So, this is the part where we fall into fantasy cliché, right? Our brave adventurer, having just escaped from having his life essence ripped out of him and repackaged as a resource, flees headlong through the dark and gloomy forest pursued by a savage band of orcs. Perhaps he escapes them by throwing himself off a waterfall or maybe he slinks into a cave and hides behind a hibernating bear?

That was certainly where I thought things were headed when I heard those horns filtering into the forest carried by the wind. I was happy that their sound was relatively faint. Whether that meant I had made it some distance from the camp or the sound was just being deadened by all the trees around me, I knew I had to pick up the pace if I was going to make good on my escape.

I continued plunging into the forest. If you have ever been under a dense canopy of trees at night without the aid of a light source, you know that it is almost impossible to see anything. I moved through the forest quickly but gracelessly. Stumbling headlong from tree to tree, hoping somehow that I was maintaining my sense of direction, barely able to breathe because I had not run in a long time, I made my way deeper and deeper into the forest. I acquired quite a collection of cuts, welts, bumps and bruises that night. My new to me cloak kept snagging on underbrush and I was forced to take it off and place it in my pack. At some point, I noticed that I had lost the earpiece that Lacey had given me back in New Orleans. I only noticed it because I started hearing things better. I guess Noverunt would have to bill me for its loss. Don’t worry guys, the check is in the mail.

I have no idea how many times I tripped and fell. I only know it happened over and over again.

Every few minutes, I was forced to stop and catch my breath. As my breathing calmed and my heartbeat slowed a little, I began hearing the forest around me. Because I couldn’t see what was going on, the small sounds of the forest at night were quite ominous. Things scurried about, crunching on the plant litter of the forest floor. Sometimes, I would hear larger creatures move through the woods. When the wind would gust, tree branches rubbed together in an eerie cacophony.

I think it was miraculous that I did not blunder into a fight with a predator of some kind or step on a poisonous snake. Perhaps noticing my shambling, headlong flight they decided that I must be diseased and would not be safe to eat. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe they thought that anything making that much noise in a forest at night, anything being so obvious, must be a stupendous badass who was mighty enough to back up his obliviousness.

I had been traveling what seemed like hours when stumbled onto the banks of a small river. Having learned from a hundred action movies and spy novels that wading in a river is a good way to throw off your pursuit if you are being tracked, I plunged into it. I almost couldn’t catch my breath when the cold water rose up to the middle of my chest.

I started trudging upstream but quickly realized that I was making poor progress and it wouldn’t be long before hypothermia set in. I quickly turned around and allowed the water to push me downstream, becoming thoroughly soaked in the process. I couldn’t remember whether my cellphone was waterproof, or just water resistant. I didn’t think that I would be making any calls, but it was the only source of light that I had on me. Well, that and the glowing essence crystals in my pack. Everything I carried became sodden.

I stayed in the river until I couldn’t take it anymore. My teeth were chattering and I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. As I was dragged downstream, I noticed that the river was starting to widen, which fortunately also caused the current to abate a little. I pulled my exhausted, bleeding, bedraggled butt out of the water on the opposite bank. Trying to stand and continue running, I soon learned that I could not get to my feet. I crawled on my hands and knees until I reached a thicket of bushes. Crawling into the thicket, I collapsed, totally spent.

As I huddled on the ground, soaked and chilled to the bone, I curled at into a fetal position to try to conserve my warmth. And that’s when the realization hit. Other than the initial blast of horns, I had neither seen nor heard any sign of pursuit.

Surely, experienced foresters would have had no trouble tracking me and catching up to me. Blessed with experience and stamina, they could cover the same distance that I had in less than half the time. But yet I had seen no torches or other lights. I had not heard the baying of hounds or any other evidence of pursuit.

I guess the lack of pursuit made a certain sort of sense. Faced with someone who showed evidence of some powerful “magic”, why would you put your life on the line by chasing that person into the forest at night? I knew how limited my capabilities were, but nobody else did. The kobolds probably talked about being subdued by a powerful mage. Two orcs were dead on the harvesting floor. And they could always just restart the operation. There were plenty of people they could capture and slaughter. Why chase one dangerous anomaly? The leader of the camp probably just concocted some cover story about an accident to explain the loss of production and they would be right back in business tomorrow, nobody the wiser at the clan headquarters.

I had been running from shadows. Indeed, the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.

I started giggling, but soon those giggles built into gales of laughter. I tried to stop laughing because I was making too much noise, but I couldn’t. I laughed until I cried, tears flowing down my face. The sense of relief soon fled as quickly as it had arrived because I started thinking about the reality of my situation.

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Soaked and freezing cold, I was alone in the world. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know whether there was anywhere that I could be safe. I didn’t know how I would feed myself. Hell, I was uncertain whether I would survive the night. Soon, tears fell again for a quite different reason.

