I woke up in a room I was not used to. The world was still outside, like after a storm. My ears twitched around on the top of my head as I stretched. It was early, and I could feel the chill coming through the window, the dawn light echoed in through the window and off of the walls of the unfamiliar room. I stretched out, arms nocking the top of my nook, my legs nocking the other side. Wow, my niche feels comfortable, I pull back in and yawn and curl up for just one more minute. I’m not being called for yet, I have time. I do a self-snuggle with the sheet around me and go to sleep… Then the unfamiliar room, the cool breeze and the soft bed below me make my head twinge to something. I opened my eyes again. Wood walls, check, a real bed, new, totally alone, new, cool morning, new. The last time I checked, it was early fall.
I sit up and use every bit of my brain to start the process of thinking. I was in a woman’s house out in the valley; it was spring, not fall. I feel like I’m missing…
It hits me all at once, everything piling in all at once in a fox pile of terrible memory. Scrambling around in my mind like a henhouse. And as it did, it scrambled all the easy feelings that I had woken up with. There’s nothing I can even do about most of it, it's been out of my hands for longer than I have ever truly lived. I was 24, and now I am almost older than the bloodline of my host.
I pull my fingers through my mane on instinct, a thick, now relatively clean head of hair. It's more than just human hair, going down to my neck and consistent in its thickness. It gives me a larger head of hair than most humans could hope to have, and because of that, it is a singular hell of a lot more hair to comb through than a human. I manage to push back the roiling madness like I did yesterday, minus the gibbering mad laughter. Breathing in and out as I go through my hair with my fingers. I didn’t find any matted patches, but I didn’t think I had any; it was just what I did every morning. Well, every ‘morning,’ I didn’t wake up in a tomb. I half choke down some kind of bitter mad laugh, and then I got it back under control. If it's spring-like, and I think it is, not early fall, why is it so chilly in here? A late cold snap is in the cards, but those are rare. The mountains north of us block the colder winds that press southward. Was there some kind of northward wind that cooled down the mountain? It was somewhat strange.
Something that didn’t stand out as the valley acting as expected. I reached out to the land and asked it about the cold. It gave the amazingly descriptive ‘Warm gone until full light time.’ I, of course, asked where, but it just gave back the phrase ‘gone.’ While unhelpful, that just meant that whatever had happened was abnormal, the land didn’t understand it. It was, to be somewhat overdramatic, unnatural, in a very narrow view of the word. It was early morning in the valley, but I didn’t smell any food cooking downstairs. I suppose it was too early for my host. Humans always seemed to sleep longer. I decided to get myself sorted out and went downstairs, or rather, down the ladder. When I arrived in the main room I looked around, and everything looked normal, un-scuffed floor, stuff where it was left, windows un…
Oh wait, they were latched. I walked over and unlatched a window so I could look outside. The ground is covered in a delicate frost, and tiny whisps of mist float along the ground, and I mean thin and wispy, like steam off a simmering pot wispy. Swirling along the ground up into little cyclones before falling back to wisps. Waving across the hill. Around the edge of the grove. Not a speck of fog nor frost touched the grass in the ring around the cottage. I decided to take a small swing outside and pulled myself through the window. A quick contortion, a dash of upper body strength, three and a half footfall onto the ground outside, and a wet back got me outside and on the grass. And I haven’t opened the door like an idiot. Oh well, I could climb back in the window, it was at chest height, not that high. I turned around and watched the mist undulating magnificently.
It was positively bewitching. A floaty layer was waving toward the edge closest to me, geting thicker. Pulled along by… that wasn’t important. It was floating towards me, and I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to put my hand through it and watch it curl up and down.
I started walking towards it. One foot in front of the other. Then, one arm in front of the other. Pulling myself towards the fog. I could feel it falling out to me, whispers.
“Chiild, come heere. Play with uss,” I could feel them calling me, something in me reaching out to them, “Walk with usss, one whispered to me, “Come to uss coussin,” another crooned. I managed to get my feet back below me as I got closer.
With each foot I travelled, something in me called louder. First, a vague pull, then something whispering to me. When I got within two yards, it started screaming. I reached for the wall of mist, and the fog pulled up against the dome. My hand made contact. My body flinched back from the feeling of a skill activating. Confused, I blinked at the mist as it took on a ghostly form and clawed at the barrier. I could feel it resonating with two skills as it did so. Two new skills.
