In a forest shrouded in shadow, not the kind that evil and malicious but the kind that eerie and mysterious. Few were the beams of daylight that able to passed through the crown of leaves above, their light faintly illuminated the absolute stillness below, every leaf, every branch, every blade of grass seemingly frozen in time. The forest, barren of the usual sounds of life, as an unfathomable silent ruled over that picture of uncanny woodland, the kind of silent that could drove a person mad by forcing them to listen to their own heartbeat. Amidst that eerie scenery, there walked a man of late twenties, his blonde hair stirred the still air and his blue eyes seemingly glowing in the dark, the forest air felt thick like syrup, and breath had to be taken with much effort. His step hasted and uncertain, for he was lost. How did he got here, in the middle of a strange dark forest? the young man couldn’t say. How long had he walk this woods? he could not tell neither. All he knew was he just in the forest, lost and confused. Fumbling through the stillness of the forest he tried to find a way out… a way out to where? The young man couldn’t be certain.

The young man walked and walked, and walked through the sieging of trees and of the ominous darkness surround. Next to a small hill he stopped to catch his breath, wiped away the sweats rolling down his aquiline nose, he swept his eyes through the ominous scenery before him. Not just to find a hint of a trail that might lead him out of this place but also to ease a feeling raising inside his mind. A feeling of being watch.

A strange tingling sensation had kept every hair on his body stood up, filled his skin with goose bumps, since the moment he appeared in this wood. And with it was a strange paranoia feeling, that, every movement he made, every breath he took felt like being watch closely by someone or something beyond that mysterious darkness surround him. His eyes scanned his surrounding once again, yet still find nothing but tree and tree, and more blurry images of tree obscured by the darkness afar.

Then, a whisper, like a passing wind, faint but clear.

The young man turned around quickly and fluently, just like what had been drilled into his muscle memory, his knees bended, his body lowered to make him the smallest target possible, his foot firmly planted to the ground, gave him a stable stand that hard to be knockdown. Carefully, the young man inched his way to the nearest tree to took cover. His heartbeat increased, send blood coursing through his blood vessels and heightened all his senses. But panic was not what filled his mind but the instinctual caution of a soldier.

The young man eyes and ears still wide opened, scanning his surroundings, yet naught was only what he found. Was he imagined thing? Was he just paranoid? Felt so real that whisper was, “what did the whisper said”, he wondered?

“Challenger!” that what the disembody whisper had spoken to him.

“Challenger? Was that what I just heard?” the young man wondered to himself – “A challenger? Challenge what? Challenge who?”

After a few moment of confusion, the young man realized what the whisper spoke was not a challenge but a name. And the name whispered to his ears, was of his own.

“Samuel Challenger!” the whisper called to him from behind.

In an instance, his entire body rotated, but greeted his eyes was still the silent of trees and the impenetrable darkness beyond.

“Samuel Challenger.” The whisper called his name once again, and this time so close, it felt like the owner of that disembody voice stood right behind Samuel. And right behind him it was, for as Samuel turned again to the whisper’s direction behind him. His eyes caught a silhouette stood next to a tree on a mound, a humanoid figure somewhat obscured by the darkness. Samuel cautiously approached until the figure revealed to be of a person, of what gender, Samuel couldn’t be sure. The person attire was dull, only the face was left uncovered by clothe, and even that face was mostly shrouded behind that person’s long flowing hair, that resemblance the stereotypical hippie’s long hair of the 70s, but the most striking part of that person hair was its colour, perfectly split in the middle into a pure white colour on the left side of the person’s head, and other haft was a pure black colour.

“Er, hello, do you know where am I? can you show me the way out of here?” Samuel asked, as he approaching the person and mesmerized by the person’s flowing hair waving in the wind. “Sir? Miss? Can you… hear me?”

But soon Samuel realized his skin felt no wind, and his distain to the person had yet to reduce further no matter how long he had walked. That strange person still stood there, still as a statue with a mysterious smile on his mouth. Samuel’s step quickly turned to run, yet, ran and ran, ran as he might, Samuel still couldn’t get any closer to that person, no matter how much he hasted his stride, no matter how desperate he asked for direction. As if the very space between the two of them kept expanding and expanding to infinity by some mystery cosmic force, until everything was swallowed by darkness, and then Samuel woke up.

The morning sun illuminated a small simple room, its rays of warm washed upon the flaming grenade tattoo on a young man shoulder, as he stirred from his sleep. Samuel opened his eyes amid the welcome chirping of the morning birds. Sat up and let out a long yawn, Samuel’s haft awake brain recollecting on what had bothered his sleep just now.

“Urg… that dream again…” -Samuel groaned, rubbing his face to wake the rest of his brain cells up- “What that shit is about? It’s bloody weird.” He mumbled to himself.

Indeed, in the past few weeks he’d kept having this strange repeating dream of getting lost in a dark forest. At first, the dream only bothered him one or two night a week, but lately the dream had increased in frequency, and every time the dream troubled his sleep, it left an eerie feeling in his mind that would annoy him the entire day. Washed his face in the basin to completely awake, Samuel gazed out to the peaceful scenery outside the window. As the tree’s leaves swayed with the gentler breeze passed by his window, beyond the window was a typical sight of an Bricatia’s countryside. Through the thatched rooftops of the village’s lovely houses were many wheat fields stretched far, far away to where the earth touches the great blue sky above with big wool-like lumps of white cloud slowly drift through the heaven.

“How long had I been here? Two?” -Samuel wondered- “Nah… probably, three months?”

