The question of what follows after death has remained relevant throughout history. Countless have guessed, and perhaps a few have glimpsed at the truth. The girl however, was none the wiser. Because the girl you see, she didn’t truly die. At least not in the classical sense of the word. Sure, the coin spun alright. But in a matter of speaking, she waited a full revulsion. Her death marked the end of her life so far, but it didn’t result in the end of her consciousness.  

It did however put a pretty big gap in things.

She seemed to retain all of her memories, and she was clearly alive at the moment. Firmly wedged between those two moments was a whole lot of nothing. She knew with certainty that time had passed, but she did not know what had happened during that time. It felt more or less like watching a movie where a large part was without sound and picture, just silent blackness rolling by. It was a funny sensation: by all rights she should have been reeling from what she had just experienced, but it was as if that large chunk of unknown nothingness had let her process the whole ordeal. Granted, she was feeling quite dizzy and confused, and that might also explain why she wasn’t panicking. As the girl thought about her current situation she realized that she had no clue what she had been doing five minutes ago. It was as if the aforementioned movie had gotten back its sound and picture at this very moment.

So the girl looked around and tried to access her situation. Her hair was annoyingly long and all of her stuff was gone. All of it. She could have done without some of the heaviest equipment, but all her stuff was gone. She stood in a large but rather empty valley, with a setting sun and not much else except a small creek in the distance. And she was as naked as she was the day she had been born. A gentle wind was blowing, and while it was a somewhat warm wind it still felt cold to her skin. As she thought about it, the cold put goosebumps on her skin and she wrapped her arms around her in an attempt to feel slightly less exposed. She sat down on the ground and hugged her knees as she tried to access her situation. It wasn’t as if she was completely out of her element. She had grown up in the countryside and was something of an outdoorsy person. That and her year in the army made her feel almost in charge of the situation, like as if it was just another drill.

Her stomach grumbled, and the girl felt weak from hunger. Generally, access to water and not freezing to death takes priority over securing food, but the girl felt like this wasn’t the case at the moment. It felt as if she had been hungry for a long time, and judging by how weak she felt, her body was definitely starting to run out of energy. There was a creek in the distance, and except a few small bushes there wasn’t much else in the valley that might hold anything edible. Betting on the creek, the girl began walking. The ground was fairly even, but it was covered in some kind of thorny version of grass. It should have been pretty painful to walk on, but for some reason the soles of her feet where like leather. The sensation as she walked was a weird mix of strange and familiar, her brain feeding her two versions of what constitutes a normal foot. The girl pushed her confusion away and was satisfied that it meant she at least didn’t need to tiptoe like a fool wherever she went.

She came upon the creek and was rewarded with the pleasant sound of flowing water to break up the monotony of the wind in her ears. The sound of the wind ruled the valley, and once your ears grew accustomed to it, the area felt deathly quiet, seemingly devoid of animal life. The girl knelt by the creek and examined the water. It was clear and obviously moving, and after scooping some up with her hands she could tell that it was more or less odorless. These were all good signs, they meant that the water probably was safe to drink. So she tried some, and when she felt that it tasted okay she drank as much as she could muster, responding to a thirst she hadn’t realized she had felt.

When she was done she searched the water for something edible and found some weird version of a clam. It was really thick and squat, almost spherical, and was slightly bigger than a plum. She reached into the water and tried to bend it loose. It was stuck quite hard to a rock, but after some tugging it detached. The trick seemed to be to snap it to the sides before pulling. Once out of the water it clamped up tight and it proved impossible to pry it open with just her hands. Eventually hunger won over her patience, so the girl simply found a large enough rock and smashed the clam’s shell. Dirt and pieces of shell stuck to its slimy innards and it looked far from appealing. She brought the clam to her face and glumly realized that it looked more like something that had just left a mouth rather than something that was about to enter one. But her stomach demanded action and she was too weak to really put up a fight. Unfortunately she couldn’t just pop it in her mouth and be done with it, since there was still large pieces of shell sticking to it. Instead she had to take several small nibbles, tearing pieces of the meat loose with her front teeth. She gathered herself and took a bite.

The meat had a very distinct eggy and oily smell, with only a hint of seafood. Chewing it was horrible, so she quickly resolved to swallow the pieces whole. The aftertaste wasn’t too bad, the worst part was really the look and the texture. Once she got past that it was almost ok. Not good, but ok. The girl grabbed three more clams from the creek and repeated the process. She wasn’t sure if it was her empty stomach or if it was the uncooked clams, but she definitely felt a bit queasy. Still, it beat starvation by quite a wide margin.