[Saint of Death] and [Marked by the Long Road], and with the effect it had on me fading, I understood what was going on. Whatever it was, it was very much not alive, and it had tried to pull me into the fog to do something. I started backing up as it railed against the barrier ineffectually. Throwing a tantrum against the invisible wall, I managed to get to the window, and similar to the action that got me into this mess, I pulled myself up and into the cabin.
This time I don’t fall onto the floor, I land feet first on Ahnahbehth floor. My wet feet on her now the wet floor.
I go looking through the place she took the bed sheets out of, a closet next to the closet I use to get up and down from the loft. With each step I take, my feet leave behind little foot-shaped bits of water and dirt. I go through it until I find sheets that are too small to be for a bed. They are just thick pieces of cloth, but that’s a towel if I have ever seen one. I dry myself off before wiping down the floor, I left behind watery, somewhat muddy footprints on the wood floor. The footprints aren’t that much effort to remove.
My noisiness was, however; as my host opened a door and left the only room I had not entered, and by how similar it was to my room, I had to assume its where she was sleeping until I started climbing in and out of windows. She stares unimpressed at me, I think she’s trying to look at me darkly, but her face is too cute to pull it off.
I put my hands up like she’s a guard and point to the window and my head. Trying to get across that there’s something outside to my would-be witnessing host. She stares, confused, at me before looking over to the still-open window and pales. She charges past me and throws the shudders closed before baring them again and looking back at me.
I point to my eyes, then ears, then head.
I point to my eyes, then act out the fogy undead, my ears and a croon like the fog did, that my head and I glaze my eyes over and start marching towards her for a few steps.
She nods her head and gestures, ‘Head, magic?’
I nod vehemently, ‘Down, room, you, circle, push.’
‘yes, push, circle, me, circle, push, head.’
I think I got most of that. ‘eat?’.
She nods in return.
***
A hand full of minutes later, we were both done eating some morning gruel and some fruit, 7/10 on it. She put something in it that makes it taste nice, and the fruit is a fruit; it’s a soft fleshed apple-like fruit with a nice sour tang to it. But it's one that I have never eaten before.
When we were done, we checked outside, the sun had come up, and the fog was dissipating. But we decide to stay in for a while. She leads me instead to the room with books that I moved her chair to yesterday. It's, by the looks of it, a study.
She gets me to pull a chair over, and we start writing stuff; she writes in a script that looks very similar to the one that I remember.
ABCD… on and on until she spells out the entire alphabet and starts pointing at them and making sounds before I tap on her shoulder and motion to pass over the quill.
I write out the letters of my language and make each sound associated. I look back at her to see if I got them right, and after looking over the two sets of letters, she looks up at me and nods. It seems that they haven’t changed much; honestly, that’s more surprising than them changing a lot. I remember Skipseo complaining about language drifting over time, yet there was very little in the way of drift between our alphabets or the meaning of the letters. Is it all spoken? Is it our accents that make communication difficult?
I tap on the paper to get her to look down at it and write my name; it's got two parts, Saph like Sapphire, and -ine as in mine. My mother saw me as her jewel, a precious thing that she had in her life that would stay with her.
I doodle a little gem and give her a hold-on gesture while I go and grab some dye from the drawing room. I bring it back and start pointing between the gem and the blue dye before giving a ‘you, understand?’ gesture. Then I doodle two stick figures, with the larger one having a hand on the little one's head. I then stand up and make the motion described before acting out, greeting someone and then describing the person in relation to myself and saying, “Mine.”
She doesn’t understand that one; who knew acting was hard?. Anyway, we end up getting into a literal game of charades; before we call it quits, I’ll be able to tell her when I know the word.
We then go into a breakdown of her name. It turns out it's not Ahnahbehth but Annabeth, which looks much more like a name. There’s a difference in the way the letters are spoken in the context of a word, apparently. Anna sounds like Ah-Nah; she can’t give a drawn example of either half of her first name, but the name is visibly similar to names of my time just slammed together, even though there spoken differently.
After we get our names out of the way, we start going over colours.
The words for most things seem to have changed despite the lack of change that our names have spelling-wise. Blue, purple, green, and all the dyes that I brought out of them have a different name to those I know. She opens up a book for me to go through, and while the letters are similar, the words they make up are nearly incomprehensible despite recognizing the letters in them. The same goes for how the book is written; tiny words linking larger words are also incomprehensible. I sigh and close the book, shaking my head toward her. It’s not as simple as an accent, apparently. I go out and grab a spoon to test it; taking it back into the study, I place it on the desk before writing 'spoon' and gesture for her two write its name.
