There was a light buzz in the air after the bloodied appendage made contact, then a shimmer as a faint near black purple haze appeared all around and seemed to coalesce on the very near dead Tyler. It seeped into him, through his nose as he breathed, through the horrible wound on his back, through every pore of his body. His entire being was changed as it happened. Not only did he heal at a pace visible to the naked eye, his muscle and skeletal structure seemed to shift and change, adjusting and becoming ever closer to perfection.
It was unknown how much time had passed, but eventually Tyler began to stir and with a groan he gingerly propped himself up. He was still groggy from the combination of adrenaline wearing off and blood loss, but he was still distinctly alive. Slowly feeling his body and extremities, trying to take inventory of his situation starting with his legs.
“Huh, my pants are torn all over, but there’s no cuts or scrapes.”
Then he moved to his arms and the same thing, no injuries to speak of. Noticing the blood-stained hand, he was reminded of the wound that he had previously been certain would kill him. He tenderly held the same hand to his back and inspected for damage as best he could. But no matter where his fingers roamed there was no evidence of the life-threatening injuries he expected.
“Why…” no matter how he thought about it, this made no sense. He should have died from the wound on his back, even if the tiger had decided to leave him for some reason. That was another weird thing, how had he outrun that thing? why had it stopped chasing? When? But thinking harder left him with no answers and Tyler decided to just think of it as another unexplainable miracle, as he had been through a surprising amount of seeming miracles today.
Looking around he noticed the black pillar still in front of him. The pillar only reached slightly higher than Tyler himself and had bits and pieces missing from it's sides and the top seemed to be a jagged mess. Slightly glittering in the dimming sun, he also saw a bloody hand print, the one he vaguely remembered leaving shortly before passing out, not even able to remember why he had focused so intently on the stone. Going up to it to inspect closer, he slowly grazed his fingers across the surprisingly cold pillar. While the perfectly comfortable evening air enveloped him, the pillar seemed to defy its surroundings and was cold to the touch. Not just slightly cooler than the surroundings, it was near uncomfortably so.
After getting over his surprise at the odd pillar, he took in his surroundings and the more he looked in the dimming sun, the more evidence of civilization he found. From the brown, grey chunks of stone in varying sizes strewn across the ground, to the now obvious remains of walls from grandiose buildings long past.
“Where the hell am I? This makes no sense, is this part of the country the watch mentioned?”
Seeing that the sun was setting lazily under the horizon, the reality sank in and he realized that it doesn’t matter what happened to him. That pain and fear he felt while running for his life was real enough for him to take this seriously. Without a doubt, he could die here, and if this forest was like any of the ones he knew, the real danger was at night, when the predators thrived in the dark, unlike him.
Getting to his feet, Tyler dusted off the tattered remains of his favorite black shirt and grey pants. It didn’t really do all that much but it was the thought that counts, or so Tyler mumbled to himself while doing the act. He could tell what parts of him had been injured from the chase just by the feeling of sticky, near dried, blood.
Tyler felt ever so slightly better and started looking for some sort of kindling for a fire. Luckily, he noticed that it was easy to find felled branches from the heights above, and they seemed to have been there for quite a while seeing as they were bone dry. Even the smallest of these branches were six times longer than he was tall, and he would just barely be able to wrap his arms around it.
Not even thinking in his exhaustion, slightly delirious from the near-death experience, he yanked on a limb to break it off, but he actually somehow managed to move the whole thing.
“What? Is it a super soft wood tree, and it’s just bone dry and super light now? Some type of tree I’ve never even heard of before. That has to be it.”
Tyler nodded to himself in obvious denial as there was no way in hell that a normal human being could move something that size on their own so easily no matter the type of tree it had come from. But our self-doubting protagonist just got a better grip on a sturdy looking branch and dragged it back to a clear spot a few dozen feet from the pillar. The place he decided to make base camp as it had already given him a miracle once, why not hope for a second time?
After going overboard and dragging several such branches to his new camp, he snapped off several small offshoots and cleared a pit several feet in all directions of where he planned to set the fire. While clearing the debris away he made an interesting discovery. Under the dirt and many multiple inches of leaves, there was a floor. In that same now off-white stone he saw elsewhere, getting on all fours to inspect this ever present stone, he noticed it looked like some sort of marble, just very old and very dirty. It was really no surprise after being left out in the elements here for who knows how long.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Looks like this was somebody’s house, and judging by how far the bits of marble go, it was a fucking mansion!” Tyler was a little stunned by this discovery, wondering what kind of important ruins he stumbled into. But that was not important now, fire was.