Eventually, I fell into a fitful doze, curled completely up on myself. I had strange, vivid dreams. Voices whispered around me, hovering on that line between inaudible and comprehensible. From time to time I would catch a word or a fragment of a sentence, but never enough to make any sense of what the voices were trying to convey to me. I saw visions of people that I had never seen before, there for a second and then blinking away the next. Not all of the people were fully human.

“What do you want from me?” I asked. “What are you trying to say to me?”

There was no reply. I reached out to grab at one of the figures, this one a well-dressed human male, but my hand just slipped through him.

I wracked my brain attempting to find another means of communication. But then the figures fled as I returned to consciousness, feeling a sharp pain in my left calf.

Thinking I was under attack, I tried to roll to my feet, only to realize that my calf was cramping from overexertion and dehydration. I was panicked by a charley horse.

Regathering my things, I crawled from my nest of bushes. Facing the river, I could see that the river was wide enough that the forest canopy could not cover it completely. It was still night, but the glimmer of the approaching dawn told me that some time had passed. My clothes remained wet, but not nearly as soaked as when I fell asleep. There was still no sign of pursuit.

After relieving myself against a tree, I emptied out my wineskin and after washing it out in the river several times, I filled it with cold water. Deciding to let the water warm up a little before I tried to take a drink, I sat back on the ground. I dug out a couple of my protein bars and noticed that their wrapping had kept them from getting soggy. Even trying to eat them slowly, they were gone too quickly. I could hear scurrying in the woods around me. Perhaps there were squirrels or rabbits or the local equivalent here, and I could do some hunting after sunrise.

The sky continued to brighten, beginning to dispel the deep shadows around me. I started actually seeing movement out of the corner of my eye, what looked like small creatures scurrying around close to the ground. Eventually, it had grown bright enough to faintly see the area around me, so I got up and drew my sword and stood behind one of the biggest trees that I could find. I noticed that the trees that were in the area were mostly coniferous, something like pine. I hoped one of the creatures would blunder into my range and I would have breakfast.

I stood there patiently for a few minutes, when suddenly I heard crunching in the fallen needles on the other side of the tree. It’s now or never, I thought, as I swung around the tree and lunged at a hint of movement, spearing my target and pinning it to the ground. For a second, I was so proud of myself. Then, I got a good look at what I had speared.

Instead of the expected small, cute and furry woodland creature, I had thrust my rapier through what appeared to be a six-fingered, claw-tipped orcish hand. Its skin was artificial looking, almost like the hand of a wax figure. There was no orc attached to it, however. Instead, the hand ended at a severed stump with just a couple of inches of wrist. No blood was evident on either the end of the stump or the wound my sword had made, and the hand was still scrabbling around on the forest floor, trying to pull itself off of my sword.

A wave of revulsion swept through me, and I almost dropped the sword. The severed hand started making a high keening sound and I could see it forcibly slicing itself on the blade trying to pull free. Somehow keeping my grip on my sword and continuing to apply downward pressure to immobilize the hand, I drew my belt knife and knelt to the ground. I plunged the knife into the hand over and over. Chunks were torn from it by many of the strikes, but it was remarkably resilient. After stabbing it more than a half dozen times, the keening sound finally stopped. I stabbed it several more times, macerating it into small gobbets of flesh until finally I decided it posed no further threat.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I stood back up. I heard scuttling on the ground behind me, and I started swinging around prepared to defend myself with my sword. Before I could fully spin in place, however, I felt the iron grip of a hand grab my ankle, and then it began working its way up my body.

Glancing down, I noticed that another one of the creatures had attached itself to my leg. Coming out of the forest, I could see two more scuttling forward. In the time it took me to register all of this, the hand on my ankle had crawled all the way up to my knee.

Honestly, I almost froze up. This was all so surreal. I hoped that I wasn’t still dreaming. Maybe I hoped that I was.

Quickly, I developed a list of priorities. The first priority was to get this damn thing off of my leg before it could reach the family jewels. The second was to find a defensible place where I could fight these things off. They moved ridiculously quickly.

I still had my belt knife in my hand, so I stabbed downwards along the outside of my leg. I gasped at the pain as the tip of the knife went through my passenger and penetrated the outside top of my calf. I pulled the knife back slightly and pushed down on it, rotating it sideways. Then, using the knife as a lever and my knee as the fulcrum, I pushed inward on its hilt as strongly as I could. The severed hand on my leg tried to hang on, digging its claws into the skin around my knee but it had little mass and my leverage was too great as I was able to free myself from its grasp.

I dropped the knife, still embedded in my erstwhile passenger, and went quickly stumbling away, my eyes scanning for some place solid to put my back to, someplace that would limit the angles that I would have to defend. About thirty feet away was a large rock, perhaps four feet high and of a similar width. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I could find on short notice.

Placing my back to the rock, I realized all three severed hands were less than ten feet away, rapidly closing the distance between us. The one in the back was slightly hobbled by the knife that I had left thrust through it.

I drew back my sword and prepared to swing for the fences. It had been at least eight or ten hours since the last time that I had to fight for my life. I guess I was overdue.