Times were tough growing up. With an absentee father, two younger sisters, and a chronically ill mother, taking care of the family, specifically his siblings, had been up to Shae from an early age. It’s not something he would ever complain about; he loved his family and would do anything for them, but there were certainly times that it felt altogether too much to bear.
Hiking, in the rare moments when he could find the time to do so, had always been a guilty escape from his responsibilities, leaving him free to explore the world and the depths of his own mind. Now, alone and absent on a distant world, the thought that his family could very well be starving right now as he hiked ate at him like acid, corroding him from the inside.
In an attempt to push such unpleasant thoughts from his mind, Shae lowered himself into the self-induced trance of meditative breathing that he’d honed every morning for the past several weeks. As he walked, his mind drifted into an unaware lucidity, a semi-consciousness comprised of intense internal awareness and absolute relinquishment of mental and bodily control.
This middle state, a sort of active passivity that felt like floating in an isolation chamber while lucid dreaming, was what Perun called “Ren,” and according to him, it was the foundation for all rei techniques. It had taken a frustratingly long time to even begin to grasp the concept of Ren, but with nothing but hiking, training, and Perun’s stubborn silence to occupy his time, Shae had found himself spending more and more time alone with himself inside of his own mind. Eventually, it clicked.
It could have been twenty minutes since he’d departed, or two hours. Ren was odd like that; within this peculiar mental space, time was as easy to track as watching the second hand on an analogue clock tick by, yet as ephemeral as a ripple fading in the water. A prod at his awareness, and Shae jolted back to reality.
Before he’d left, he’d fashioned a makeshift rucksack from a canvas bag Perun had been carrying. That, his waterskin, and the sword belted to his waist caught in his legs as he threw himself to the side, narrowly dodging the blunt black head of an iron-banded club as it passed mere inches from his face.
“Kjartzan,” someone hissed as Shae tripped over himself, collided with a tree, and fell to the ground in a rolling heap.
Shae’s arms were tangled in his cloak, and he tasted dirt in his mouth, wet and moldy as he struggled with the fabric, desperately trying to free himself and rise to his feet. Pain blossomed from his shoulder and his head rang as he fumbled dumbly with his cloak.
“Anzernam! Siel haer!”
A new voice called, this one high and preening with worry and the excitement of the moment. An arrow thudded into the dirt an inch beside Shae’s chest, only missing due to his vicious thrashing and twisting about.
The man with the club stood above him, crude weapon raised, an enraged grimace painting his features: cleft chin covered by thick, stout black hairs, an egregious brow, and sunken, dirty eyes. They glared down at Shae, violent and full of hateful promise.
There was no telling how many men there were. Shae’s heart slammed in his chest, sweat pouring profusely from his forehead and back, the brown cloak a demonic garment of claustrophobia and death. He swore, drove his elbows apart, and dove forwards at the man in a move reminiscent of his first and only sparring bout with Perun. In a stroke of luck, his arms came free from the cloak’s suffocating embrace, allowing him to wrap his arms around the man’s thighs.
There was no time to think. In situations of intense friction when your life's on the line, speed, aggression, and violence of action are the best choice. With this prerogative driving his thinking, Shae drove his shoulder into the man’s gut. The air leapt from the man’s lungs in a whooping breath as he doubled over, his torso folding neatly over Shae’s back. His feet left the cold dirt as Shae lifted him from the ground. The man was heavy, and Shae was weary from his morning workout, his legs weighing heavy as iron as he hefted the man’s weight, but he managed to lift him high enough. Shae twisted, dumping his attacker spine first onto a sharp boulder below, then immediately drew his sword and backed away, searching for cover. Save for the surrounding trees, each tall and straight though insignificant in their girth, there was none other than the boulder from behind which his attacker had surprised him.
The man Shae had thrown crowed as he landed on the jagged rock, then lie whimpering on his back, squirming on the ground. One leg kicked stupidly at nothing while the other lay motionless. His face was a mask of pain and horror, and his disbelieving eyes flashed from his leg to Shae’s face, back and forth like the ball in a sped-up game of pong on Atari, almost as if he couldn’t comprehend how or why he was now paralyzed.
Heart racing and his breathing fast and heavy, Shae flicked his gaze around himself, scanning his surroundings. This patch of mountainous forest was much like any other, and he saw nothing that might distinguish this finger of terrain as anything worth setting up an ambush over. Through the trees, Shae could distinguish the hazy outline of a large tree.
