(What a strange dream.)
(I'm floating in that space between sleep and waking. I thought I'd been pulled into another world — swords and magic, gods and monsters. How strange it will be to wake up from a dream like that, right?)
(Any second now the alarm will go off and the morning will start the way it always starts. Maybe I forgot to play last night. I must have been tired.)
The alarm did not go off.
Instead, a shaft of sunlight came through the gaps in the wooden planks above him and settled on his face, warm and insistent, trying to coax him awake. It had the opposite effect. It woke him into the wrong morning.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was rough timber, weathered and uneven, with light filtering through the seams. The bed under him was hard and narrow. The air smelled of dried herbs and woodsmoke and something steeped in something.
(I'm not home.)
(None of it was a dream. Gods, monsters, blades, death — all of it real. All of it happening. All of it mine.)
He sat up at the edge of the bed and looked around. In the exhaustion of the night before he had not registered the room properly. Now, in the thin morning light, he saw it clearly for the first time.
Plants.
Plants everywhere.
They hung from the ceiling in bundles and clusters, some dried, some still living, trailing green tendrils down toward the floor like slow-motion waterfalls. They sat in clay pots on every flat surface — the windowsill, the floor beside the bed, a shelf that ran the length of one wall. They grew in ceramic dishes on the table, in wooden troughs under the window, in a copper basin by the hearth. They climbed a small trellis nailed to the wall beside the stairs. The room was not a room with plants in it. It was a garden that someone had built walls around.
He stood carefully, avoiding the pot at the foot of the bed, and stretched. Every muscle protested. The hard mattress, the cold night, the accumulated damage of five days — it all announced itself at once. But underneath the pain there was something else: the quiet relief of having slept under a roof. A real roof. With a door between him and everything that wanted to eat him.
He peeled the silk bandage from his side and looked at the wound. It was closing. The cauterization scar was rough and ugly but the edges of the claw-marks had pulled together. The angry pink had faded. The pain, when he prodded it carefully, was manageable.
(Getting better.)
He opened the inventory and pulled out fresh silk and the remains of his moss-and-flower poultice, ready to reapply. He was halfway through when the old woman appeared in the doorway.
She moved through the obstacle course of pots and plants with the unconscious grace of someone who knew the position of every single one from memory. Her eyes, those sharp blue-green knives, took in the bandage, the poultice, the silk in his hands.
"Slept well, boy?" she asked, the voice bright. "I hope my snoring didn't keep you up. What are you doing with those herbs?"
He smiled. "I slept better than I have in days. Thank you. For this —" he indicated the wound, "— I'm reapplying a poultice that my friend Alice taught me back in the village I came from."
[Deception] hummed faintly at the back of his head.
She nodded and crossed the room to him, examining the poultice with the quick professional attention of someone who had been looking at wounds and remedies for a very long time.
"Compliments to your friend Alice," she said. "She clearly knows her business. But you need something better."
She turned and moved to a small plant on the windowsill. It was about the size of a bonsai, with silver needles instead of leaves that caught the morning light and held it, faintly luminescent, as if the plant were breathing the dawn.
She plucked several needles with precise, delicate fingers and came back to him.
"Auralis, we call it," she said. "It drinks the morning light. Once the needles are harvested, they release a balm for burns. Lie on your good side."
It was not a request.
He lay down. She placed the silver needles along the cauterization scar — vertically, like sutures, each one positioned with a precision that made him stare. Her hands were old and gnarled and they moved like a surgeon's. Over the needles she applied the poultice, and over that she wrapped fresh spider silk in a bandage so clean and tight it looked professional.
"There," she said, stepping back and clapping her hands together with satisfaction. "A job worthy of Endra the Apothecary."
(Apothecary?)
[Apothecary — a person trained in the collection, preparation, and use of herbs and compounds for the creation of natural remedies and medicines.]
(That explains the plants. All of them. She's not a simple old woman. She's a professional.)
"Good," she said, her tone shifting. A gnarled finger pressed against his chest with surprising force. "But this does not excuse you from your promise. You slept in my house. You are obligated to keep your word."
"Of course I'll help. After everything you've done — the bed, the bandage — how could I go back on a promise?"
"Good boy!" She smiled. "Give me a moment to prepare what we need and then we'll head toward the forest."
(What a strange dream.)
(I'm floating in that space between sleep and waking. I thought I'd been pulled into another world — swords and magic, gods and monsters. How strange it will be to wake up from a dream like that, right?)
(Any second now the alarm will go off and the morning will start the way it always starts. Maybe I forgot to play last night. I must have been tired.)
The alarm did not go off.
Instead, a shaft of sunlight came through the gaps in the wooden planks above him and settled on his face, warm and insistent, trying to coax him awake. It had the opposite effect. It woke him into the wrong morning.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was rough timber, weathered and uneven, with light filtering through the seams. The bed under him was hard and narrow. The air smelled of dried herbs and woodsmoke and something steeped in something.
(I'm not home.)
(None of it was a dream. Gods, monsters, blades, death — all of it real. All of it happening. All of it mine.)
He sat up at the edge of the bed and looked around. In the exhaustion of the night before he had not registered the room properly. Now, in the thin morning light, he saw it clearly for the first time.
Plants.
Plants everywhere.
They hung from the ceiling in bundles and clusters, some dried, some still living, trailing green tendrils down toward the floor like slow-motion waterfalls. They sat in clay pots on every flat surface — the windowsill, the floor beside the bed, a shelf that ran the length of one wall. They grew in ceramic dishes on the table, in wooden troughs under the window, in a copper basin by the hearth. They climbed a small trellis nailed to the wall beside the stairs. The room was not a room with plants in it. It was a garden that someone had built walls around.
