You limp into the forest, slogging through snow which rises past your ankles. It nearly evening, and soon you will need to set up camp for the night. You have no need of matches or wood to start a fire, but you would much rather make use of those physical objects than resort to the dangerous, costly, and unpredictable alternative.
You had known it would be cold when you set out this morning. It was not a naive sort of knowledge, where one knows the idea of cold only as the opposite or absence of heat. You understood the nature of the cold, having trekked north for several weeks through gradually dropping temperatures while donning gradually thicker clothing. The cold was a slow killer, one that could sneak up on the unaware but never threaten the adequately prepared. Your winter garments and well-laid plans were all you needed to protect yourself from the snow and ice. At least, that's what you thought this morning.
You could not have have predicted the afternoon blizzard, how the skies would go from clear to cloudy to blinding white in what seemed like moments. You should have known how quickly the heat would be torn from you body by the harsh winds. Removing a glove for but a moment risked numbness, frostbitten fingers, or worse. You had taken the sun's warmth for granted, a small comfort in a hostile wilderness. Now a drop of water falling from your bottle would freeze long before it hit the ground beneath the merciless grey skies.
And yet.
And yet you continue. You push on, because there is no other choice. You can feel the sacred knowledge burning in your mind, a motivation beyond mere human determination. You know the way you must go, the direction your feet will carry you towards until you reach your journey's end or die trying. Unwavering, undoubtable, the knowledge is something between faith and background noise, as if the notes of birdsong or the rustling of the wind communicated divine, inescapable truths. Ever since it found you, it has lead you onward. Like a compass carved into your consciousness, the guidance it provides leads you towards your true destination regardless of space or time. It has sent you in a straight line through this icy, barren, unforgiving wasteland, with nothing more or less than the absolute, unshakable faith that your arrival is inevitable.
And yet.
And yet you are still human, and a human in your pitiful present condition must find warmth soon, no matter where they are going or why they are going there. Your feet and hands and face have long since become numb, the cold robbing your extremities and exposed skin of any trace of warmth and life. You can barely move your fingers even within the insulation of the gloves. Your feet feel like stones, and ice clings to your nose. You feel as if you want to sleep, but you know that if you close your eyes now that you will never open them again. You remove your gloved hands from your pockets, pull your hatchet from your belt, and hack a rune of protection into the bark to ward off those things which roam the northern forests at night. The sound of metal against wood feels out of place after hours of the quiet hisses and sloshes of boots on snow. Your work on the ward is sloppy, but it will suffice. When it is done, you let the hatchet fall to the ground. You will not need it to start a fire, and if you cannot start a fire soon you will not have need of anything ever again. You feel very, very cold. Your gloves have already begun to freeze solid, forcing your fingers to remain shaped as if they were still holding some tool. Distantly, you manage to recognize that your fingers might be frostbitten if you don't warm them soon.
You fail to recognize how the slow onset of hypothermia has already begun to dull your mind.
You wander into the woods in the fading afternoon light. There is dry wood on the ground, perfect for a fire, you think.
And then it is sunset, and you are somehow even colder than before, and there is a pile of wood in front of you, and your gloves are covered in snow. You must have gathered it, placed it there, but you cannot remember doing so. Memory escapes you, the concept of the past leaking from your mind. The only thing in your world is the cold, the unforgettable sacred knowledge, and the pile of sticks. You stare dumbly at it for a time, until somewhere in your slowly freezing body a lone synapse desperately fires and you move once again. You fumble with your pack, pull it off, struggle to open it. Then the pack is open, and you're looking in it. The matches are there, in the bottom. You try once, twice, three times to pull out the maddeningly small box of matches. You forget what the box is for a moment, only knowing that it represents your last hope for survival.
The pack is open.
You need the matches.
The pack is open.
You're cold.
The pack is open.
You gaze mindlessly into the pack, and then violently shake your head to clear your mind for the last time.
One more shot.
