I blinked when I looked over the land that was once my home, or rather the immediate area around me, it looked nothing like what I remembered.

The hilly land that made up the top of the valley made up the majority of the land, with the lower hill that used to be for farming grapes being boggy marsh. Everything else, the lower plane where we grew our hardy crops, the lower hills and the river plane that led to the river were a single body of water.

A lake in the place where all the staple foods were grown and the most fertile land we had. I felt the land as I took her in, and she felt... bloated and a little sick. She did not like it very much, and I understood it. I would hate it too.

Next to the shaft, right at the top, was a pully to draw up the rock. It was old and crumbling from the elements. It was barely intact it was so old.

I looked for any sign of civilization, but the tree cover was immense below the moor that stood atop Moarn, dense tree canopy, a tiny amount of grassland down and eastward, but that was on the horizon.

With how high the water was, I doubted the bridge still stood over the river, which meant the only way I could go was south and west.

I turned around and looked up at the mountains, I could see what looked like ruins where the monastery once sat.

Well, I could go north, but I doubt I could just crawl up the mountain and find food in their pantry.

I turned back to the south and looked over the trees, just at the horizon so far off they looked tiny I saw some plumes of smoke, to the southwest and down into the forests that had taken over the hilly land.

Where there is smoke, there is fire; big fires mean wildfires, but I know what those look like, and those aren’t wildfires, little fires mean people.

And people are what I’m looking for.

I looked for a way down and realized it was going to be an annoying walk down in sandals. It was rolling hills, thick grass, and rocks. Each of which are not exactly ideal on its own.

I sighed and started to walk, the long stalks of wild grass passing around and under me like a boat over an ocean, over the hilly mounds that likely formed on a city lost to time.

The fields of grass were long, both in height and width.

It felt like I had made little in the way of progress even a short while later, but I had the wrong perspective.

I had crossed most of the area where the buildings made lumps of earth. That meant that I had crossed most of the city. And when I put that into context, I realized that I was just being overdramatic.

I crossed in and out of the city each day, and It felt longer because of the terrain. That and anticipation, slowed me down slightly, as I thought to myself. I wanted to get to the smoke, I wanted to talk to someone, I wanted to pretend that I was in a brand new world with minimal histories, like a children’s fable.

I wanted to forget all that had happened before I had gotten back to the surface, all of it. Leave it behind like a nightmare. Leave behind the grave where all the good things I had, died.

Settling my mind, I walked nearly mindlessly, one foot in front of the other. An old trick my mom taught me, place one foot in front of the other, and pay attention to them, my mother had told me, when you look around, you’ll find that your walk goes a little faster.

Her guidance had never been wrong, well… at least when it came to this. My mind was wandering too much, losing track of the time and walking made the walking feel shorter. This is all it took for me as a kid to be quiet and get a boring walk over quickly.

Really the trick worked on everything, if you pay attention to the work you do, the time it takes to work, time suddenly decided to take ten times longer to get on with it. But if you let it slip by it would pass in a blink.

And so I walked until my feet came out of the rolling hills of grass and down to the woods. I looked back and saw the distance all the way up to the rock near the mountain I had come out of the ground near.

The second piece of my mom's advice I used today was, if you think you might get lost, remember where you came from with a landmark, it could be anything, really, so long as you could remember it. A trick my mom told me when she had to go out and work, and I had to go do something, like go to church all on my own. My mind decided to start going into a dark place before I stopped paying attention.

Foot in front of the other, over the leaf litter of a forest that hadn’t existed when I first lived. The ground was wet, which had me thinking of spring. It seemed like it, but I couldn’t tell, the river that showed what time of year it was did not exist. As the river was now a lake, I doubted it raised and lowered the same way it did as a river. But then again, the leaves looked fresh on the trees.

I stopped and looked back at the trees, which made a sort of path, not in clear lines but in that spontaneous way trees did where branches and undergrowth made a serpentine and left a line that was less cluttered. I held my imaginary compass in my mind.

As I turned back, I began heading south down the western edge, some distance from the lake.

I walked some more. One foot at a time, periodically checking that I could remember my way back. Over a stream that had three little plots like islands in a delta. Passed a cave made of grey stone where the mouth looked like a shack to my east. I stayed above the mucky bits on the flat land as the lake curved in towards the land.

And then up over a mound and onto a road. An old road set just above the ground with dirt ditches, more like gutters along the edges. A well-made, well-worn road.

