‘I’m really out of luck here’

In a place where almost everything was either green from vegetation or brown from the ground and wood, a skinny man dabbled his way forward.

He had a makeshift machete, a little more than a bare piece of stone strapped to a stick, to cut his way through the vines in front.

How many hours had he been walking now?

Rylen wasn’t sure. He was growing tired, but the animals he had seen so far were too small to bother hunting. They wouldn’t do much to fill his stomach anyway.

When he saw a tree with a deep mark on its trunk, he stopped and stood there in place. The gash was wide and uneven, and the insides of the trunk carried a trace of grey.

He ran his fingers over it lightly and furrowed his brows.

‘Should I have gone in a different direction?’

Relyn questioned his decision to walk south. In fact, he was questioning that decision for hours now, but everywhere around was getting tough.

Just a week before, he had seen birds heading to the west in flocks, but the thinking of the west was enough to make his skin crawl. He had seen far too many weird things going west, things he could barely bring himself to remember.

He kneeled down and looked over a red, four leaves plant. He carefully plucked it with his right hand and squinted his eyes, while his thin fingers moved the plant around and looked at it closely.

‘Is this the one you can eat or the one that makes you shit your organs out?’

His last bad experience with the wrong plant hadn’t been too long ago, and the possibility of making the wrong decision again made him hesitate.

No matter how he looked at it, he just couldn’t tell the difference, the red ones were always practically the same. He knew for a fact almost all the blue and purple ones were edible, but they weren’t too common.

“Damnit” He cursed under his breath.

At the end, he sighed and dropped it to the ground. Eating a poisonous plant in his conditions would probably slow him down for hours, or maybe even worse.

Getting back to his feet and looking up, he saw the shape of a moon slowly rise into the sky in the distance.

“Is it Hell Day already? Fuck, it should only be in two days from now, what’s going on?”

“Did I miscalculate?”

Relyn had a system to control when, what he had named the ‘Hell Day’ would happen. It was something that should happen every thirteen nights. But the last one was only eleven nights ago.

Was it changing?

It had been the same for so long now, it was unlikely. Maybe the culprit was the cave.

The humidity inside was getting worse in the last couple of weeks and the moss had begun to distort the marks he had scratched into them, his calendar.

But now, the cave was far behind him and there was no way of being sure.

His mind raced and he felt his heart pounding in his chest. The machete slipped from his sweaty palm, and fell right beneath him.

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He stared up at the sky with a blank expression and his knees buckled to the ground.

All the struggles he went through crossed his mind. From the first memory that he could recall, when he woke up on the beach with his mind cleared of any memories, or the first time he killed an animal to fill his stomach.

Living with so many questions had been hard, but finding these answers was even harder. In fact, Relyn hadn’t been looking for answers throughout this time, his mind was too busy thinking about what his next meal would be.

One mistake and this was where he ended up. Reality was brutal.

Rylen closed his hands into fists and slammed them into the earth a couple of times until he grew tired. The impact made his knuckles sting, but the pain didn’t even register - nothing mattered right now.

“Damn it!” He yelled out loud.

But it didn’t take him long to get back on his feet with a tight grip to his machete again. Rylen had always managed to hold himself together, always kept it in control even when everything was falling apart. Why couldn’t he now?

‘Think! You need to fucking think!’

He took a few shallow breaths to let go of the panic and looked around, trying his best to come up with something.

‘How much longer do I have now? An hour?’

Rylen used his hands to measure the angle of the moon against the sun.

‘Maybe a little bit less?’

He laughed bitterly. Running his way back was impossible at this point, and this whole place had nothing but trees and earth.

Suddenly, he began to move east.

There was something there, or at least it should have. Rylen remembered the day he saw them going in that direction.

With his experience walking amongst the forest, he could roughly compensate for how much he had already walked south and figured he wouldn’t be too far off.

He quickened his pace, pushing through the vines and grass as fast as the terrain allowed him.

Occasionally, he had to stop and think about where he was going to make sure he’d still be on track.

But after delving further into the forest, finding a place that wasn’t completely covered by the tall trees leaves was rare, but when he finally found the one, he finally felt a bit of relief.

In the short distance, he saw a trail of smoke going up through the air.

‘It’s close now.’

From time to time, the tall trees in front of him would make him lose sight of the smoke sign for a couple of minutes, but soon he would track it down once again and continue on its way.

That was his guide.

The sole of Relyn’s feet went numb a long time ago, but taking any more breaks was not an option in his situation, he simply gritted his teeth and kept going.

His body was damp from sweat, and the temperature had been dropping steadily. Whatever warmth he had left was fading quickly.

But finally, he saw hope. And it was only a couple of minutes away.

‘Found you’

He saw a source of light ahead in the distance, just enough to form a small contrast to the dark surroundings.

He had been avoiding them for so long now. And for a good reason.

Rylen had seen many of them by this point, wandering in the forests. Sometimes they were lost, sometimes they were going somewhere.

What had kept him away all of this time were the few he had seen that defied all logic he had of this world, true monsters.

“What are you doing here at this hour?!” A voice rang out, not too loud but enough to be heard, and it came from a man wearing a silver plate armor holding a torch high.

‘And you found me too, uh’

What struck Relyn was the strange language in which the man spoke, it was clearly different from his native tongue, whatever that was, but he could understand all the words of it.

‘Can I speak it too?’

His throat felt dry and he was unsure, but he forced himself to speak.

“Hello. I want to eat food and drink water. I think I had.. uh.. accident.” His voice was weak, but it was the truth.

“This accent… where are you from?” The man’s eyes narrowed, scanning him up and down.

Before he could answer, a second figure stepped out of the shadows, someone dressed similarly to the person Relyn was already talking to. But his expression was more grim, more urgent.

“We need to get the hell out of here now.” He said, looking at his partner.

The first man hesitated, his gaze flicking between the boy he had just found and his partner. Then, with a heavy sigh, he turned back to Relyn.

“You are going to have to answer some questions later on.” He said, not taking his eyes off Relyn for too long.

"For now, follow us closely. Don’t try anything funny with me."

As they walked, Rylen's instincts screamed at him to stay alert. He had a rough understanding that most of these people were weak, scavengers like himself. But a few of them had supernatural powers that creeped him out. These men might be the same.

But for now, there seemed to be no better option than to follow.

The second man, who also was carrying a torch, led the way. His pace was quick, and his partner followed closely behind, keeping a watchful eye on Relyn.

‘Who are these guys?’

He was trying to understand the situation he got himself into, and when he looked closely at them, something unexpectedly came to his mind.

‘Soldiers?’

Sometimes, Rylen would remember pieces and bits of information of a world he didn’t know by experience. And this had just happened again.

“Well, where are-” Relyn was about to ask something but didn’t get to finish it.

“Quiet!” The man right in front of him urgently cut him off, his expression serious.

‘They both have their hands busy and are wearing this heavy thing… I bet that I can run away from them and get myself a head start if something happens.’

Relyn’s mind raced with plans and counterplans as they continued to walk in.

‘But what if they catch me then? Maybe I should try to steal one of the swords… No, there’s no way I can beat them like this… I’m just going to run.’

Following along the dense woods, traces of light began to break through the trees. That light grew brighter with every step, until they emerged from the shadows and found themselves facing a tall stone wall.

He had arrived in the land of men.