In those precious moments of lucidity, you gingerly try to pull out the matches. You know you will only have one chance, one opportunity to survive. And the box is opened, and the matches spill onto the dark snow. You do not see where they land. The matches are gone. Despair, until you look inside the box and see a lone match left inside, your last hope. You carefully put it into you hand, struggle to grip it with the last hint of strength in your dying fingers, and strike it. It lights for an instant, and then snaps in two in your clumsy grip. The pieces fall to the ground, one aflame, one icy, before they are both swallowed by the shadowy snow.
You stare uncomprehending at the ground.
There are no more matches.
Death. Cold, alone.
Resigned to your fate, your ultimate failure, you fall back against the tree you had so hopefully carved the ward into in hopes of surviving another day. A wave of warmth washes over you, and you do not have the mental capacity left to realize how impossible the sensation is. You relax into the falsehood of heat produced by your brain in the last stages of death by hypothermia, and slide slowly to the ground. As your head sinks into the snow, it's peaceful. It's quiet. No more treks across fields and forests, braving cold and snow. You close your eyes. The image of the broken matchstick, of fire and ice, lingers in your mind.
And, miraculously, you remember there is something else in your mind. The knowledge, the glowing purpose burned into your soul. It violently reminds you why you have ventured to this place, and how you got here, and what you must do.
It will not allow you to rest. You open your eyes.
It will not allow you to despair. You rise to your feet.
It will not allow you to fail. You step forward.
It will not allow you to die. You reach out.
If you had been granted time, and dexterous unfrozen fingers, and the capacity for more complex thoughts, you would have executed this more carefully, planning it out well beforehand. Ideally, the ritual should have cost nothing more than a few drops of blood, some strength, and a trivial memory or two. In the right hands, those small sacrifices could easily have created a slow-burning fire that would have kept you warm for the night. But you are freezing, and you can barely move your limbs, and your mind is being immolated by the inexorable urge, not to survive, but to move towards your holy destination. Right now, it is all or nothing, and somewhere between all or nothing you must find something, anything, to give up in order to keep yourself alive and fulfill your only goal.
You reach out your hand, focused by the indomitable, divine will overtaking your mind, and offer yourself to the spell.
A blast of heat sends you reeling as the magic extinguishes the last of your strength, consumes half a liter of blood, destroys the memories of your childhood home, and obliterates a literal handful of your frozen digits, which silently wink out of existence one after the other. You collapse, completely drained, before the inferno. It burns larger than your exhausted mind can comprehend, fueled by the tiny sticks at its center and the eternal, irreducible promise in your mind. As you crawl closer to the heat of the flames, your eyes fall upon your right glove. It is turning red with blood, and you pull it off to look at the stumps where your fingers used to be on your ruined right hand. The warmth slowly enters your brain, and only the do you slowly begin to grasp what has happened.
You accept it. Without question, without regret.
You are one day closer to the place you must go.
You squint through your goggles at your hand-drawn map. “Map” is a generous description for the collection of barely legible scribbles and sketchy lines you are currently struggling to comprehend. Your minimalist document consists of dots representing important locations and lines connecting them. Dots are accompanied by a concise written description, and the navigation lines are labeled only with approximate travel time and the exact compass bearing to get from one point to another.
You draw a line from a dot labeled “oasis 4” and jot down “SSE” after glancing at your compass. Glancing up, you catch another glimpse of the structure on the horizon. The air is unusually clear today, you think, even accounting for the nearby oasis. It’s too far away to make a time estimate, so you place your map back in your pack. After checking your goggles and clothing, making sure that there are no holes for dust to enter through, you set off once again.
Your cheerful whistling is muffled by the cloth around your face, but you don’t mind. It’s been a good few days. You have your supplies for clearing a room, plenty of food if you ration it carefully, and a handful of leftover trinkets to trade at the oasis in case this expedition turns out poorly. Always good to find a place so near an oasis. I have food for maybe two weeks, but only enough water for a few days. Here's to hoping there's a well or something to drink.