With her hunger declining and her thirst quenched, the girl reckoned it was time for her to secure some kind of shelter. It was obvious that there was none to be found in the empty valley, and with the sun almost gone she had better find something soon. Unwilling to leave her only source of food and water, the girl decided to stick to the creek. So she followed it downstream. It snaked its way through the valley, and far off it disappeared in a bend to the left. It took her almost an hour to reach the bend, and the slight slope that had been a constant so far had begun to even out. The girl took that to mean that she had reached the bottom of the valley. As she followed the bend the girl saw that the creek ended in a small lake, which in turn was more or less enveloped by a forest.

By the time the girl had reached the forest the moon was up. It was rather full but that didn’t make much of a difference in the dense forest. The trees seemed to mostly be some kind of fir, and everywhere on the forest floor there was fern growing. The girl felt rather miserable now, she was hungry again and it was very hard to move in the forest. At least she wasn’t as cold as she had expected. She had her arms in front of her face and waved them about as she moved at a snail’s pace. The girl looked and felt like a fool, but she figured that she didn’t have much of a choice. There were bare and pointy branches everywhere which were next to impossible to spot in the darkness. This quickly grew old and the girl decided to make camp where she stood. She had long dropped any fantasies of a cozy shelter, she just wanted something somewhat soft to sleep on and something to cover her naked body.

Her plan was to snap a lot of branches off and use them to make a bed. A minute or so of futile tugging at the surprisingly sturdy branches made her drop that plan. Instead she settled with gathering a ton of the ferns that grew everywhere. It was quick work to gather more than enough, and soon a large pile lay underneath a tree with particularly low branches. So she had something akin to a lousy roof and once she nestled up inside the pile of ferns she found that for the first time in what felt like forever, she was comfortably warm. She had expected a long and cold night, but before she even noticed it, she had fallen asleep. Something her body hadn’t done in a long time.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The girl woke up screaming just a few hours later. Her leg was burning and her arms were flailing. The cold ground was scraping her back and the treetops were moving over her head. Through her pain and confusion she realized that she was being dragged by something towards the lake. She tried getting a look at whatever was dragging her but it was too dark and hard to focus. Judging by its size in comparison to her leg, it seemed about the size of a large dog. A dreary feeling in her gut told the girl that once it got her into the water she would be done for.

In a hurried almost-panic she frantically searched the forest floor as it passed her by, searching for anything to stop her slow but steady advance. She found it at last, in the shape of a rock about twice the size of her fist. Gathering as much focus as she could muster, the girl slammed the stone into the moving blob of shadow that constituted her assailant. The stone struck true and she was rewarded with a yelp from the creature. The treetops stopped moving as some of the pain in her leg disappeared.

The second she was freed from the creatures jaws she leapt upon it. The rock was in her hand and she brought it down upon the creature’s head as hard as she could. It gave off a sickening wet sound and the animal recoiled a bit from the force. She struck it once more and the animal grew still. But the girl didn’t stop hitting it. It was as if a mad anger had overcome her, a burning hot imperative to extinguish any threat to her existence.

The girl had never really fought before. A couple of times earlier in her life she had almost had to, but the situations had diffused before anything had happened. She had been close to dying a couple of times, and at those times she had been overcome with a calm and pragmatic logic. That stood in stark contrast to her current behavior, to such a degree that she didn’t feel like herself. It was as if something else had moved in and taken over, ensuring her safety when it deemed that she could not.

When she finally calmed down the creature lay dead. It looked like some sort of mix between a pig and an otter. It had the fur and general shape of an otter, but it was much bigger and sturdier, and it had a short snout. Its thick skull had caved in from the repeated bashing and a part of the brain was exposed. As she sat there studying her kill she felt the last bit of adrenaline leave her system. With it gone her exhaustion made its presence known, and before she knew it she fell asleep on top of the carcass.

The smell of morning and the rising sun woke her up. It seemed like just a few hours had passed since she fought the creature. It looked no less strange in daylight, but her rumbling stomach helped her mentally shift the creature from predator to prey. Longing for an actual knife the girl set about looking for a rock or something with a sharp edge. To her dismay, sharp edges was not easy to come by in the forest. After about half an hour she found the rusted remains of a shovel blade by the lake. Most of the shovel was gone, only about a third of the blade remained, but what was left vaguely had the shape of a knife, and she could hold it without too much discomfort.