The tree cover was thinner near the roadway, and Just in the distance, I could see a stone marker. A slice of civilization, even as old as it was. I stepped onto the road, and nothing jumped me, no gods awful bandit walking out, no wild animals jumped me. It was nice, for once.

I walked up the road and tried reading the stone. The stone was half again my height and made from solid weather rounded stone. The key word when it came to the stone did end up being ‘tried’ because it was totally gobbly gook to me. It was obviously a language, but none I had ever seen. Even the alphabet was different, underneath was an additional language that used the same alphabet I did, but it, too, was nonsense. I noted down the stone northwest of the location I was heading to and got back to it.

The road was a great thing, with no more plodding through the dirt came faster steps, and I ate up the distance one step at a time. Down a hill, I got a look at a long stretch, more tall stones, more gobbly gook writing, more steps. They seemed to happen regularly, so I checked my paces between them. Around 2000 paces. Or so. I could see quite a few but I just passed them, and I kept walking, periodically checking to see if I could read them, although none of them had anything I could read.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

My feet started to hurt in my sandals, so I took a break on a tree stump. The closer I got, the more the tree cover cleared. The tree stump was relatively fresh. I re-tied my sandals so they could stop biting into me, then I walked on, passing three more stones, a bend in the road around a particularly steep hill. And I could see a clearing in the trees.

FINALLY, I had walked for hours. I peeked my head through the thin tree cover and looked around.

The forest wasn’t clear cut, like near the road, it had been uprooted. The ground was a flat open space with little in the way of things near in the middle distance. Closer, next to the city, was a kind of caravansary looking place, a short wall around a compound with a bunch of buildings. Only one or two places were outside the immediate city limit, from what I could see.

The city was a strange one. No wall enclosed it, which seemed like it would be a terrible idea, instead, a wall of housing just popped up. A wall of a fortification hung above another wall further in, behind the sea of wood and stone.

Considering the lack of a wall, I didn’t think there would be guards patrolling and looking for me. But I decided to play it safe, and went just inside the tree cover around the perimeter.

For all, I know, they had some kind of killing field set up, and I wasn’t about to be pincushion because of unpreparedness.

The city was an odd looking thing. It was… archaic, like something you would see as a background for a play about the ye olden times a few hundred years before I was born.

The thinned tree line circled most of the way around the cleared land the city sat in. And it ended up having a ton of small footpaths leading to cottages, circling around only took up half an hour. Each cottage had gardens with what looked like vegetables, which made more sense to me. It was the sensible thing to do, use your land to cut your food needs down a peg.

Nowhere I looked in the circle of the clearing could I see crops. It was odd, but then everything in the valley had been in a way. I had to wonder where these people got their food, water was apparently abundant, but the land was more restricted than when I had last worked in the valley.

Most of it was underwater, and it had changed the landscape, there was no way it was unintentional, the land was certainly not loving it. I had to wonder if there were just big fields somewhere outside somewhere, that or they ate fish all day, every day.

The city was so very boring, seeming, like some kind of set piece. I couldn’t see anyone, not a single soul.

I never saw anyone at a cottage either, all of them seemed empty, it was almost unnerving. If I hadn’t felt the land, and hadn’t been jumped by skeletons, I would have assumed I was in some form of stress induced dream.

Up until I stumbled onto a hill where the grass seemed lusher, the trees thicker, like a wooden curtain. It was on the northwest side of the walled-ish town, I climbed up the short path, it was much like the others, well-trodden, and likely the most frequently used path to the city. Up on a hill surrounded by trees and gardens, was a cozy cottage with a woman on the porch.

Something about the cottage caught my attention, it was logs, and some planks for the front porch, the roof seemed simple and thatched. It was cozy, but it wasn’t just how cozy it looked or the garden around it with, of all things, flowers and herbs.

Nor was it the woman on the porch. I stopped and thought about it, it was a feeling, so I felt it out. It was the land, I could feel a noticeable contentment in a ring around the cottage, like the land was just a little bruised everywhere but the cottage. Or, I suppose, more like the land was healthier, just better all around in the ring.

The fertile soil of the valley was more fertile, and there were more things in the soil, worms and bugs and other little things that were important for plants. The flowers got just more than there needed water.

I had felt something like this before, and it took me a second to realize where I had felt it. It was a [Druids] grove. A magical sphere of influence around a [Druids] home or a place of power.

It was comfortable, almost snug, when compared to the overfull feeling the rest of the valley had, like going from walking in mud to walking on the nice, packed earth.