Assuming you can find a reliable source of water, you’ll be able to set up camp and loot nearby structures without having to worry about supplies for a while. You’ve heard legends about how some nomads can procure water from the desiccated, waist-high grass through obscure magic or strange tools, but you’ve long since decided that trekking back to an oasis every few days is far less effort than tracking down some semi-mythical water-wizard. However much you value your time alone, you can’t deny you enjoy the human presence at the oases. No matter how fulfilling wandering may be, there’s something irreplaceable about sharing a laugh with a few strangers every now and then. You think it’s a good balance to explore freely for a while before returning to those safe places with faces old and new.
After a few minutes, the structure is only a little closer. My, it's clear today. You can see for miles out here. Even without a nearby dust storm, the haze usually limits visibility to a fairly short walking distance. The house is…twenty minutes away, now? Close enough. You pull out your map and scrawl “3 hr 30 m” next to the travel line. You spare a moment to ponder the clarity of the skies. From what you’ve heard, the dust ruined much of the continent a little more than a generation before your birth. According to the stories, the dust storms overtook the land in a week, sparing only moderately-sized patches of forests and rivers. These mysteriously preserved havens became oases in a world dominated by rapidly eroding ruins and a resilient, previously unknown type of grass. The dust, however, was still present in the air of the oases, and had deadly long-term consequences. Anyone who was alive to know what the world used to look like succumbed to dust sickness only a decade after the calamity. The current methods of covering one’s whole body allow one to live for forty years, maybe a little longer, before their lungs finally fail. It is said that, before the dust, people used to live past their seventies, and their bodies would begin to fail in strange ways all on their own, even without exposure to toxins or disease. What in the world would someone even do with all that time? An extra three or four decades, able to live and roam anywhere without worrying about dust? Hell, I can't even stay in one place for two months. The structure now appears to be two outlines, one significantly smaller than the other. It would be nice to live longer, I suppose. You can make out the slant of what is hopefully an intact roof. Ah well. The time I've got is plenty enough.
You arrive at your destination. The house is low and small, but you don’t dwell on that. Your eyes fall on a well, and you break into a grin. Before you walk in the front door, you know this will be a good spot to set up camp. There are a few rooms inside. You carefully inspect the walls and windows for the smallest imperfections that the dust might find its way through. It’s methodical, slow, and satisfying. You’ve come to appreciate your well-practiced motions, sliding gloved hands along walls, peering closely at every nook and cranny. You pull up a chair, and relax for a moment. This one should do. One last check.
You reach into your bag, removing a charred glove and a sheet of paper. Any spell requires a sacrifice to work, an offering of something subjectively valuable to the spellcaster. It can be anything - objects, memories, keepsakes, even parts of one’s own body. You’ve heard tall tales of people who could supposedly sacrifice their good luck. You’ve found that your curiosity makes a very specific group of objects into potent offerings: your spells are fueled by the notes of other people. Specifically, notes that you have not yet read and were discarded by strangers long since gone. They fascinate you, everything from to-do lists to letters to personal confessions. Diaries are the best, each page filled with stories you long to read. But if you read them, they lose all that value. The story becomes known, the mystery is lost, and the object becomes nothing more than a reminder of information that is stored inside your head. So you collect these pages and notes and scraps of paper but resist the urge to read them. That curiosity is never sated, the value of potential knowledge instead serving as fuel for your small spells.
You cover your right glove with the charred one and pick up the crumpled paper. It’s a to-do list you found in a house a few weeks ago. You’ve found that taking a peek at a few words makes these messages all the more enticing. You close your eyes to concentrate and focus on how much you want to read what the note says. After a moment, a sudden warmth in your right hand indicates your success. Excellent. Opening your eyes, you see that the paper is enveloped in a ball of fire, serving as both magical sacrifice and mundane kindling. The room fills with smoke as you set the smoldering remains to the side and lay on your back. Peering through the goggles, you can make out small traces of movement in the smoke, hinting at tiny gaps in the wall you failed to notice on your first inspection. The dust can find its way through the smallest of gaps, ruining the lungs of those careless enough to let their guard down in these unforgiving wastes.
