I awake to the sound of the birds chirping in their trees, singing the melody of nature. I sit up and stretch my arms, yawning into the rocky walls surrounding me, the sound reverberating through the cavern. I get off of the hard ground and check the condition of my body only to find that it isn’t just better, it has fully recovered.

I think to myself “Isn’t fully healing like this supposed to take weeks?”

I start thinking of plausible answers to this and come to the conclusion that it must have been the monster slowly regenerating the damaged parts of my body caused by the slow, daily death of cells. I start to think about how this implies that I will slowly but surely turn into a monster, merging with it.

This starts to cause me to go into a panic but then I use the amazing strategy that no sane therapist would ever recommend, pushing it off to the side for another day. In this instance I use the fact that I was going to go explore to holes in the walls to forget about it.

I walk over to them and inspect the inside of them. It is dark, really dark inside of some of them as if they lead to a never ending abyss so I decide to not go inside of them and go to the other, bigger and brighter ones. These ones look like they could easily fit a person inside of them and the light from outside penetrates through the openings. From what I observe, inside of them is an expansive cavern with tunnels running off in all directions and wait… is that a pickax.

I decide to step into the cave the cave to take a closer look at what I have seen. I heave myself through the hole and my bare feet land on the hard ground jolting the remaining human parts of my legs. I steady my self and look for the pickax I saw, spotting it not that far away.

I walk over to it and upon closer inspection there is not just a pickax, but a lantern, a bag of food, and a canteen of water next to the pickax. I decide that I should probably take the lantern with me and go inspect the tunnel and see if the owner of these things is in there.

I walk down the tunnel and as I reach the end of it I jump, startled by the supposed owner being in view.

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“Hello, sir um I think I found your missing stuff at the end of the tunnel”

I ask him “ I have been stranded in the wilderness for the past few days could you please help lead me to wherever you live?”

He gives me no response confusing me so I walk closer in case he didn’t hear me. I once again jump, frightened this time for a much more terrifying reason. He is a skeleton, long since death. I start to think about what might have killed this man and come to the realization that I need to get out of here because as I look around I realize that there are a lot more bones, brown into pieces strewn around.

I hear a loud howl in the distance and start running, grabbing the man’s supplies on the way out. I run with All my might to get out of the cave, looking for an exit to this labyrinth.

I start to hear loud foot steps behind me, and count the number of beating paws and conclude that there is a pack of about seven wolves chasing me down. I run into a tunnel and run down the winding pathways until I have found it, an exit! I scramble up the barely climbable terrain and then I reach the top, I am safe.

I look down to see the wolves at the bottom of the ledge, trying and failing to climb up it. I run out of there before they find another way out and hunt me down.

Eventually I find a nice little spot, hidden by overgrown bushes and vines to settle down into. I take the canteen and open it, chugging down the water to quench my desert dry throat. After that I feel a intense hunger welling up inside of me so I pull out the bag of food and pull out some bread and gobble it down like a ravenous beast.

After a bit of just sitting digesting my food I remember that I left my clothes at the shore of the lake. I despair over my situation for how will I weather the environment. But I have an idea, I open the bag of food back up and rummage through it finding what I guessed was in there, clothes. I stand up and put them on, they don’t fit very well but this will have to do for now.

After getting these things done I think back to my experience in the cave and the fact that there was human items and bones in the cave and realize that this means that there has to be a human settlement at least somewhere nearby. I decide to get up and continue walking in the direction I was going after my encounter with the wolves to try to find this human settlement.

As I am walking I continue to find more and more things that look deliberately placed or changed. A pile of ashes surrounded by a ring of stone, footsteps in the dirt, and trees with just a stump. Eventually I arrive at the top of a hill and I start to descend it. At the bottom of the hill I encounter a change of environment, I am out of the forest and now in a large plain.

As I look out into the plain I see something unexpected, the very thing I have been searching for. I have found a human village.