Chương 19: All Alone

She didn't stop running until the shouting behind her had thinned to nothing, swallowed up by distance and the sound of her own new legs eating up ground faster than she'd ever moved in her life. Even after it was gone she kept going a while longer, legs carrying her on the same momentum long after the reason for it had stopped mattering. Somewhere in that stretch, without her quite deciding it, she stopped running from the threat and just kept running.

Wind tore past her ears, faster than anything had ever moved past them before, and the ground blurred beneath paws that covered ground in single strides her old legs would have needed several more to match. Nothing chased her anymore. Just open hills rolling out in every direction. Something close to joy cracked open in her chest, bright and unfamiliar, spreading warm through her ribs the same way sunlight did on the best afternoons back home.

Her breath came ragged, her tongue thick and dry against the roof of her mouth, and somewhere underneath all of it a thirst she hadn't noticed building made itself known at once, sudden and impossible to ignore. She slowed, testing the air. Something reached her on it, faint at first, then clearer the more she paid attention. Wet stone. Cold, moving water. A green, growing smell riding underneath it that hadn't been anywhere on the road behind her.

She turned toward it without a second thought, the pull of it stronger than any direction she'd been running in before, and the hills ahead of her started giving way to trees, sparse at first, then closer together, until she was moving through real forest for the first time in her life. The stream, when she finally reached it, ran shallow and clear over a bed of pale stone, moving too fast to hold any real reflection, cold enough that it stung against her tongue on the first swallow.

She drank until her tongue stopped sticking to the roof of her mouth and her breath finally settled, longer than she'd ever needed to drink from any bowl back at the guild. Her attention turned to the shallow graze along her shoulder next, still faintly stinging where the arrow had grazed her. She worked at it steadily, tongue rough against fur matted stiff with blood, until the wound underneath ran clean and the taste of copper faded from her mouth.

She stayed crouched there a while after, just breathing, the cold of the water still clinging to her whiskers. Something rustled in the brush a short way upstream while she was still settled by the water. She was moving before she'd finished deciding to, low and silent, every part of her locking onto it the same way it always had, whether or not she was hungry enough to care about the outcome.

The something turned out to be nothing worth the effort, some small brown thing gone to ground before she'd closed half the distance, but the want to chase it had been real, sharper and more immediate than anything her old body had ever managed. She sat there a while after that, not doing much of anything. The water kept moving past her without any particular hurry about where it was headed either. She didn't know what came next.

There was no scent or trail worth following, not a gate anywhere close to walk back through, nothing in any direction telling her where to put her paws next. Eventually she got up and started walking along the bank, not because she'd decided anything, just because the stream was going somewhere and standing still wasn't. A pool sat off to the side of the current a short way along, still enough to hold a clean reflection, and something in it caught her eye before she'd meant to look at all.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. She stopped walking entirely. The face looking back had amber eyes, plain white fur, not a mark on it anywhere. Everything past that face, though, looked like it belonged to something she'd never met before. She lifted a paw to test it, and the reflection lifted one back, easily multiple times the width it used to be, claws included.

She turned side-on to the water next, the way she'd size up any unfamiliar thing that wandered into her territory, sorting out in one glance whether it was worth taking seriously, not recognizing what she was looking at for a long moment. If this had walked into the guild yard a few weeks ago, she wouldn't have hesitated to run. Then, slowly, she worked out that the shape in the water copied every move she made, exactly, without fail. Surely, then, this had to be her.

Her fur stood up along her spine even so, and she took three slow, deliberate steps back instead of bolting outright. Knowing a thing and trusting it, apparently, were two entirely different problems for whatever was left of her brain. She bolted the rest of the way back nonetheless, putting real distance between herself and the water before she let herself stop again. [SYSTEM] Skill Acquired: Strategic Retreat. No one would shame you for retreating strategically.

She heard it, but found she couldn't bring herself to care one way or the other. She left the pool behind eventually, moving deeper into the trees without any real destination in mind, one paw in front of the other because it was easier than standing still with everything that had happened today. A pair of birds broke from a branch overhead the moment she passed beneath it, wings cracking loud through the quiet, though she'd made no sound at all that she could tell.

Further along, something small and quick vanished into a hollow log without ever showing itself, gone before her nose had even finished working out what it might have been. Ahead of her, a deer stood frozen at the edge of a clearing, head lifted, watching her for a long moment before instinct finally won out and it crashed off through the brush, gone in a spray of leaves. It was the longest anything all day had bothered to actually look at her first. She kept walking.

The trees thinned in places and thickened in others, the ground rising into small hills and dropping back down again, none of it forming any pattern she could actually use to navigate by. A smaller stream crossed her path at one point, and she walked alongside it a while, not for any real reason beyond having nothing better to do, before it bent away from wherever she was actually headed and she let it go. Curiosity kept catching her sideways.

A patch of low white flowers grew thick along one shaded bank, and she pressed her nose into them without thinking, sneezing hard at the sharp, almost peppery smell that came off their centers. Further on, a fallen log had gone soft and spongy with age, crawling with pale fungus in little shelves along its side, and she batted one loose just to watch it crumble apart under her claw.

Vines hung heavy from some of the older trees, thick as her own tail in places, and she tested one with a bite anyway, no real reason behind it. None of it meant anything. She wasn't hungry for any of it, wasn't hunting it, wasn't even sure half of it was safe to put in her mouth. She did it anyway, the same restless curiosity that had gotten her into more trouble than she could count back at the guild, still fully intact no matter how much else about her had changed today.

Something large moved through the brush a good distance off, once, heavy enough that she felt it through her paws before she heard it. She went still, waiting to see whether it would come closer. It didn't. Whatever it was, it seemed to want the same thing from this forest that she did, which was mostly just to be left alone in it. That thought sat with her longer than she expected it to. The forest didn't care about her one way or the other.

Animals fled from her and plants grew around her the same as they would for anything else that happened to be standing there. She'd been alone before. She'd chosen it, most nights, curling up somewhere no one else wanted rather than in the middle of the hall's noise and heat. This wasn't that. This was alone with no place waiting for her, no Bram muttering in a kitchen somewhere nearby, no Garr's hand anywhere close enough to land on her back.

The light started changing while she walked, the gold going long and orange between the trees the way it did toward evening. She hadn't noticed how much of the day she'd already spent out here, one aimless mile bleeding into the next. With the light fading, something in her shifted from wandering to searching, low and deliberate, the way she used to check every corner of the hall before settling in for the night.

She needed somewhere closed on at least three sides, somewhere she could see out of without being easily seen back. A hum reached her before she found the source of it, faint at first, the same familiar pull mana always carried. She followed it up a low rise to a shallow cave mouth cut into the rock, warmth radiating out from somewhere deep inside it, gentle and inviting in a way the cold evening air wasn't. She hesitated at the threshold only a moment. It was dry. It was warm. It was closed on every side but one.

It was, as far as her tired body was concerned, exactly what she'd been looking for. She stepped inside. Stone ground shut behind her, fast and final, sealing off the last of the evening light before she'd even registered the sound of it moving. [SYSTEM] You have entered a dungeon.