Although it had only been two days, Leo felt like he'd been in Arkfel for a month. But that was just a feeling. The truth was that he barely knew anything about his new surroundings.

"The main door to the school is just off that big chamber?"

"That's right, the front door, so to speak. I don't know how you missed it," said Harald.

"So everything I've seen is just the part near the entrance? How much more is there?"

Harald shrugged. "You'll see when we get outside and you can get a look at the place. We've been here for two weeks, and I don't think we've seen more than a fraction of it."

They were once again chatting while they followed the main group -- quietly, after Karn had snapped at them for being too loud. Karn and Nemtal were carrying bows they'd picked up when they returned to their safe room, while Suzat held a compact wooden crossbow. The others had gathered their packs and a variety of implements, half of which Leo didn't recognize.

He was excited to see what lay outside the gloomy, dusty halls of the school, but at the same time, a bit scared. Would it look like his own world? Or would it be bizarre and dangerous? He briefly imagined an Avatar-esque world with enormous trees and huge monsters.

But if he asked about it, that would ruin the surprise. And he figured he was safe enough, tagging along with the expedition.

They were headed for the hall with the large staircase, which Leo had begun thinking of as Chandelier Hall. It wasn't far from the safe room the expedition had claimed, but due to Karn's slow scouting pace, their progress was painstakingly slow. He suspected the expedition had already killed everything nearby. They acted like the shadows could be hiding anything, though, which left Leo on edge. What if they were right?

"Do you guys have to hunt for everything you eat? Why didn't you bring more supplies?"

Harald glanced at him, then shook his head. "We did bring some supplies, but we're saving them as long as possible. As for why we didn't bring more, well. For one thing, the old roads are overgrown or in ruins, so we couldn't bring a wagon. Even pack animals would struggle. We had to cross a gorge where the bridge is out, for instance."

"So it's rough terrain? What's the other thing?"

Harald lowered his voice even further. "The King didn't provide much funding for this expedition. Most of it was funded by Nemtal, actually."

"By Nemtal? He's rich?"

"He's a former Kingsguard. They're... an elite unit. You'll have to ask him if you want to know more."

They entered Chandelier Hall, which looked exactly as it had the other two times Leo had passed through. Dust hung in the air, illuminated by a beam of light coming from a high window on one wall. Once Harald finished whispering, the only sound was their echoing footsteps.

The Hall was shaped like a long rectangle, with the stairs on one end and corridors leading off the long sides. Leo guessed the gate must be at the end with the window. Karn led them towad it, their feet crunching on the gravel left by the battle with the living statue.

Leo wished he could have seen that fight, if only from a distance.

The gate wasn't directly on the wall, it turned out. There was a dark antechamber between the Hall and the gate. Nemtal sent his Light ahead to illuminate it.

Like the door to the classroom, the gate was made out of dark wood that seemed immune to time's passage. But it was huge: easily ten feet across, and probably twice as tall. It was covered in designs of robed men doing various, unclear tasks. There was an ancient rug on the floor, too, but it was nearly completely covered in a mat of mold and fungus.

"Sides," said Nemtal, motioning to either side of the door, where the others were already lined up in rough semicircles. Harald, Janso and Lidya had taken one side, weapons at the ready, while Nemtal and Suzat stood on the other side. Leo figured it out after a second and joined them, while Karn readied himself to open the gate.

After taking a last look over the group, Karn grasped the door's lever and pulled at it. The doors split open in the middle, both sides moving although only one was being pulled.

Daylight burst into the antechamber, washing away the dim glow of Nemtal's orb, followed by a flood of fresh air.

Anticlimax. Everyone was standing at the ready, but there was nothing outside. But Leo's attention was rapt.

Was it only so beautiful because he'd been locked in a dark, dank ruin for two days -- like a starving person tasting food for the first time? Or was this world really more vivid than his own?

