Caleb woke up with a pounding headache. Sitting up in bed, he groaned and tried to block the sunbeams shining through the cracks in his wooden walls. He looked around his cluttered room and was struck with a sudden wonder, new instincts urging him to investigate everything in his sightline, from the footprints on his floor to a particularly suspicious mote of dust. He squashed those instincts with the disgruntled frustration of a poor, overworked farmer and started getting ready for the day.
His headache slowly receded as he brushed off the patched-up rags he called clothes, and by the time he left his shack, he was resigned to another day of sunburn and sore feet. Walking up the packed mud road to the wheat fields, he kept finding himself losing minutes at a time to just taking in the landscape around him. The uncomfortable way his boots felt, the rough texture of his clothes, the crisp smell of the early-morning air. After around half an hour of slow wandering, the ground started shaking, causing him to lose his balance.
“Out of the way!” a panicked voice shouted at him.
Caleb found himself roughly pushed to the side. Managing to catch himself on his hands, Caleb turned to berate whoever had shoved him, but saw instead a monstrosity of steel blurring past, seemingly moving on its own. He stared in shock as the machine sped off into the distance, moving impossibly fast.
“Well it's not like anyone’s gonna miss one measly farmer.”
Even without this strange curiosity he had been feeling all day, anyone would be interested in whatever the hell that was, right? Caleb picked himself up, brushed off his tattered tunic, and went off in search of adventure.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“...”
The machine would have been easier to follow if the landscape wasn't so goddamn interesting. He could swear some part of his mind was laughing at him.
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I remember being a test subject for a portal-magic experiment. I also remember when it went wrong. I nearly lost myself wandering that eternal nothingness. It was impossible to save myself on my own, but to this day I still do not know who, or what, helped me.
~ excerpt from Why Portal Magic is a High Risk Venture.
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“Walking and walking and walking some more, look at that tree trunk! No, it's a door! What have we got here, I do not know, but by the Mad King’s beard my brain is gonna force me to look at it.” Caleb hummed to himself as he walked, feet blistering in his roughshod boots, maybe going slightly insane. The sun was setting, and he was still walking through the forest he had found at the end of the farms. He kept walking, only to stop and run back through his recent memories.
“Tree, tree, fruit tree, tree, door. Huh, that's weird.” he wondered aloud, still dehydrated from his long walk through the fields. “Wait, a DOOR!” He exclaimed, stumbling backwards and flinging open the conspicuous portal in a somewhat foolish manner. He proudly walked into the empty cave, and finally realised what he had done. He face-palmed. “Oh god, that was stupid. I need some water or I really will go insane.”