He stood carefully, avoiding the pot at the foot of the bed, and stretched. Every muscle protested. The hard mattress, the cold night, the accumulated damage of five days — it all announced itself at once. But underneath the pain there was something else: the quiet relief of having slept under a roof. A real roof. With a door between him and everything that wanted to eat him.
He peeled the silk bandage from his side and looked at the wound. It was closing. The cauterization scar was rough and ugly but the edges of the claw-marks had pulled together. The angry pink had faded. The pain, when he prodded it carefully, was manageable.
(Getting better.)
He opened the inventory and pulled out fresh silk and the remains of his moss-and-flower poultice, ready to reapply. He was halfway through when the old woman appeared in the doorway.
She moved through the obstacle course of pots and plants with the unconscious grace of someone who knew the position of every single one from memory. Her eyes, those sharp blue-green knives, took in the bandage, the poultice, the silk in his hands.
"Slept well, boy?" she asked, the voice bright. "I hope my snoring didn't keep you up. What are you doing with those herbs?"
He smiled. "I slept better than I have in days. Thank you. For this —" he indicated the wound, "— I'm reapplying a poultice that my friend Alice taught me back in the village I came from."
[Deception] hummed faintly at the back of his head.
She nodded and crossed the room to him, examining the poultice with the quick professional attention of someone who had been looking at wounds and remedies for a very long time.
"Compliments to your friend Alice," she said. "She clearly knows her business. But you need something better."
She turned and moved to a small plant on the windowsill. It was about the size of a bonsai, with silver needles instead of leaves that caught the morning light and held it, faintly luminescent, as if the plant were breathing the dawn.
She plucked several needles with precise, delicate fingers and came back to him.
"Auralis, we call it," she said. "It drinks the morning light. Once the needles are harvested, they release a balm for burns. Lie on your good side."
It was not a request.
He lay down. She placed the silver needles along the cauterization scar — vertically, like sutures, each one positioned with a precision that made him stare. Her hands were old and gnarled and they moved like a surgeon's. Over the needles she applied the poultice, and over that she wrapped fresh spider silk in a bandage so clean and tight it looked professional.
"There," she said, stepping back and clapping her hands together with satisfaction. "A job worthy of Endra the Apothecary."
(Apothecary?)
[Apothecary — a person trained in the collection, preparation, and use of herbs and compounds for the creation of natural remedies and medicines.]
(That explains the plants. All of them. She's not a simple old woman. She's a professional.)
"Good," she said, her tone shifting. A gnarled finger pressed against his chest with surprising force. "But this does not excuse you from your promise. You slept in my house. You are obligated to keep your word."
"Of course I'll help. After everything you've done — the bed, the bandage — how could I go back on a promise?"
"Good boy!" She smiled. "Give me a moment to prepare what we need and then we'll head toward the forest."
She turned and walked out.
The words hit him three seconds late.
(The forest. No. Not back into that hellscape.)
The wound in his side twinged — right on the spot that had been fine a moment ago — as if his body itself were protesting.
"The forest? No — not back in that place —"
But she was already gone, and his protests echoed in the empty room. He finished dressing, checked both daggers, and pushed through the door.
The smell of fresh bread and hot milk met him. She was lifting a small pot from the fire with practiced hands, setting out breakfast at the wooden table — a steaming cup and bread that filled the cottage with a warmth he hadn't smelled since his mother's kitchen.
(Don't. Don't think about her kitchen right now.)
"We haven't properly introduced ourselves," the old woman said, gesturing him to sit. "In all the confusion last night we skipped the formalities."
He sat.
"I'll start," she said, pouring milk into clay cups. "I am Endra. But you can call me Nonna Endra. I've lived in Oakhaven as long as I can remember and I tend to the town through my herbs."
"It's a pleasure, and thank you again for the hospitality, Nonna Endra. I'm Virgil. I don't have a home anymore."
He let the sadness sit on the words — visible, deliberate, not quite real.
[Deception] confirmed quietly.
"Don't worry about that," she said, and gave him a wink that made his stomach tighten. "Nobody here will ask you questions you don't want to answer."
(Did she see through it? Nobody winks at a lie they believed.)
But her smile gave nothing away.
After breakfast — which made him feel almost human — Endra took an enormous gathering basket from behind the door and slung it over her back. She walked to the door and looked at him.
"Coming?"
He came.
They walked through the village in the early morning quiet.
The guards at the gate moved. The moment they saw Nonna Endra approaching, the two men on duty stepped aside without being asked. Their faces didn't show respect — they showed caution, the careful deference of men who had learned through experience that this particular old woman was not to be delayed.
They let Dante through without a single question. Their eyes followed him the way you followed a condemned man who had found an unexpected patron.
(She has weight here. Whatever she is, it's more than an herbalist.)
Beyond the gate, the wheat fields were silver with dew. The forest waited at the far edge, dark and patient.
At the treeline, Endra pulled a hand-drawn map from her pocket — precise, with red X's marking spots inside the forest's outline.
"This is the map of the area," she said. "These marks are where we need to go."
[Notification.] [New tab acquired: MAP.]
The hand-drawn map transferred into the system — the area shown from above, his position a red dot at center, everything else fogged.
[To unlock additional map coverage, use the CARTOGRAPHER skill or obtain map fragments.] [Competence acquired: Cartography → Lv.1.]
He lost himself in the new function for a moment. When he looked up, Endra was already walking into the forest.
(She didn't wait.)
He followed.
He had known her for the better part of a single day. And here he was, following her back into the one place in this world that had tried hardest to kill him — with his daggers checked and his reasons thin.
