5 - Dream

Will woke up feeling well-rested for the first time since he'd left the forest. His figure was silhouetted in the patch of red flowers as he lay there quietly, gazing up at the drifting clouds, his thoughts drifting freely along with them.

'What should I do?' He wondered. Did he have a goal? No. Perhaps he wanted to stay alive, although he didn't exactly have much to live for.

Searching for meaning, he tried his best to find a reason not to give up right now and lie in these flowers until his body decomposed into fertilizer. At least then his life would mean something.

The best goal he could come up with was, killing the snake, an impossible task seeing as the God-Emperor hadn't managed to do it. Other than that… perhaps he could help humanity survive the coming struggle.

Now that he thought about it, was he even human anymore? He certainly felt different than he had before emerging from the egg. His body was unnaturally cold, and his vision seemed to flicker in a spectrum of reds and blues, although only when he left his left eye open.

Besides, he had never been a particularly righteous person. Saving humanity just didn't seem like the right job for him, better leave it to the professionals who got off on that sort of thing.

He picked up one of the red flowers beside him, smelling it as he gazed into its vibrant petals. He liked the smell, he liked how it looked, and it was nice to just sit here and enjoy the beauty of nature, his worries leaving him for a moment. And then it clicked.

He didn't need some grand dream or goal, all he needed was to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Sure, he could spend his time searching for a cause or aspiration, but it was only worth doing if he enjoyed the process. If he wanted his life to have meaning, it needed to be a life worth living.

Enjoying the flowers had helped him realise that, although things were certainly bad, that didn't mean there was nothing good in this world. There was always something to look forward to and he would try and find those things for himself.

It beat lying in a field and waiting to die anyway.

'First things first, I need to find a city or large gathering of people,' he decided. Everything after that would be much simpler to figure out.

Extricating himself from the flowers, he looked at the picturesque meadow and sighed, memories of his old town flooding in. Shaking his head, he turned and began the long walk towards his first stop in a long journey.

Port-Vale harbour, a nearby dock on the river Bronn. While he didn't have high hopes for the surviving human populace there, when he reached the harbour, he should be able to follow the Bronn downstream to the lake city of Samari.

Will had never visited Samari himself, so he wasn't exactly sure how long the journey there would take. And although he had visited Port-Vale a few times, that had always been in a wagon. Even then, the journey often took a few days.

Now that he had to walk the whole way, he wasn't sure exactly how long he would be on the road, perhaps half a week if he was being optimistic.

With his thoughts on the coming journey, he managed to reach the edge of the meadow and stepped out into the unknown without noticing. With one final look back, he sighed and began his odyssey in earnest.

As he walked, he marvelled at the vibrant scenery. Everywhere he looked, the world was in bloom, teeming with chattering wildlife and blossoming flowers.

Remembering the brutal storm that had shredded trees and overturned earth, Will wasn't sure how this was possible, he simply chalked it up to the miraculous effects of Atma and the extended period he had spent within the egg. He supposed that these two conditions might have allowed life to regain a foothold in this area. By that logic, the west should still be ruined and the east a far better place for life.

The storm fresh in his mind, he was glad that, while Port-Vale was to the West, Samari lay far in the east. He reasoned that the further he got from the initial impact zone in the West the better. There were probably many gods roaming about in those parts and if he bumped into one, he would be finished.

Quickly, he learned something important about walking. Shoes were actually quite important. Unfortunately, his were destroyed, perhaps from the bath in the egg or the raging winds of the storm, whatever the reason, all his clothes had been reduced to rags and his shoes seemed to have borne the brunt of it, hanging off his feet in tattered scraps.

Right now, this wasn't a problem but when night fell, he could see things turning very bad very quickly. The cold would creep in and sap his life from him greedily.

Judging from the height of the sun and the screeching calls of birds, it was early in the morning. This left plenty of time between now and nightfall, time that he needed to take full advantage of.

Deciding his first action should be to make some sort of cloak for warmth, Will tried to think of what animals would be suitable. Something too small and it would be useless. Too big and he would be mauled.

Now that he was paying closer attention to the wildlife, he felt a sense of Deja-vu, everything was familiar and yet altered slightly. Much like the flowers, he had seen in the meadow, the birds in the sky had undergone various changes.

He was currently walking along what had once been a forest trail and was now a grassy plain that stretched between massive rows of saplings that had just begun to grow. The trees looked similar to those that had made up the forest before, but their leaves were a darker green and their trunk a lighter beige.

The birds that perched on their growing branches were bigger and more exotic than before. Each painted in vibrant swathes of greens, reds and yellows. Some having gained impressive plumage or wickedly sharp claws on their feet.