I basked in it, it felt like… I brushed that thought to the side, shaking my head.

I don’t have a home, not anymore.

I huffed and went to leave, but just before I did, I caught the woman staring at me. Eighty feet away from me, the woman sat on her chair, sipping from a mug when I caught her eye. She seemed to lean a little forward and began to squint at me, I cocked my head, confused at the look, like an elder craning to see just outside of their vision. Her head bobbed just a fraction before she sat back up and waved, gesturing me over.

What’s the worst that could happen, right? I crossed over the threshold of the grove, feeling the pleasant feeling through my feet. It did little for the air, but that was clean enough, my feet were made comfortable even through my sandals, however.

As I approached, the woman looked at me, and she looked so very confused. Her face was the perfect example of when people look off into the distance while they try and remember something they swore they knew.

She made a short huh noise before she smiled. I quirked an eyebrow at that, her voice was light, soft even. I gave a half wave, and she returned it.

“Hello, my name is Saphine, lady [Druid]. May I know your name?” I asked.

Her face soured a little before talking to herself in a language I didn’t know.

I sighed.

Well… This sucks. I can't even ask her name.

We both sighed, coming to the same conclusion.

Now that I was close enough to get a good look, she was rather good-looking. Brown shoulder-length hair with flowers in it, they were the same as some of the ones in her garden, little violet petals with a yellow carpel in the middle, haloed her head in a crown or circlet. Green eyes sat behind almond-shaped lids, and her eyes had the strangest little patterns and highlights in them, like green lichens. They were captivating, once I met her eyes, they held mine. I couldn’t imagine what she thought when she looked into my eyes, horrible and black as pitch. And then, just as suddenly as we had locked gazes, we looked away.

I could feel myself blushing like a teen, a feeling I had hoped to leave behind.

I cleared my thoughts before looking back toward her, “So… I don’t suppose you know how to talk with me? Maybe magic?” I asked, making a little wiggly finger gesture at the mention of magic.

She looked confused and mimicked my gesture. It was somewhat expectant. I decided to punctuate my words.

“You know!” I gestured in her direction and then to my head. I waggled my fingers, “magic,” I gestured around us, “You’re a [Druid], right?” I asked, punctuated by gesturing in her direction again.

She looked confused again before taking in the around us gesture and hearing [Druid]. That was the funny thing about classes, they were more than just words. A look of understanding overtook her face before she nodded.

She spoke, though I only understood her gestures. Herself, [Druid], around her, wiggly hands, than what I can only assume is a questioning expression.

I nodded, “Yeh, you’re a [Druid], with magic,” I repeated the gestures before stopping for a second to think. “Do you have magic for understanding me?” I gestured to her and gave the magic wiggle, following it up by indicating my ears, then tapping my head, then my mouth and gesturing between the two of us.

It took her a second before she got it, head shake, flat-handed wag followed by my gestures back at me.

Now it was my turn to “huh,” which I followed with a shrug. I looked at her again and remembered my state.

I was absolutely filthy, I ran my fingers over my hair and felt the clumps of ash, remembering the grime on my skin.

I looked down at myself and sighed, “Wow, I am filthy.”

I looked up at the gorgeous-eyed, very clean lady I have been conversing with and said, “I don’t suppose… you are willing to let me have a bath?” That was a hard one to act out. I gestured to her, then made a giving motion towards myself, then motioned to pick up something and scrub my head.

Honestly, it was a bit of a stretch of the charades, it could also have been interpreted as, “You give me a head rub?” Or “You give me a bath?” Both of which would be quite embarrassing.

She looked confused, so I know I lost her on that one.

“My hair,” I pointed to my head, “Your hair,” I pointed to her head, “I’m dirty,” I picked at a bit of ash in my hair, then to myself made a sniff and plugged my nose and waved.

She seemed to get that because she started nodding, so I continued, “You're clean,” I pointed at her hair again and flapped mine, then I made a picking-up motion and pretended to wash my hair, then FINALLY gestured at my sooty face and mimed washing it, followed by the same shrug gesture she had made just to try and get the point all the way home.

Her face underwent a rapid series of changes, trying to parse the exactitude of my question. Before she settled on bringing out a tub and some soap. The tub was empty, but I accepted it gratefully and looked both ways before catching her eye. She gestured just around the opposite side I had approached from, and I gave a little bow before going over to fill the tub.

Thank Gods, at least I’ll be clean, I honestly can’t believe that worked. What a kind lady.