Certainly, three months had passed since Samuel come to this land or rather this world under unknown mean, he couldn’t recall much, the clearest thing Samuel could remember was he just woke up and found himself in this land, injured on a bed and under the care of a family that own an inn, which he was now reside and work at. This land, that he later known was called Bricatia, a kingdom of the Uppers, a kind of people that not much difference from Samuel, a Caucasian man. After stretched his limbs and filled his lungs with the fresh morning air, Samuel finally put on his tunic and headed down stair for work.

Another day, another slow business, Samuel sighed at the sight of a mostly empty Inn, only four to five people were patronizing the inn today. It’d been like this for the few months, rumour was, as Samuel overheard the villager’s chatting, that, the surrounding area and the southern trade route was being plague by bandit, thus forced the merchants had to reroute to a farther route or risk getting rob, but even that they still often ran into bandit, and with the village’s economic largely relied to trade, this problem grinded everything to a near halt. Even worst still, from what Samuel heard lately, some villages had been attacked by bandit. Although the king and the local lord had increased on patrolling the roads but for some reason they seem to unable to completely eliminated the bandit problem.

“Well… business is… good today, isn’t it? At least better than yesterday,” Casha the daughter of the Inn owner talked to Samuel.

“Yah,” Samuel smiled at the teenage girl’s comment, such an optimistic person, always look at the bright side of thing, the girl sometime reminded him of his sister.

Ling tink! Ling tink! The hang bell on the door rang as it being pushed open, Samuel turned his head to the sound’s direction and found a tall stranger stood at the doorway. With the face haft covered by the hood, Samuel couldn’t make out what the stranger look like but amazed by his height and especially by the stranger’s two locks of blonde hair reached down from inside his hood to his chest. In fact, Samuel was not the only one but everyone that present in the inn, all had their eyes fixated to the stranger’s hair. There something mesmerizing about the stranger’s hair, never before Samuel had ever saw such beautiful shade of blonde, they look like they were made out of fine thread of pure gold, each strand of hair seemingly gleamed under the sunlight. The stranger stood awkwardly still like a statue for minutes on end and scanned his eyes throughout the inn, then with a catlike grace he took step inside the inn, but barely fit through the doorway, the top of his hood somewhat got caught by the top of the doorframe, slightly pulled his hood backward and revealed his straight nose, chiseled jaw and chin.

“Welcome to the Red Oak Inn, what can I get for you, sir?” –Samuel came to the stranger’s table and greet in Bricatish.

Silent, the stranger gave no immediate answered, only raised head, his gaze scanned Samuel’s face. An awkward feeling ran through every of Samuel’s neuron as he felt the stranger’s blue eyes peeked out from the hood and staring at him with scrutiny.

“A beer, if you please,” the stranger finally broke his silent in the common speech, his voice sound melodic and pleasant to the ear, although it has a peculiar accent Samuel never heard before.

“A beer, right away, sir,” said Samuel, and went to fulfil the order.

With eyes still watched every step Samuel took, the stranger reached his hand to his leather rucksack on the tablet, and retrieved from it an objects that seemed to be a small painting the size of a man palm, his eyes study it closely. The painting was very strange to say the least, for the parchment which the painting was made of was very thin and have a light stiffness, very difference to the kind of parchment of similar thickness which usually made out of animal skin one usually saw, it also not like the kind of paper usually imported from the Downer’s kingdoms either, for it have a beautiful glossiness on its surfaces that no parchment or paper known or produced by any Varlaurea’s folks ever have. That was just the material part, the painting itself was even stranger, because there was no mark of brush stroke visible on the painting’s image side. The surface of the image completely and utterly smooth like fine marble, as if a mage had used some kind of magic to capture the image and imbedded the image on the parchment.

The painting depicted two persons, and young brunette maiden and a blonde man with shortly cut hair standing in a place, that, seemed to be a tavern or dinner of some sort, behind both of them was a trip of small triangles colourful flags with letter on it. The blonde man in the picture wear strange clothing with buttons ran down in the middle and with stranger pattern, swatches of Olive green, brown, light brown and sandy yellow colour splatter all over his clothe like some crazy painter just randomly splattered dye on the fabric and call it a day. The young man wore an olive green clothes cap and he bored Samuel’s face.

“Here your beer, sir, enjoy” –Samuel placed a big mug of beer on the stranger’s table.

“Samuel Elizabeth Challenger, Son of Watson Challenger and Elizabeth Challenger, born at London city, capital city of United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland, you lost your mother at the age of five due to illness, after that, your father remarriage with Margaret Challenger whom also have a daughter of her own and thus you have a stepsister named Jessica Merle Challenger” -the stranger suddenly spoke to Samuel.

Silent reigned the atmosphere as Samuel’s eyes and mouth were opened as wide as humanly could, he was completely stunned at the information the stranger just dumped on him. His mind bogged down like a wagon in thick mud, tried to comprehend what he just heard, those names, the names he thought he would never could hear again, the name of his father, mother, stepmother and stepsister, his country of origin just been uttered to him casually by a stranger from a complete foreign world.

“W…wh…what… did you just…” –Samuel leaned against the stranger’s table, mumbled in surprise.

“Samuel Elizabeth Challenger, son of…” –the stranger repeated again but was cut off by Samuel- “No, H… How did you know those things?” Samuel asked.

The stranger turned to his rucksack, from it he took an envelope, a small card and handled them together with the painting to Samuel- “Your sister send you this,” he said.