James Nemzworth raised his head. He covered his eyes with his right hand, trying to block out the morning sun. His mouth felt like it was filled with cotton and he licked his cracked lips with a dry tongue.
“Where am I?” He asked aloud, his voice rasping and full of static.
To his left he spotted an empty bottle, his escape from the night before, but beyond the bottle spread out a majestic woodland, glittering in the sunbeams and spotted with long shadows.
‘I’ve really fucked up this time,’ thought James. Dehydrated and alone in some strange woodland, he realized that this time his bad drinking habit might finally have killed him.
Struggling to his feet, James tried to remember the night before, but to little avail. The last memory he had was in the bottom of a seedy bar, alone, trying to drown out his memories of her.
After that everything became a blank slate. There was a nagging feeling at the back of his mind telling him he forgot something of great importance, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. For some reason, an image of a blank white space kept popping up in his head.
A few deep breaths helped James to calm down. He noticed the taste of the air, damp and strong. He could hear the cries of birds in the distance, their chirps loud and strange, unlike anything he ever heard before in the woods near his backwards hometown.
James closed his eyes to the morning light, but the brightness shined through his eyelids, painting the darkness with a red hue. He hummed a tune to himself as he collected his thoughts. His left hand clenched at the neck of the bottle. He was a boy scout, once, and he knew that if he really had meandered too deep into the woods, having a bottle to store water (if he found any) would be valuable.
Opening his eyes again, and having collected himself, James looked forward to a change of pace. He stretched his body a bit and felt like he was in much better condition than he originally surmised. He felt lighter on his feet than he had in years, and his muscles seemed to stretch against his clothes.
He wondered if he was still a bit drunk, but the aching in his head and the clarity of his thoughts proved otherwise. He stepped forward and almost stumbled, finding his own legs a bit foreign, but it wasn’t abnormal. He did just wake up from a 16-hour bender in the darkest hellholes he could find…
The glade opened up a bit as he marched forward, gathering his footing and his coordination along the way. He looked over the foliage but found the trees and plants foreign at first, but soon he started remembering details about them. Then he started to question his own sanity a bit. James knew, for a fact, that the tree he just identified as a ‘Golden Coledropper Moffit’ didn’t exist, but the name and a few details of the tree were ringing in his head, louder and louder with each passing second he looked at it, echoing like thunder over his thoughts. He even recalled several uses for the bark as an antiseptic when ground into a paste, mixed with water, and applied to wounds…
“What’s going on?” James asked, holding his head with his free hand. He looked down at the bottle in his other hand and, for the first time, managed to see his reflection. The face staring back at him wasn’t his own. “WHAT!”
James stumbled at the sight, tripped over a root behind him, and dropped the bottle. The crack of shattering glass rang out over the glade, and a small flock of colorful birds burst from a nearby bush, taking to the skies in panic.
Looking over the birds, James didn’t recognize a single one… But then he did. The information, like from a moment before with the tree, seemed to bloom in his mind like a flower in the dawn, pushing through the concrete of his consciousness. He identified the birds by strange names, and even several folksy remedies that could be made by using their livers, gallbladders, and bones.
James closed his eyes and leaned back on the ground, putting his hands behind him to hold himself up, when a sharp pain in his left hand startled him. He pulled his left hand forward and rolled into a comfortable sitting position to pull a glass shard free. The stinging pain in his hand confirmed one terrifying thought: he wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t dreaming.
James stared at the glass shard, painted red with his blood, and his eyes hazed a bit. He put on a thousand-yard stare, when a new sensation came to him. He felt a wriggling from his hand, from the cut he just received, and looked down in time to notice the wound begin stitching itself together in real time.
“I’m going mad,” he whispered. “Diane finally did it. She drove me to madness…”
Just the mention of her name shook James to his core. He felt a dark brooding overcome his heart, and he just wanted to find another bottle to sleep in, hoping this mad nightmare would end upon waking up in a hospital somewhere.
But no such escape came. Instead, something far fiercer appeared. James turned his head at the sound of a snapping twig and, on instinct, rolled forward, dodging the snapping of sharp jaws by inches. He rolled to his feet, finding his nimble movements strange, but it was a welcome strange. He held the glass shard, the one he pulled from his hand earlier, like a knife. With a staggering breath, he looked upon his assailant.
The creature resembled a wolf, but wore the face of a badger, with a blunted snout and vertical stripes running down its face from ear to maw. It wasn’t large, looking to weigh about 50 or so pounds, but James knew from his time in the scouts to never underestimate any wild animal… And the longer he stared at the snarling monster, the more random information popped into his head as if he were a human version of an encyclopedia: Woodland Boppa, a monster that roams the Eastern Woodlands of the Helvesta Steppe, between the Great Divide and the Raining River. They often hunted in pairs and, to the inexperienced, would provide quite a challenge to fend off alone…
“Pairs?”
James had no more than mouthed the word when a terrifying sensation gripped the back of his neck. He didn’t stop to look around. He just moved. He moved with such force that he felt his bones ache. From the shadow of a tree leaped the second Boppa, snapping its jaws where James’s neck had just been. With a display of incredible skill, skill he didn’t know he possessed, James managed to snake his blade of glass across the creature’s left eye as he passed, drawing a sharp whine from the monster.
Fight or flight instincts began to flood James’s every thought. He looked at the two creatures and knew, instinctually, that he wouldn’t be able to outrun them. He didn’t know the lay of the land well enough to plan a route out, either. He had no option but to fight for his life. The fear of his moment overwhelmed all of his previous thoughts and, as if by instinct, his body took up a proper stance to fight with a knife, even if said knife was just a piece of broken glass from the bottle he almost drowned in the night before.
“FUCK IT!” James bellowed! His eyes sharpened, like a proper hunter’s, and he gnashed his teeth. If he was going to finally die, he wanted to at least die fighting. It was better than dying in a gutter at the bottom of a bottle.
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