The man on the floor screamed something in a foreign tongue, his breaking voice laced with pain and fear. Shae risked a look down at him, taking in his bloodstained, tattered fur clothes, his gaunt, sunken cheeks, and the look of haunted weariness in his eye, then looked back up, searching ravenously for the other attackers. Someone had a bow, and he was only alive now because they’d missed their first shot and given themself away.
Despite his efforts, he couldn’t find the archer. Leaves of bushes and trees cluttered his vision. Branches and trunks and rocks and the rise and fall of the earth around him created patches of concealment if not cover, and in his panicked state, he couldn’t calm his mind enough to even attempt to enter Ren. Feeling naked in the alpine forest, Shae was left utterly helpless, totally at the archer’s mercy.
Fearing an arrow in his back at any moment, Shae took one final look at his fallen opponent to memorize his features, then fled, weaving between the trees, doing his best to keep himself at least marginally protected as he ran.
Why had there been men there, and why had they attacked him without so much as a word? Were they bandits? Perun had mentioned almost nothing about the lands through which they were traveling to get to the Sisters, but wouldn’t he have at least warned him if he’d known? In pondering such questions as these, Shae realized rather suddenly that he had become lost. Fleeing from the archer had taken him in whatever direction had been most expedient, and he’d lost all sense of how far he’d come or in what direction he had originally been heading. Thinking back, he remembered that the path Perun had set him on had taken him uphill, and he was now at the foot of a long narrow draw with rises on either side.
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In his flight, he had become so turned around that one direction seemed no better than any other. Bewildered, defeated, and more than a little disappointed in himself, Shae set off up the center of the draw towards what he hoped would turn into level ground. Overhead, the suns seemed to shine from everywhere and nowhere, providing him with little more than exasperated confusion in the way of navigational enlightenment.
Shae’s throat grew parched and he took a long swig from his waterskin. Restoppering it, he took a seat at the base of a tall tree, one that might’ve been a pine if he were on Earth and if it didn’t smell strongly of cinnamon. His calves burned from the effort of long uphill walking, and his shoulder ached from the fall. The pack weighed heavily on it, and though the strap dug painfully into the bruised tissue of his trap and delt, he was thankful that he had neither lost it in the fighting nor in his speedy retreat.
There is a certain pessimism that comes from being lost without the means of finding your way back to any place familiar and in the callous grip of pain and hunger. But this was his first and possibly only time to win over Perun’s trust and confidence. He had been given a task, and he would complete it. A cave and a big tree. That’s all he had to go on, but it would have to be enough.
Hours passed, and Shae continued to walk. In the excitement of the moment, he had lost his sense of direction, but the memory of seeing the tree in the distance lingered. He tried to retrace his steps. He failed. Soon, the suns set, and Shae found himself no closer to his goal. An odd weariness overcame him despite the fact that he was eating and drinking regularly. Trying to meditate as he walked proved useless, his mind restless as it was from his encounter with the bandits. Why had they attacked him? And why were they there?
Thinking back on the men, Shae thought that they were rather lightly armed for bandits, though he had no real frame of reference. Their attack caught him, an untrained and unsuspecting single traveler completely by surprise, yet they failed. They hadn’t even been wearing armor, at least not the one he’d seen. And why had they attacked him in the first place? For his gear, presumably, but they must’ve seen that he was armed. Was it worth it? Couldn’t they have just held him up?
His mind raced with such thoughts, but as the hours dragged on and the suns sank below the horizon, worry set upon him for the first time. There was no sign of the tree that marked the cave and his prey, and no sign that he was headed in the right direction whatsoever. He was completely, utterly, hopelessly lost. In fact, Shae had no sense at all in what direction he was traveling. All that he could see were the mountains, preposterous and looming, and he’d been heading towards them for what felt like forever. In theory that should’ve helped to keep him on a roughly singular course, but in a realization that stoked a subtle flame of fear in his belly, the mountains seemed to be in front of him no matter what direction he looked.
This is a fantasy world after all… perhaps it isn’t too far off to assume that this could be an enchanted forest. Or a cursed forest, with my luck. Thoughts of faeries and whisps and night ghouls roaming the woods to lure him to an early death plagued his mind as night settled over the forest. The area in which he now found himself was considerably rockier than where he and Perun had made camp the night before. Boulders scattered the alpine floor, and tall, spearlike trees pierced the sky and shot off at angles from the steep terrain all around. The surroundings were breathtakingly beautiful and reminded him of summer trips to the mountainous canyons of Colorado, but his constant fear about his current predicament precluded him from enjoying it.