A long, gentle slope filled with gorse-like bushes declined away from the gate of the school, split in the middle by an crumbling road. Perhaps half a mile away, thin, ruined structures of stone or brick rose up. After a moment, he realized that they were chimneys, probably left behind after the house around them had collapsed. Beyond that, the forest began, and even further beyond, the mountains. A layer of cloud lay between a few of the tallest trees and mountains, and the sky above the peaks was a gentle, pink hue that reminded Leo of a Fall afternoon.

After a moment of staring, his view was cut off by the others cautiously moving past the door. He closed his mouth, walking forward to where he could resume his view.

There was something odd about it the entire tableau. After a moment, he realized what it was.

"Harald? How tall are those trees, over there?"

After a quick scan of his surroundings, Harald squinted toward the distant trees. "Those are balto trees, I think. Those can reach five, six hundred feet, or so?"

Leo tried to remember the largest trees he'd heard of on Earth. Some type of redwood, probably? He was fairly sure those topped out around four hundred feet.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He looked around for other details. To his left and right, he could see other buildings made out of the same grey stone as the school nestled among trees and hills.

Something above caught his eye. Looking up, he saw a black moon hanging overhead. It was full, and looked slightly larger than Earth's moon.

"How many moons do you have?" he asked, not looking down.

Lydia spoke up, from beside him. "That's not a moon. That's Lemyr."

"Lemyr?"

"Lemyr. The god-daemon of madness." The way she pronounced "daemon" was a bit different from the word Leo was more familiar with, "demon".

He blinked, staring upward intently. After a moment, he began to make out detail.

It wasn't a moon. It was a vortex. His eyes traced a path around the outer edge of darkness, into a gentle curve that repeated over and over.

Abruptly, a hand covered his eyes, pushing his face back down to the level. "Don't stare," he heard Nemtal say. "Lemyr is cursed by Corum and Gateb, the Twin Gods of Charun." He removed the hand, leaving Leo staring out toward the trees again.

His mind was still following that path, around and around. What was in the middle? He shuddered, trying to push away a foreboding feeling.

"Ask your questions later. Listen up."

Nemtal proceeded to divide the party into two groups. One, the group with bows, would go hunting for animals. The other would take Leo foraging for whatever the surrounding forests would yield. A few ingredients were discussed, none of which he'd ever heard of.

The bow hunters tramped off down the road. Lydia, Janso and Leo were left behind, with Harald as their apparent leader. Instead of following the road, he beckoned them to begin moving through the brush under the wall of the school.

"We'll stay close to the walls, in case we see anything dangerous."

Magical mountain lions? Giant bears? Some mythical creature like a wyvern? Or something he'd never heard of? Leo began to regret not spending his time asking for a list of what might qualify as "anything dangerous".

On the other hand, nobody looked armed for bear. Lydia and Janso were carrying short spears, while Harald had a long knife and a hatchet sheathed on either side of his belt. Leo had... his illusions. He wondered if he could disguise himself as a bush. He made a mental note to try it later.

Actually, he did have a knife, but it was still in the pack they'd given him, which had been owned by one of the dead expedition members. He felt strange about going through his new possessions, though, and he figured he'd barely know what to do with a knife, anyway.

He followed along as they turned left out of the gate, following the wall.

The wall loomed overhead like a cliff, and the ground was paved with ancient, cracked cobbles, which had low grass and weeds growing up between the edges. Ten feet beyond the wall the underbrush began, but for some reason it hadn't turned into a full forest during the long neglect of the area.

He spotted long, flat stones in the brush twice before realizing what they were: overgrown or collapsed benches. A statue, features long weathered away and coiled with creepers, poked up out of a large bush. Perhaps the whole area had once been a park. Now the foliage was so thick that Leo couldn't see how they'd make their way into it.

The walk did give him a sense of just how massive Arkfel was. This single side of the walls stretched on -- he wanted to gauge the size against a city block, but it was hard to tell without roads and other structures around for scale. Still, it felt at least as large as, say, a conference center or a mall, and it was all made of stone, which somehow made it even more impressive.

Finally, they rounded the corner.

The school stretched back away from them, and then sprawled outward. Like a college campus, it wasn't all one building. But the building Leo had been in-

It was huge. Massive. And was it four stories tall? Five? From somewhere within, a tower loomed upward, its top just visible over the walls. He spotted another further back, which was even taller. Like a skyscraper, almost.