Apuun.
OH boy, different words with a totally different spelling. Wait, Apuun sounds vaguely similar to a spoon but with no S sound at the front. I stopped for a second. And asked for the name of a book.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Abuuk
Oh no. I ask for the name of many books
Abukie
What the hell? I ask about hair by gesturing between the two of us.
Haeir
Using the book as a prop, I find the word for words and then ask for a ‘word book’ verbally; and tentatively she goes to the shelf and grabs the 'word book.' She has one, a dictionary that is, every book is technically a ‘word book,’ and I look through it, examining the words individually outside of the context of writing. Using props to get help finding the words I was looking for, checking for similarity, and it repeats and repeats, sometimes with different added bits for more complicated words, but many of the really basic words are similar to the ones I know.
It IS just an accent, just written down in a nearly incomprehensible phonetically written accent of the language I knew. And each person speaks those words with an additional accent, and when they wrote down new stuff, they wrote it down the same way. Skipseo would have an aneurism if he was in my place; is this what he meant by drift?. Who the hell transcribed the words phonetically? And why does everyone speak it now like a separate language? Wouldn’t they each have a separate language based on where they live? Why is it just one? And why one that is nearly incomprehensible?
I look at the strange words for the colours; they, too, follow that pattern. I just don’t know what the words they describe are. I ask for the word for colour. I have to indicate I don’t mean the material, which is ‘dasty,’ than a ‘daye,’ and not the colour, which we already went over. I end up getting the right question when I start pointing out the difference between the ink we are righting with, the paper, and the pallet of dye.
She writes down Culor.
The both of us are just speaking two distinct dialects of the same language, so distinct that we can’t understand one another’s words, and she has a different accent of that dialect on top of that. What a messy problem. I start writing down a few words and then try to describe the change I see to my host. I do the two pronunciations of the word and find out the word for accent, which is convenient. And once I have the word, I start breaking down the words, step by step, to show her what I discovered.
We sit there speechless for a while, then both say something to the effect of, “What a mess.”
We both start probing one another for a few hours before we get on with our day.
***
When we go out into the garden, it's long past the time where the fog left, and presumably with it, the monster that was made of it. Banished by the sun, I exit the cabin for the second time today, this time with my sandals on. As far as I know, I need to check the keg for filling periodically, so most of my chores will likely be outside. When I tried to ask about the towel I used, Annabeth waved me off, so I didn’t need to think about the laundry. Maybe it’s because she can do it with magic? I don’t know how to do magic works or how to do it other than the basics of you use mana to do stuff. I never got the chance to learn any spells, but I have always wanted to. Maybe she can teach me magic?
My [Green Thumb] class is level 8, and it can evolve at level 10. A few weeks of learning magic and a month or so of doing chores in her garden can get me an evolution, especially if I end up paring the two together. I should ask her after I study up on the words, that way, I can properly ask her instead of miming it.
She brings me around to a tiny shed on the other side of the house. It has a little bar holding the door closed like the windows do. Opening it, a host of tools lay within, and I know all of them, spades, rakes, a can to water with a tiny trowel, hoes, and a scythe. The tools go on and on, and they represent the things I know best in life. Instead of her having to run through their use, I get her attention and say, “[Tool handling].”
She gave an “Ah,” which is somewhat cute. Then she walks towards the plants and starts pointing things out. I have to weed, water and keep pests off the plants. She leads me to a hole behind a ruffle of land next to the tree line. It's where I’m going to bring the chamber pots if I understand her.
After explaining my chores to me, she starts gesturing, ‘I leave, pick up, come back.’
I nod and reply, ‘Me, fieldwork, leave and look, come back.’
She nods and gestures to herself, then her ears, then make a looking gesture and go “ah,” again, and I ignore that it’s cute, instead watching her make a hiding gesture behind a tree.
My look of confusion must have asked my question for me because she pointed at her eyes and made a frightened gesture before doing something that looked like drawing a sword, followed by wringing her neck and making a dead face.
My look of confusion only grows. My eyes would frighten others? Why would… My mind flashes back to the crypt and the shrieking skeletons trying to kill me. They had candleflame eyes, like mine. As she tries to think of a way to explain it, I hold out a hand to stop her.
I point to her, ‘You see my eyes, and you're not scared?’
She shakes her head no, ‘Magic ground, you good, me good!’
