After walking toward the same peak for several hours, she discovered a rundown house. Karp examined the house, which was unlike the ones she had known in the Lush Forest. Instead of reed or wood walls, clay bricks were stacked to form the outer walls. The small house had large sections of its roof missing and looked utterly uninhabited. Straw held down with thin wooden slabs comprised the remaining parts of the roof. Karp cautiously pushed open the door and peeked around. To her relief, no one waited inside. Unfortunately for her, though, there was no food either. Likely the house was abandoned, just as she had guessed from viewing the outside. A steel dagger with a short blade rested on a kitchen counter, but no other valuables remained in the pillaged rooms.
Even though the cold was gone, Karp was exhausted since she hadn't eaten for days. She went into a bedroom that still had roofing and lay on a bed to sleep.
Scratches along the side of the wall woke Karp in the middle of the night. She instinctively rolled through the darkness and hit the floor with a thump. As the scraping sounds drew closer, she slid under the bed. She grasped the steel dagger she found in the kitchen, waited, and listened. Heavy breathing came from just outside the main door. Something shuffled toward the entrance. The door didn't swing open in a smooth flow but jerked free with a few small thuds.
Karp didn't voluntarily hold her breath, but she couldn't breathe while the creature was in the house. It shuffled about as if looking for something. After a few minutes, it stood in the small bedroom where Karp had taken refuge. Every heartbeat pounded in her head, and she felt that the creature must hear the loud thuds. The longer the creature loitered, the slower the time moved, the quicker her heartbeat, and the shallower she breathed. Karp closed her eyes, hoping to wish away the thing standing at the end of the bed. Cold spread around her exposed limbs and face, and she opened her eyes to find herself lying face down in snow, clutching the dagger. Karp had unconsciously shifted back to the Lush Forest to protect herself from the creature, just as she had shifted to the Arid Desert to prevent herself from freezing.
Karp wandered through town until she found the local inn. Before the innkeeper threw her back into the cold, Karp had negotiated a trade. The steel dagger bought a week's worth of room and board. Luck was on Karp's side, too, because the owner's daughter was in the late stages of pregnancy. The shorthanded inn employed Karp through the rest of winter, but she would leave in spring after the owner's daughter recovered from childbirth. The owner then returned Karp's steel dagger as a going-away present. At the time, Karp assumed the gift was out of gratitude for her hard work. However, as Karp grew older and shrewder, she realized the owner's motivation was probably guilt. A sharpened steel dagger could have paid for a month's room and board and still have been a bargain. The owner had tried to take advantage of a starving teen but found she genuinely liked Karp for her pride and work ethic. Now, she was sending a child back into the world unprotected and unaware of how to survive.
Karp departed the village and headed southwest. She worked on farms and in taverns to pay for food, clothing, and lodging during the frequent rainstorms that occurred during the summer months. Progress south slowed due to working almost every day to sate her needs, so when winter came again, she wasn't far enough south to avoid the cold and snow. Starving and freezing, Karp returned to the Shift World to find supplies to trade for lodging. She hadn't shifted since returning to her world with the dagger. In fact, she didn't exactly even know how to shift. Karp circled behind the local village's inn, unsheathed her blade, lay on the ground, and concentrated, but nothing happened. She willed herself to focus more and more, but still, nothing happened. She only got wet from lying in the slush outside the building. In a way, her failure relieved her. Now, she wouldn’t have to face that creature. As she relaxed her muscles, though, the world swirled and cracked, and she lay under the bed again.
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