Looking closely, he noticed a hulking crow that was about twice the size it should have been. It took off in a flurry of wind that bent the tree it had been perched on. Its, massive wings stretched wider than Will was tall.

Will stared in awe at the wild, prehistoric landscape, wondering just where humans fitted into this new and less restrained version of nature.

As an aspiring hunter, he understood all too well how seemingly small changes in an ecosystem could produce drastic differences in the animal kingdom around him.

Before, the only things he had to worry about in the forest were opportunistic foxes and the odd suicidal squirrel. Aside from that, he would have to be monumentally unlucky to meet anything capable of killing him.

But if a fox grew twice as big… he wasn't sure who would win. Although it would definitely make a nice pelt… warm too.

He envisioned himself in a glorious red cloak that kept all cold at bay, trailing behind him like a blazing fire in the wind. Who would still call him an 'Aspiring hunter' with a cloak like that? he would be the real deal.

Impulsively deciding that a fox was the best target, he was met with his first speed bump. Foxes are nocturnal, or to be more precise, they hunt during twilight and the earliest hours of dawn. There wouldn't be any foxes running about the forest until late in the day, right around the time he needed the cloak.

His only option was to somehow find a fox's den and then flush them out, killing one of them and escaping before the rest attacked.

Before the first impact, the villagers would have used a hound to sniff out foxes or a special type of fish used to lure them out into the open. Neither of these strategies was viable right now so he decided to think creatively.

If he were a fox, where would he dig his den? His eyes landed on a grassy knoll that rose up from the forest floor. It was big enough to build a house on and more importantly, not too far from a nearby stream.

He picked his way through the saplings and arrived at the hill. Quickly, he ruled out the west side of the slope as it was surely ravaged by winds when the first impact hit. Any foxes that had been there had probably gone up in smoke.

Clambering over the slope to the more sheltered east side, he found it littered with holes that were too small to belong to a fox. It seemed that he had the right idea but the wrong result.

Staying quiet, he watched the honeycomb lattice of holes that covered the eastern face of the slope. After a few minutes of waiting, a small grey head poked out of one of the holes.

Beady black eyes and big floppy ears, he had found a rabbit warren and a big one at that. Rabbits were certainly too small to make a cloak, but perhaps he could craft shoes or gloves from their pelt.

The trouble with hunting rabbits is that they are skittish. At the first sign of danger, they will simply bolt and leave you scratching your head. Will knew this and was sure that brute force wasn't the method to catch these things.

Remembering an old trick his dad had used, Will returned to the Western face of the hill and opened his backpack, rummaging around inside until he found a tight ball of corded rope. It was thin and rough, slightly thicker than a pencil but not by much.

This rope was sturdy and had been used to hang up the jerky to dry in the Sawyer's house. Hoping that it would be strong enough, Will knotted a noose with one end of the rope before climbing the hill until he reached its peak.

He looked down at the crisscrossing network of holes beneath him and noticed one of them had particularly worn grass leading off into the budding forest.

Judging that this hole got a lot of traffic, Will took a deep breath and carefully picked his way around the edges of the mess of entrances and exits to the warren.

He arrived at the hole and stabbed his knife into the dirt just above the opening, looping the hangman's knot around the knife and then carefully placing the remaining loop over the hole.

One end of the loop was attached to the knife for purchase and the other was held by Will who walked quietly up to the top of the hill. He picked each step carefully so as not to disturb any of the rabbits within the warren. If he woke them up and they might simply hide in the den for the rest of the day.

Reaching the top of the hill again, He sighed with relief and lay flat against the grass, his eyes trained on the entrance he had chosen. He stared unblinking and waited for his prey to come to him.

The longer he stared at the opening, the more focused he became, tuning out the chattering of birds and rustling of leaves. Whenever a rabbit left and entered a nearby exit, he ignored it. They weren't important, his prey was.

An instinct told him to close his right eye and focus all his attention on the left one. Without really thinking, he did just that and the world was flooded with shades of blue and red.

The sky was a blue so dark it was almost black while the world around him was a more subtle deep blue. The shape of things was distorted and blurry, seeming to change at random. He watched a glowing yellow figure fly into the sky and disappear beyond his scope of vision.

Opening his right eye, he noticed it was a bird. Closing it again, he looked down at his left hand which glowed a faint orange and figured out roughly what was going on.

'I'm seeing lifeforce or something like it,' he thought. 'Perhaps if I train it on the entrance to the warren, I'll be able to see a rabbit coming and prepare for it better.'

Doing just that, he stared intently at the dark blue pit that the rabbit's called home. Occasionally a glowing red figure would emerge from a different entrance and hop away, but he took no notice of them. His entrance was the only one that mattered.

His prey would come soon enough.