The grove, for me, was welcoming, like coming home. I had never thought about that; even though I had felt something, it had never occurred to me that I might have been judged by the grove. That the grove was a thinking thing.
Earlier, the grove had kept out the mist; it had pushed away the hostile fog monster that clawed at the wall. That had tried to push into the grove to get me. It could judge that it was hostile, but how?
I looked to the ground, and I felt at that feeling. The feeling of home, I felt down into the ground looking for it. I felt it reach towards the [Druid] and, ever so gently, towards me. It felt familiar and welcoming. It felt like…
The land. It was the land. The land knew me; it could tell I was ok. It had welcomed me back and told me that it was going to be cold until it was brighter out. The land could judge, hells the land was where [druids] drew their power.
I was momentarily stumped, “Huh.” Thank you. I send to the land.
‘Friend’
By any chance, can you talk to Annabeth?
‘Yes, a while.’
I point over to Annabeth, ‘Ground hears us; ground speaks to us,’
Can you tell her thank you for me? Please and thank you. The land does not talk back to me, but I can tell she gets it when the land speaks back to her. Her face takes on a slightly surprised expression. She then says something back to the land.
I get ‘confusion; why, please?’ I stop for a second before I snort.
The please and thank you was for you land. A few seconds pass before she hears something, then it was her turn to snort a little.
Can you ask her what she was saying about my eyes? She seems to get that when she looks up from the ground and thinks for a second before looking back down and answering.
I get, ‘undead many, others see you and fear, they don’t know you.’ Huh, the undead have a presence here? I mean, the fog was an undead; I could tell that from my new skills. But what would cause the undead? I don’t even know the first thing about the undead other than them being not dead and not alive. The valley didn’t have that problem while I was alive, but a whole lot of people died all at once. Is death gone for everyone? Are the souls of the dead just floating along the mortal coil?
Can you ask her if death is gone? After a few moments, I get her response, ‘I can check, going to the gathering place.’ Weird choice of words, but that sounds like the land being the land and less her word choice. I nod to her and head to the shed to start doing my chores. I hoed the weeds, watered the flowers and the greens, squashed a few beetle things on the taller plants, and brought the pot out; the keg was already mostly full, so that was fine. The garden was well cared for, doubtless, hours a day were spent out here taking care of the plants. It took me an hour, tops.
My skills in conjunction were pulling their weight, [Tool handling] made me proficient in the wielding of everything tool, [Rapid action] increased the speed of my hoeing, [Toil] made every action more effective, extending the time I could toil away in a field. The skills [Sense stone], [Displace dirt] and [Sense composition] were less effective; there were no stones, the soil was of consistent composition, and I wasn’t moving dirt around, just cultivating it and pulling up weeds and breaking them up. And I wasn’t doing big work like digging a ditch, so [Timeless construct] couldn’t activate at all. I also used [Green Thumb] to help the plants as I looked through them for bugs, and hoeing latched onto [Revitalize Land] the entire time. I held them on during the process, muttering them to myself whenever they were able to be activated.
A proper [Ditchdigger] can haul tons of dirt a day. I once saw a level 35 [Dirt displacer] haul out a whole ditch's worth of dirt in an hour, five peoples digging all done by one guy in a quarter of the time; I have no idea where he hauled it, but it was probably used for something.
After I’m done, I even cut down the grass a little with the scythe [Durable tools] pulls its weight; scything grass is hell on a sharp blade, and dulling makes cutting problematic, my skill stops that outright. I get through that in half an hour, and then I’m done. I am also bored once I have finished. I go looking for a sac and find one, exit the house and borrow the shovel before heading out into the forest.
Unlike this morning, I don’t get jumped by a wall of undead fog. The forest is normal. Different hardwoods spot the landscape, Oaks and Chestnut trees are the ones I know best, but it's hard to tell the differences without paying express attention to the leaves. I’m not looking for nuts, I’m looking for potatoes. I’m looking for the bushes, not the trees.
I find some, but they're not the right shape of leaf, a little longer and I find another area but the brush has berries, later and I find little red berries, but they look like bird berries, not people berries. A little more, and the plant looks right, but I dig it up and find nothing but normal roots.
Again and again, bush by bush, I find a few amongst the many that look like they're right, but they have no tubers.
