’d seen before except the writing was different.
Panel Control +0.01
Birch screwed up his face. Panel Control?
By holding the panel in place, he must’ve demonstrated some control over it and had done enough to earn a reward from whoever or whatever was making all of this happen.
The wooden panel faded and then vanished before Birch thought to hold it in place to see whether he’d be rewarded again.
He swore. Now that this panel was gone, he’d have to start the whole process again.
Birch reached down for another stone and launched it at the tree. It missed to the left, but only by a hand’s width. He slightly adjusted his line and sent another stone hurtling through the air. It struck the post in exactly the spot he was aiming for.
He stared ahead expectantly, ready to grasp hold of the panel the moment it appeared.
The now-familiar sign popped up.
Throwing Small Projectiles +0.01
Birch clutched it with his mind, pinning it in place. He held it still for several breaths.
Was this all he could do with it? He focused more intently on the wooden surface. He tried to turn it around to see if there was something written on the other side, but the panel refused to budge. He tried to rotate it, but he couldn’t make it move.
He concentrated harder still. There was definitely more. Something he was missing. Something that existed just beyond his grasp. He could sense it. He knew it was there. But he couldn’t quite work out what to do to get at it.
He let go of the panel. Without the mental force he’d applied to it, it slipped away.
Just as he’d predicted would happen, the second panel appeared.
Panel Control +0.01
This time he was ready. He gripped the panel, carefully examined each of the carved letters, then studied the wooden surface. It looked just like a length of cut oak, the type that was used in many of Eldergrove’s buildings.
But he could still detect something more. Another panel perhaps? One attached to the one he could see. Yes, there was definitely something there, he just couldn’t bring it into focus.
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Like a muscle contracted against a heavy weight, his mind began to tire, and his hold on the panel gave way. It disappeared, and almost immediately reappeared.
Panel Control +0.01
It didn’t seem to matter what was written on the panel. If he held it in place, he’d receive a reward.
His brain felt too tired to reach out for this panel. He allowed it to drift away and took a deep breath.
The whole concept of panels appearing before his eyes felt like a dream. But none of his other dreams had seemed so bound by logic. The panels clearly obeyed a set of rules. A system that he could test and learn about. If this was really a dream, surely his mind would’ve come up with something more exciting or whimsical. The panels would’ve followed his commands from the start and he wouldn’t have had to work so hard for them to reveal their secrets.
He picked up another stone, steadied himself, then flung it toward the target.
He didn’t connect with this throw, nor the next two, but the one after that was the best one he’d managed so far.
Throwing Small Projectiles +0.01
He latched hold of the panel, an action that was by now starting to feel natural and instinctive, and continued his investigation. This time he detected the outline of the phantom panel he’d sensed before. There was some sort of symbol carved into it. The shape of a leaf perhaps.
It took him a few more panels for him to visualize this new panel in what he guessed was its true form. Like the others, it was made from a rectangle of wood, but instead of a message carved into the middle, there was an oval-shaped leaf. The leaf was on its side with its stalk to the left and its tip to the right. The space inside the leaf’s outline had been left empty save for a thin vertical sliver to the far left stained bright yellow.
To the right-hand bottom corner of the panel, the number 5.02 had been chiseled into the wood.
Birch checked the panel to which this new panel was attached. It was the one that read Throwing Small Projectiles +0.01.
Perhaps this showed the total points he’d amassed so far for this particular skill.
No, that couldn’t be right. He’d stopped counting how many times he’d successfully struck the tree, but it certainly hadn’t been more than five or six, seven at the most. For him to have a total of 5.02 he would’ve had to have hit the target about five hundred times.
But perhaps the count hadn’t started from the moment the first panel appeared. Maybe the number simply reflected his current ability to throw a small projectile. He’d taken his throws more seriously today than he ever had before, but it wasn’t the first time he’d thrown stones at things. Maybe he’d been earning points his whole life without even knowing it?
He allowed the panel with the leaf and the panel to which it was joined to disappear and sat down next to his dwindling pile of stones. The panel rewarding him for holding the previous panels in place appeared.
Panel Control +0.01
He ignored it, and it promptly vanished from view.
Birch looked again at his injured hand. Somehow the wooden panels and the vicious mark he received had to be connected. Nothing else had changed. Before he’d stuck his hand inside the Sacred Oak, he’d never once seen one of the strange panels, but he’d seen dozens of them since. There had to be a connection.
Another wooden panel came into view.
Power of Reasoning +0.01
Without thinking, Birch reached for the panel with his mind, preventing it from fading away. Although the words were new, it was the same size and shape as the other +0.01 panels.
He accessed the panel linked to it. Once again it featured the leaf-shaped symbol, but this time there was a 6.13 instead of the 5.02 he’d seen before. And slightly more of this leaf appeared to have been painted yellow too.
If his thinking was correct, according to the panels, he was better at reasoning, whatever that meant exactly, than he was at throwing stones.
He let the panels fade.
A wave of tiredness crashed through his mind.
Panel Control +0.01
He was about to allow this panel to go away too, when something occurred to him.
Fixing it in place, he touched the panel linked to it.
This afternoon was definitely the first time he’d encountered the panels. He’d never even heard of anything like it before. So, unlike his abilities to reason or to throw stones, there was no way he’d have been able to attempt the skill of controlling panels until today.
He focused on the linked panel. The number read 0.12. This seemed about right if he’d received 0.01 for every panel he’d managed to hold in place. He checked the leaf. The yellow line was so thin it was only just visible. This made sense too. He was an absolute beginner when it came to controlling the panels. It was all new to him. But as his skills improved, no doubt the yellow bar would thicken, and less of the leaf’s bare, unpainted wood would remain.
This was all the proof he needed that the panels bearing the leaf represented his cumulative totals and that the scorekeeping had started long before he gained the ability to see the panels.
He relinquished his grip on the panels and waited for them to go wherever they went when he could no longer see them.
Two more panels took their place.
Panel Control +0.01
Power of Reasoning +0.01
Seeing two panels appear simultaneously surprised Birch, but there was something else that caught his attention.
A scrabbling noise was coming from somewhere behind him.
He whirled around, then stood still and silent. He half-expected a lynx or a forest bear to pounce at him from one of the boulders, but there was nothing there.
He yawned and stretched his arms above his head. The shadows were beginning to lengthen, and the sounds of song and laughter from the village drifted on the breeze. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d been concentrating on the panels. Nor the faint smell of meat being grilled on cooking fires.
His mouth watered, but there wasn’t a chance he was going to head back into the village just to get a taste of the food on offer at the celebrations.
The panels might have been a welcome distraction from what had happened to him, but they were nothing more than that. They weren’t going to change the fact that he was now one of the Markless. They weren’t going to prevent him from spending the rest of his life shoveling piles of dung and following the orders of Old Rush, and whoever became the stablemaster after him.
Things hadn’t worked out for him, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
He’d try and slip into the stables without being spotted. He’d left a hunk of bread wrapped up in one of the feed bins from yesterday morning’s breakfast. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as the food on offer in the village, but at least he wouldn’t have to go to sleep on an empty stomach.
Tomorrow, he’d talk to Old Rush. He’d let his master try to tell him that things weren't as bad as he thought they were. That life would go on. That even being one of the Markless wasn’t really so bad.
Birch yawned again. And maybe Old Rush would be right. Maybe tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, things would seem better.
He clambered over to the edge of the boulder and started to scramble down the side into the meadow.
“Wait!”
A man’s voice sounded down to him from the top of the rocks. “Don’t leave now. I need to talk to you.”