Using her makeshift knife, she cut the creature’s belly open. She drew a straight line from its jaw towards its tail. The broken side of the blade proved to be surprisingly sharp, but it was still an arduous task. She dropped the blade when she was done, and reached inside the belly to pull out the creature’s innards. In the back of her mind the girl realized that she ought to be more fazed by this, but she felt detached and desensitized. So she went with it, figuring that she had to seize any advantage she could. She hadn’t done this before, but she reasoned that it was pretty much like gutting a fish, something she had done plenty of times.

With the intestines out of the creature’s stomach, the girl set about separating the skin from the rest of the body. It was slow going, and before she was even halfway done the girl decided to stop for some breakfast. With no means to produce a fire she had settled on eating the meat raw. She cut a fist sized piece loose and bit into it before she had time for second thoughts. The meat was lukewarm and stringy. Plenty of it got stuck between her teeth as she tore the meat into smaller pieces. Lucky for her, hunger seemed to do a lot of the job that was normally done by spices. She would of course have preferred it cooked and salted, but it was surprisingly palatable. Compared to the clams it was a definite step up.

The girl ate until she felt tired and heavy, and barely could keep the food down. The meat sat like a rock in her stomach, and it took a sigh and a heavy dose of determination to get back to work, but she forced herself to continue skinning the animal with slow, determined strokes, until the skin was finally separated from the rest of the animal. By then she had worked the carcass with the shovel blade for several hours, and her hands ought to have been hurt. But when she studied them no damage could be found, except for a slight redness. As she saw this she suddenly realized that she had been bitten during the night. She hurriedly gave her leg a look-over but found no sign of damage. Her skin was muddled with dirt and blood, but it didn’t hurt at all, and she couldn’t find any wounds. It felt weird, but the girl was certain that the creature had bitten her. Maybe it hadn’t punctured her skin?

Pushing her questions to the back of her head, the girl focused and put the last touches to removing the skin. She hadn’t seen anyone prepare a skin before, but the girl read a lot and she had a few ideas about what to do. She started with scraping of as much meat and fat as possible, and then she washed it thoroughly in the lake. She kept one eye open for more of the pig-otters but she didn’t see any more of them. When she was done washing the skin she put it down in the sun to dry. She knew that she ought to stretch it as much as possible but she felt that she didn’t really have the means or the energy to do a proper job.

The sun shone brightly and after a few hours the skin felt a lot dryer. By then she had stuffed herself full of the stringy meat once more. The girl had read that the oils in an animal’s brain was perfectly suited to cure its skin. She doubted the brains were still fresh enough to use. It had been quite some time now since the creature died, and even the meat had begun to smell differently. Despite her doubt she still stuck her hands in the creature’s brain and grabbed as much as possible. It felt lick sticking your hands in lukewarm mud, except that it was fat and disgusting. The girl went on to apply it to the creature’s skin, making sure to work it into every little crease. When she was done she rolled the skin into a tight roll, thinking it would make for a good pillow until it was done.

It had been a long day’s work, but now she was fed and soon she might even be clothed. The day still had a few hours left in it, and the girl had a full belly. After pondering her next move while carefully removing as much as possible of the stickiness that covered her hands, she decided to fashion herself a spear. The rusted remnants of a shovel that had served her so well would sadly not be much use in a fight. She needed something that put some distance between her and any potential danger, and a spear seemed suitably easy to make. So she grabbed the skin and the blade and started searching for a branch long and straight enough.

All of the branches she could find were both too short and too thin. Thinking about an alternative, she realized that she could instead utilize the actual stem of the tree. The girl felt a tinge of frustration when she realized that she had just wasted a good amount of time searching for branches when she instead should have searched for a young tree. Once she changed her scope it was easy to find several suitable specimens, so she picked one at random. The tree was both sturdy and flexible, and it seemed next to impossible to brake it using just her hands. With a sigh the girl dropped any notion of success coming easy and begun cutting the tree down using the blade.

It took a lot of time since the blade repeatedly got stuck in the tree, but in the end she had cut the tree off and removed its branches. The sun was once again beginning to set so she hurried back to her makeshift bed. The darkness came quickly and she was forced to search around for a while before she found it. To her dismay someone or something must have visited while she was gone, for the carcass that was meant to be her dinner was no longer there. With a disappointed sigh and a grumbling stomach the girl made herself comfortable in her pile of fern and begun sharpening her spear-to-be. She soon fell asleep, blade in hand, dreaming of modern comforts.