After getting his fire pit and kindling prepared, he did something he tried as a kid for fun, like most other kids, and found an appropriately sized stick and a nice piece of bark to act as a base. Even though he hadn’t ever gotten close as a child, he focused intently on it, determined to get it right as he spun the stick in hand like his life depended on it, because it very well could.
After only a few minutes of trying there was a little trail of smoke coming from the base of the stick.
“HELL YEAH! I'M THE BEST” Tyler exclaimed in excitement as finally something seemed to be going right for him.
In his excitement though, our easily excitable survivor let the ember smolder out as he forgot to help it catch fully into a flame. Ready to cry, he took hold of his sticks and succeeded for the second time in his life just minutes later.
A half hour later, he had a roaring fire and collected some water using some of the fresh fallen leaves and a bucket that was less a bucket and more a chunk of wood with a large depression in it. In his investigating the new temporary home base he found an ornate sword when he somehow tripped over that as well. He’d originally been livid until he found and inspected the weapon. It was an ornately carved black faded leather lacing a now dull gold handle, with a matching dull silver blade nearly four feet long and though its color had been dimmed, by no means did its edge. Testing it on his own arm rather stupidly, Tyler cut himself by using just the slightest pressure not expecting it to have any sort of edge and wincing in pain he pulled it away from his arm and sighed, thankful that it was only a slight cut to show for it.
Satisfied with having something to defend himself with, he then hacked out a chunk of wood and made his bowl, and coated it with fresh leaves, filling it and himself at a river he found only a 10 or so minutes’ walk from base. He found the water source after wandering in the woods and heard the water flowing faintly. Since the area was mostly flat and the trees were sparsely spread, he decided that if he was careful and marked his way by moving leaves as he walked, he could find his way back. Lo and behold, a fast-moving river that was close to 50 feet across and seemed to run deep. While observing the river, he also found some of the local wildlife and didn’t know what to think as he looked on. There were moose-like creatures that were bulking with muscle and their large antlers were sure to break the bodies of anything that got near them, and unlike normal moose, they had razor sharp antlers that made Tyler afraid even on the other side of the river and hidden.
He also saw squirrels that were black and the size of medium dogs and gleaming fangs the length of his fingers, brown rabbits that didn’t seem intimidating at first glance, but moved faster than he could register when startled, as he got to see when a grey wolf tried stalking one that was drinking. The wolf that lost its prey was twice the size of a normal one, and while closer to what he was familiar with, it was still more than a little scary to him, knowing even a normal wolf would be able to kill a human if they were determined.
He sat stock still until the most intimidating of the group left and made sure there was still nothing near him on his side of the river and filled both his stomach and his dish with water. He deeply drank, it was delicious, pure and clean, cold and refreshing. Tyler felt revitalized and more energetic than he had all day. With new vigor he quickly and quietly went back to camp where his small fire welcomed him back.
It was far too late for our hero to notice but looking up after sitting on a small branch from a limb he had moved over for some make-shift seating, he saw the unbelievable through one of the many large gaps in the canopy. There were three bright moons in the sky. The topmost one was a brilliant deep purple with only half of it being visible. The middle most one was a bright, distinct, red and was nearly full. The last and bottom most moon was just a sliver, but the little Tyler could see was a deep and dark green, foreboding in the depth of it's color.
Surrounding the three resplendent jewels in the sky were a multitude of shining ribbons with small shimmering lights implanted in them. These were the surrounding galaxies, consisting of all sorts of shapes and colors, creating an unmatched masterpiece of a painting. It was something that no mortal could ever hope to capture with ink or paint and made Tyler feel both awe and amazement at the foreign sight that was the new sky above.
Tyler could not believe what he was seeing, there was most certainly only one moon, it was the moon for fuck's sake, and now there’s three and not even one was the right color. There was also something he belatedly realized, the moons were fully out and while they did reflect some light for him to see, the surroundings, even when looking away from his fire fully, were far too bright. It was not a midday bright, but more of a natural, dim haze let him see the nearby trees and bushes easily, nearly as good as during the day.
“I’m positive that I couldn’t do that that before. Sure, my eyesight was decent before, but this is just superhuman.”
Tyler sat stunned while he scanned the familiar but still very foreign surroundings looking for signs of any movement, thankful for his newfound night vision. Noticing nothing, he drank from his bowl and stoked the fire before crawling under one of the larger limbs that still had some leaves on top for cover, and tried to sleep no matter how tense his nerves were. He knew he would need what rest he could get for the days to come, finally starting to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t in any place that existed on Earth.