You note the places where the fumes are disturbed, and exit the room. As you observe the exterior walls, leaving pencil marks where the smoke leaks out, you recall how you learned to properly check a room. When you were younger, and more reckless, you hadn’t even considered that walls might have holes your eyes couldn’t find with careful inspection. The day before you first set out into the wilderness, that warning was provided in the form of a gut-wrenching cautionary tale told by a pale, sickly individual who couldn’t have been five years older than you were at the time. They had foolishly sealed all the gaps they could see in a ruined house and then went to sleep without a care in the world while a dust storm raged in the night. They awoke to a fine layer of dust on their unprotected body and the horrifying knowledge they had irreversibly damaged their lungs and skin.
A shudder passes through your body as you finish double-checking the walls. Rest in peace, man. The person died only a few months after that story, coughing up blood through cracked lips as their lungs and skin succumbed to the present consequences of their past carelessness. As you start sealing the holes with fabric, wood, and nails from your pack, you wonder how many times you’ve gone through these same actions. Burning notes you will never read, written by people dead before you were born, so you can watch smoke swirl in houses that no one will ever live in again. All fueled by your insatiable, fiery curiosity to explore and to know. You shut the door, and seal the frame. The room is not airtight, so you can breathe, but no dust will pass through your cloth filters that you have hammered into place.
Another day well spent. Wonder where I'll go tomorrow. You allow yourself to relax in your little haven, removing the fabric from your head, setting your goggles and tools, shrugging off your pack as night begins to fall.
You notice how quiet it is as you drift off, and begin to dream.
A child in a blindingly green field points at the night sky. They are surrounded by a variety of plants, of every shape and size, all colored a green so vibrant it appears to glow. There are no flowers in the lush field. It is only populated by verdant leaves and branches and blades of grass. The child continues to point upwards. They are mouthing words, but they cannot be heard.
You awake with a start. Something feels wrong, but you can’t determine what. You pay yourself down, then the floor. No dust. You breathe a sigh of relief, and then notice the dead silence afterwards. Not a hint of noise, even if you press your ear to the wall. Silence is an anomaly in the wastelands, for the winds blow day or night. Curiosity quickly overpowers weariness, and you prepare to exit the room.
You open the door, tread quietly through the house, and exit out the front.
The sky is impossibly clear. The horizon is a clear line rather than a blur. You smile, and look down so as to save the surprise. You think a moment before turning, grabbing the side of the roof and hauling yourself up. Your left leg comes up, and you roll over the edge onto your back, staring upwards.
Your jaw falls open beneath the cloth. There are an uncountable number of stars in the sky. The thought that you might be hallucinating crosses your mind briefly, and you shove it aside to dwell on the awe instead. The air is absolutely still. You’ve never seen it this clear, even in the center of the largest oasis. The stars look close enough to touch. You reach out your left hand, the glove a black silhouette blotting out the tiny lights. In your astonishment, you have forgotten your precarious position on the very edge of the house. You move to set your arm at your side to push yourself up, but your hand goes straight down past the edge of the roof, taking the rest of your body with it.
You roll unceremoniously from the roof, landing hard on your back.
The impact forces the air from your lungs in a way you’ve never felt before and you try to take a breath and it doesn’t work. And then you realize you can’t breathe and you’re gasping over and over and you can’t breathe and you try to take a deep breath and it still doesn’t work and the starlight shines coldly down on you as you desperately gasp for air and wonder if this is the end, if you somehow inhaled a lethal quantity of dust in your sleep, and then it starts to get easier to breathe. The panic starts to fade. You breathe in, breathe out, roll over, get to your knees. In. Out. You're alive.