Worse yet than the darkness were the sounds that accompanied it. With the disappearance of the triplicate suns came the unsettling shrieks and howls of unseen beasts that shattered the otherwise peaceful silence. They came at irregular intervals and varying distances, and every time he heard one, Shae startled. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, so to speak, but what he couldn’t see or sense he couldn’t defend against. In spite of an almost animalistic desire to do so, Shae refrained from lighting a torch. If his attackers were still out there, and worse yet, if they were pursuing him, then lighting a torch would be as good as signing his life away to the archer. So, blind, lost, and afraid, Shae climbed a nearby tree and prepared to settle in for the night.
The bark bit at his cold fingers and his weary legs protested his every motion as he climbed, knees hugging the trunk as he moved slowly upwards. Finally arriving at a place about fifteen feet off the ground where three branches joined the trunk and formed a sort of natural seat, Shae relaxed. Remembering a podcast in which members of the Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, of the war in Vietnam were interviewed about their experiences, Shae mimicked their remain overnight procedure and, after removing his pack and hanging it from a nearby overhead branch, secured himself to the tree by tying himself to it with a rope. The sword stayed fastened to his waist.
The lack of noise and light pollution was normal to him now, the only difference tonight being the sporadic, drawn out shrieks of beasts in the night that sounded like trains halting suddenly on their tracks, brakes squealing. This was his first time hearing them, and he had no idea what the creatures might be. Desperately, he hoped not to find out. And that they couldn’t climb trees.
As he leaned back against the trunk, trying to make his legs comfortable in their awkward saddle of wood and empty air, Shae thought on his life. The adrenaline of his earlier encounter with the bandits had long since passed, and he settled into a state of semi-alert half-slumber. Sleeping with one eye open was an unrealistic cliche, but both at officer candidates school and during his last few weeks with Perun he’d learned how to keep a part of his brain awake and alert even as he slept. His half lidded eyes absorbed the turquoise pink light of the foreign moons, Dinnah and Seyah, the first large and pale pink, the other small and baby blue, as it lit the sloping forest floor below him in dim reflection and shifting shadow.
Thoughts of his sisters and his mother welled up in his mind, as they did every night, and he felt their absence in his core like a gaping pit. In spite of Perun’s company, he was alone. This world was beautiful, but he was a stranger to it. He had no friends here, no family. No roots. It was as if he’d been estranged from existence, and was now living some false life. As if he was watching as someone else learned about rei, as someone else trained the sword and their body under Perun’s harsh instruction. His family had always kept him grounded, and the Marine Corps had given him a sense of purpose and direction. Without them, he felt lost, alone, and unreal in a way that was elusive to describe. It was as if all the things that made him him were missing, and now there was some pretender walking around with his face and body.
It must’ve been nearly a month since he’d awoken in the forest, naked and confused, and in all that time, he hadn’t been able to really face the reality of the situation. It was too strange, too unreal, too fantastic. How could one rationalize being transported to another planet? And by some god? And there were monsters, elves, and magic? He had been attacked today and almost died, and earlier he’d watched a dragon decimate a herd of bison. His mind had taken in all of this information, borne witness to the events, and consolidated the information, but it still all felt surreal. Making his way back home and returning to his family was the only thing keeping him going, and yet, sitting here in this state of semi-lucidity strapped to a tree trunk to avoid unseen, unimaginable monsters of the night, Shae began to lose hope. It felt as if he’d suddenly been ripped from reality and immersed in some cruel joke. Tears welled up in his eyes, and silent sobs racked his body. Despite the indignant sadness that now gripped him, a part of him knew it was dangerous to cry aloud.
There had to be a way through this. There had to be a way home. If he gave up now, if he quit on finding a way back to his family, back to his life, he’d never forgive himself. They needed him, and now he realized more than ever, he needed them. If he was forced to be alone in this strange world, he couldn’t take it.
Time passed, and Shae’s silent sobs faded to deep, exhausted breathing. Then, sudden as a bolt of lightning, the loudest, most terrible howl of the night sounded from just beneath his tree. A man screamed in an alien tongue, and Shae’s eyes snapped open.