Frightening Lives (Day 359)

There was a shift in reality--the way things were. Aisen could not put his finger on it, but something imperceptible had changed. There was a white noise that he could not hear before. His vision, indistinct and hazy, was just then beginning to come into focus. A confusing swirl of colors painstakingly rearranged themselves into a pattern that made something approaching sense. He could make out spindly trees and parched earth before him, but the ever present fog was now gone. He could hear the faint sounds of tiny creatures skittering around the outskirts of the wood and felt humid air filling his lungs. 

"Wh--where am I?" Aisen asked no one in particular. The words, despite being delivered by parched and disused vocal words, clung to the air and stayed there. They resonated and danced in the air instead of being swallowed up, never to be heard again. It made Aisen feel somewhat self-conscious, but he was willing to suffer the emotion if it meant he had made it out of the forest. Wherever he might be at that moment, it had to be a better place. 

Aisen chanced a wary glance back at the tangle of woods behind him only to behold a thin cover of scraggly trees, just barely clinging to life. The grass below him was browned and pockmarked by large patches of soil. This was no forest; that much was certain. 

The main in the piriol cloak felt strongly he'd escaped a terrible maze. He thought that perhaps it was against his best interests to assume Lakara had deposited him into a place of safety, but there just had to be more to the situation than that. It was probably foolish to assume the forest itself was sentient. Nature's dangers do not discriminate on who they befall, even if those dangers had been somehow warped by foul magic. It could very well be a fluke that Aisen had ended up here in this arid land, but he wasn't yet ready to question it.

Shaking off the weariness of an overlong sleep, Aisen set off toward what he believed to be the east, if the still climbing sun was any indication. Although he readily admitted he was as lost as he had ever been, having a frame of reference sparked a surge of motivation in the man. No more would he wander aimlessly through a thick fog, knowing full well he was likely only traveling in circles. Now he would march forward in one direction and at least take comfort in the fact that he was covering some kind of distance. 

Aisen felt a sharp pain in his stomach and absentmindedly retrieved a bean from his pouch. The hunger gradually subsided, but the pain continued to gnaw at him. As the sun made its journey to the other horizon, he only felt his trepidation grow. Still he marched on, until the ghostly strand of trees was well behind him and only an expanse of flat and exhausted ground could be seen for miles around.