The instant I saw the corpse, my body became tense. Seeing the wounds it had, spoke of a particularly large animal with claws that could easily pierce my skin.

If I was still home, I would have considered the wound coming from a bear or a wolf, but the signs I have seen ever since I woke up tells me that far from home now.

It could be a lion, a puma or and animal I might never have even heard off.

I kept glancing in every direction to see some sign of it still being here or where it could have gone. I saw no sign of any of those.

The grass around me was tall, too tall for something so big to have vanished without a trace. My observation leads me to the fox, one that has been laying on the same spot since it brought me here and strangely enough that calms me down.

The fox sleeping peacefully is what makes me focus enough to properly observe the scene in front of me. Though it would be more accurate to say that I smelled it.

And what a stench it was, making me wonder why it's only now I can sense it.

The stench could best be described as being similar to me filling a bag with rotten eggs, mouldy cheese and shit. And then I leave it outside for a month, in a heatwave. Just the image of that makes me sick.

I have read that corpses will start to smell bad after a certain amount of time, depending on the circumstances. Considering that it's not underwater or currently in a swamp, I would say it has been at least a day since it died.

Knowing that gives me some comfort that whatever killed it is not around, for now at least.

I decide to move closer to get a better look at it, almost puking with how strong the smell kept getting and had to stop before I got too close. I was close enough to notice more details now. The corpse gender being male was the first thing I could observe. It was easy to find that part out, now that I was closer since I could see that the attack had made a certain part of his lower body visible.

The clothes he was wearing was a shirt, pants and shoes. What someone would normally wear on a sunny day like this. The only thing that stood out is how worn out they were, with the pants especially being a good example of it. It had several miscoloured patches that covered holes in the clothing.

The only unnatural thing about this scene is how I couldn't see a single fly circling him. I thought rotting bodies were supposed to be like a buffet to them.

Putting that question on the growing list of things to figure out later, I head towards the graveyard while giving the corpse a wide berth.

Looking at the first grave on my path, a simple gravestone, I notice something peculiar.

I can't recognize what it says.

It's not that the writing on it has started fading away, but I couldn't recognize any of the letters. What is written on the gravestone is in a language I have never seen before. That isn't a strange thing, considering how many languages and different ways of writing that exist. It's when I move to the next one, a plaquette made of bronze, that things get weird. I can recognize the writing on this one and it simply says in Russian:

'Here lies Aleksandr Bok

Arrival in 503 A.R. - Died in 611 A.R.

Let the cold winter give way to spring'

The second line confuses me, why would they use the word for arrival instead of birth. It could mean that they arrived in the world as in birth, but I have never heard or read it in that context before.

Going further down the path confuses me even more. Each gravestone couldn't be more different from one another, in both design and what language they are written in.

Sometimes it would be in a language I knew or could at least recognize, but more often then not they would be in a language I had never seen before.

Why are there so many different gravestones gathered in one place? Why would people from so many different cultures pick this specific place, and how did they even get here?

I sigh, so many questions that nobody here can answer.

Before I knew it, I had walked down the entire path that I chose and was at an exit on the other side. Even then, it was only a small portion of the graveyard that I could see.

Walking out of one of the many exits to the graveyard I spot an actual sign that could give me some semblance of knowing where I am. Technically it was multiple signs written in multiple languages, some I recognize and some I remember reading on the gravestones.

Though they all say different thing, they still point in the same direction. Down a path that sticks to the graveyard before going into the forest.

Reading the signs again I try to see if I could glean any more information from them. But they aren't much more informative than you would expect from a strange place like this.

They only tell me the distance, that changes from sign to sign, presumably because of the different ways they had of measuring length. And the name of the place, Traviselde.

With nothing more for me to do here, I start walking down the path to Traviselde.

----------------------------------------

By the time the path started widening into a road, the sun was on its way down.

I was wondering when I would get to Traviselde, going up one of the many hills on the road, when a familiar stench hit me.

It didn't take long before I came upon the source as it laid there in the middle of the road, with the smell just as bad as last time. The corpse looked similar to the previous one, with the same clothes and wounds.

But one detail there was one detail that stood out to me. In his hand, he held a bag and it was for some reason glowing too.

Preparing myself mentally, I walked towards it while holding my breath. The stench was quite strong coming closer, but as long as I do this fast it won't be a problem.

Of course, a problem pops up when I try to take it. Because it hasn't been that long since he died, his body is still stiff and is holding onto it tightly. I might have to touch him if I wanted the bag.

My lungs were starting to hurt so I had to take short breaths that felt like torture each time I had to breathe in. I'm starting to get a new appreciation for people who have to take care of dead bodies now and hope that this will be the last dead body I see for a while.

Fortunately, I came up with a better plan before I had to touch him. He's only holding on the actual strap to the bag, I only need the contents inside, especially wanting whatever it was that's glowing inside.

Opening the bag, I start transferring its contents over to mine. There isn't much inside as it's not a big bag in the first place.

Once I'm done, my backpack now contains some extra food, a few trinkets and some rolled up papers.

The last thing I find is a blue crystal ball, the source of the glowing, but it stopped glowing once I got a hold of it.

I would consider that just barely hitting the top-ten list of strange stuff that happened this week.

After making sure it was all secured, I continued on my way to Traviselde, hoping that I can finally find some answers there.