Finally, I bump into a small plant, dig it up, and find small tubers among the roots. FINALLY! I had been bumbling around the forest for a few hours at this point and bumped into it finally. I dig up the spuds and spot a few more nearby. A few [Rapid actions] and my shovel has dug pits below each, and the swollen roots are in the bag, stem and all. Quite ready to return, I start heading back. Down the slope to the poplars, around the mound to the rocks, and so on and so forth, until I’m passing by a section covered in shade that’s easier to walk passed towards the next landmark and then follow my path back. When my new skills start pinging me.
I freeze. The skill went off this morning; with the fogy undead, it was ringing clearly and sharply. I drop the sac and start holding the shovel like a weapon. I start whipping my head around, and my ears swivel, trying to pick up sound. There are no banks of fog about to roll over me, no corpses sprinting towards me like an athletic skeleton from the nightmare Olimpia; whatever it is, it's not moving. I stand perfectly still to double-check that. The skill rings consistently and is much softer than this morning. I start stepping forward, and it gets slightly colder.
I ask the land where the cold was coming from, and I get a hole. I looked around and found it. The hole looked like a burrow, small in width and unassuming. I walked over with the spade raised like I was expecting a whole skeleton to pull itself out of the hole. A spear is ready to slam down into the hole and kill a monster. In the hole was not a scary skeleton nor a clawed fog monster, but a tiny, phantasmal flame. I could see it within arm’s reach. Soft noises came from the light, so soft I could not make them out as words. The phantasmal flame sat in the hole, smooth and unruffling. Similar to this morning, I could feel a pull towards the flame, but not in the same way.
It was not pulling me in; my skills were. I could feel an effect around the two of us, our flames echoing out and into the dark. Sitting on the edge of something I couldn’t put a word to. I felt the skill I got from sainthood echoing in my body, [Saint of Death] called to me, asked me to reach out and cradle the flame. Hold the soul, for that’s what this was, a mortal soul. I let go of the spade with one hand and began reaching down the hole.
The feeling of that thin edge that I can now recognize as my skill [Marked by the Long Road], I can feel that thin feeling like a fabric around my body, and as my hand grows close to the flame, the fabric blobs together and the soul flows with it first against my fingers, and then into my palm.
I pull my arm up from the hole, letting go of the spade.
As I pull the soul up to me, the ring coming from [Saint of Death] grows. It’s unlike the one this morning, the feeling is not a warning, it is the sound of a welcome, I hold it close, pulling the lost one to myself, cupped it in two hands and pressed it against my chest.
I hear it say, “Warm,” and it evaporates, splashing coldly through my clothes and against my chest beneath, and disappears. The cold feeling vanishes in a minute, my body sagging, and a short-term and sudden lethargy overtakes me. I feel a tear run down my cheeks, I don’t know why I’m crying, I just am.
I pull myself together after that long minute and confusedly pick up the stuff and start stumbling back to the cabin.
I bumble across the forested terrain, checkpoint to checkpoint. I get lost for a while and bumble my way close to the road, recognizing the markers. I check the gobbly gook and recognize the same gobbly gook following its direction as last time, so I start walking down the road. After some time, a few wagons roll up behind me, and I manage to remember, while I recover from my bleary confused state, to close my eyes, sensing the paved stones below me much like I did in the tomb.
I step close to the edge of the road to let them pass. I hear one of them hop off a wagon and feel them displace air as they land, they walk up beside me and try and start up a conversation. I move my shovel into the crook of my arm and wave them off. It takes a few repeats to get them to stop bugging me, they pull past me, and I eventually find my way back to the cottage, and it welcomes me back.
I put back the shovel and lock up the shed, walk in and untie my sandals at the door before walking in. My host is making food again, though she has already performed her scurrying and is resting with a book next to the table waiting for the food to cook. I place the sack down and stumble to the chair, going boneless on it.
I start taking stock of my body, feeling it out. My shoulders are tired after being in the same position for a few hours, but that's fine, my legs are tired from the exertion of walking through the forest. My whole body feels the whoop of sitting down and going limp on the chair.
The day goes on, but my chores are done. My host tries to strike up a few conversations, but I communicate my exhaustion and we eat some food later in relative silence. I curl up for sleep, bone tired.
…
[Saint of Death] Has absorbed [Disembodied Soul Lvl 8] experience earned.
[Ditchdigger] has gained a level, and is now level 17!
[Green thumb] has gained a level, and is now level 9!
Congratulations, you are now level 13!
…
I sit bolt upright and swear in a bleary confused state; once I settle down, I eventually return to sleep.