You contemplate the skies above. Never before have you experienced such visceral panic. Not from hunger, nor thirst, nor dust. You've been caught unprepared at times, but you've never really had to fear for your life. You recall an idiom that seems to describe that sensation - something about the wind being knocked out of a person. Ironic, seeing as the air is completely still right now. It seems distantly comedic that the scariest experience in your life was falling off a roof just a little taller than you. You smile, a little.
The stars are so beautiful.
You stand up, take a long, deep breath, and collapse again.
This time you’re laughing.
You stumble through the snow towards the structures in the distance. Houses and other hopes on the horizon, you think. Almost like the good old times. It’s a clear day, and bitterly cold. While the clothing you currently wear stopped being adequate almost a week ago, the cold really began to bite last afternoon. To venture further north, towards your destination, you’ll need actual winter clothing. Real gloves, boots, and other clothes made to hold warmth inside, rather than keep dust out. Some advice wouldn’t hurt either, I suppose.
You arrive at the village, miles away from the nearest signs of civilization. It looks large enough to house fifty people, maybe more. Pretty large for such a remote place. What do they do here? Hunt? Oh, there’s a lake. They probably fish, then. As you walk down a snowy street, a stern-looking individual meets your wandering gaze and begins to quickly walk towards you. Friend or foe? You start to raise an arm to wave, but she mistakes it for another greeting and shakes your right hand enthusiastically instead.
“Welcome! We don’t get many new faces around these parts. You’re from down south, right?”
She ignores your affirmative nod and continues speaking without a pause, as if she hadn’t asked a question.
“Your clothing has that airtight look to it, not to mention the dust. You’ll probably want something a tad more suited to the climate. You’ll want to go down this street and take the next left. The shop should be on your right. It’s got a big sign, you can’t miss it.”
She claps you on the back, leaving no room for thanks or any other response.
“Farewell, stranger! ”
You give her a grateful nod, and go on your way. At least something's on my side.
The door to the shop opens, and a shivering figure stumbles inside. After removing their icy goggles and pulling off their hood, they see the shopkeeper on their left and make their way towards him.
“Ah, you’re from the south, aren’t you? Guess you're looking for some winter gear?”
//The traveler stops at the counter, and nods. Their body faces almost exactly north, and their head is barely turned towards the counter on the western side of the store. Only their eyes, which shimmer faintly yellow, look towards the shopkeeper’s goods. They seem somehow both completely implacable and yet totally defeated as their gaze roves over the wide variety of clothing and supplies. The traveler inspects necessities, such as coats, gloves, and food; but also ponders stranger goods, such as the array unfamiliar weapons that seem rather excessive for a isolated fishing community.
“Cat got your tongue, or just not one for small talk?”
The traveler’s weary, determined stare now falls upon the shopkeeper himself. They gesture towards their own throat and shake their head twice. The shopkeeper tilts his head, and then it clicks.
“You’re mute?”
Nod.
“Ah, pardon me for my comment, then. Where is it that you are going? I can offer you-”
Their arm rises and points in the same direction as their body.
“Further north? We're on the edge of civilization as it is. Any inhabited place you're looking for is south, maybe south-east. I've got a map somewhere I can show you, if you like."
Silence. The traveler continues holding their arm out until the shopkeeper understands.
"I see. I don't know if you've heard, but there are creatures that live in the deep northern forests. Those monsters are the reason that you won't find many settlements near here, and also why we have those weapons I saw you staring at. It's dangerous to travel out there, especially alone. For your own safety, are you truly sure you-"
Nod.
"In that case, you’ll definitely need better equipment. I don’t suppose you have that much to barter with? I'm afraid I can’t exactly give food and gear away for-”
A chipped emerald is gently placed on the counter. For a moment, the shopkeeper joins the traveler in silence. A wry smile slowly creeps across the traveler's face.
"I’ll get you the best we have to offer.”
correct your to its either very early after the journey begins or shortly after it ends
placeholder - traveler makes a friend at some point after being unburdened (or maybe looks for things to do? this could be two stories, actually)