The haft of a spear butted into his ribs, not very gently. Startled, he stumbled back.

"If you keep getting distracted by things above you, you won't see the poisonous snakes until it's too late." Lydia gave him a nasty smirk before turning and walking off, following after Harald.

Snakes? He looked down at the ground, then up at where they were headed.

In the expanding triangle of space between the main school building and the next one that Leo could see through the foliage, there was a forest. Not the giant trees he'd seen before, but a low, wide sort of hardwood that looked similar to an oak tree. Maybe they were oak trees. Leo was a city kid, not an arborist.

The others were heading into the grove, so Leo followed, keeping an eye on the ground in front of his feet.

As they moved, they spread out, seemingly by an unspoken understanding of what to do. Each searcher was scanning an area around themselves, seemingly on the lookout for anything interesting. Leo noticed Lydia pause to dig at the leaves with her spear before moving on. He'd lost sight of Harald behind a stand of bushes, which actually seemed to have some berries. Probably inedible, since everyone had ignored them. He wondered what they were looking for. Mushrooms? Tubers? Nuts?

Not having much else to do and no idea of what to look for, he trailed behind Janso, who was nearest and roughly in the middle of the group.

He'd been in the wilderness before in his own world, of course. He'd just never thought of looking for food in the wild -- or even met anyone who knew how. He had a couple friends who liked to hunt for magic mushrooms, and that was about it.

So instead of looking for food, he just looked around. Overall, it did look generally like an Earth forest. There were trees, and the forest floor was cluttered, with smaller plants, stands of grass or fallen branches. He could hear animal noises in the distance, most of which sounded like some variety of bird. He even heard one that sounded like a crow's caw.

But there were differences, albeit hard to quantify. Things seemed -- bigger, for lack of a better word. Some of the trees were so wide around that he could imagine driving a car through a hole in the middle. He remembered there was a famous tree on Earth that you could do that with. But that was a special, unusually large tree, right? Some of the branches overhead looked large enough to be a tree in their own right. Even the roots were massive, with gnarled humps rising high out of the ground.

As they got further from the school, Leo also noticed a rich, herbal scent in the air. It changed slightly as he moved, apparently coming from different plants around him. But he didn't remember forests back home smelling so good.

Janso had paused ahead of him, squatting to peel away the bark from a fallen branch. After a moment, he pulled a thin bag from behind his belt, and began to transfer something into it. Leo moved over to see what it was.

Bugs. Janso was stripping away bark then grabbing large beetles before they could scurry away and flicking them into the bag. Leo hesitated. He'd been about to offer to help, but...

Janso glanced at him briefly, a grin appearing on his face as he continued at his task. "Compass beetles," he said. "I bet they don't eat bugs in your world, huh?"

"Ah, no. Not in my culture."

"Oh? You had a lot of different cultures? Right, only humans in your world. Well, here we don't eat bugs either. Usually."

"But you eat those." Leo watched as Janso shifted around, trying to find another spot with loose bark.

"The expedition eats a lot of things. We try to forage as quickly as possible and take whatever we find first. One of Nemtal's friends spent weeks training us to find things like this before we left."

"So you, uh. Cook them? Or just..."

Janso chuckled, standing up to move to the other side of the log. "They're too chewy unless we grind them up. They'll go into a stew, so you won't notice a thing."

Leo eyed one of the beetles as it tried and failed to evade Janso's fingers. Actually, it didn't look that disgusting compared to what else might be lurking in rotting wood. Grubs?

Maybe it was better if he didn't know any more about what went into the stew. Ignorance could be bliss.

"Is there any kind of magic that can create food?"

"Not that we have in Charun. There are stories-"

Janso broke off, looking over his shoulder. Some distance away, they'd heard a shout. Now there were crashing and snapping noises. And something... yipping? Leo caught a glimpse of Harald running toward them between the trees.

"Trouble! Gather up!" Harald shouted as he neared them.