The first thing he registered was light. It happened when he opened his eyes for the first time.

The light didn't burn his eyes. They were gentle light... a soothing glow being emitted by the green long things on the rocky walls.

'Vines,' he realized. 'Vines are... They are... What are... vines?'

He frowned. He felt like he should know what vines were. It was basic knowledge even a kindergartener would know!

'Kinder...gartender?' His thoughts got caught again. What did it mean that even a 'kindergartener' would know? Was it something he could eat? Food? An orange? 'But then... what is an orange?'

A still memory of a round, pimpled object popped into his mind and disappeared. Was that supposed to be orange? He pondered and, after a few struggling thoughts, he came to a conclusion that the round pimpled thing was indeed an 'orange'.

'Yes, that's an orange and orange is a fruit. I can eat fruits. Eating is... the action I take when I'm hungry.'

A sense of relief washed over him. At least some things made sense. Although that didn't mean he had everything figured out, he felt less lost knowing that he actually knew certain things.

'What was that saying again? The more you know, the less you fear?' he thought, though he couldn't remember where he had heard that from.

Speaking of hearing, he realized there were sounds around him.

"Grrr," the sounds sounded.

Curious about the sounds in his ears, he turned his neck to—

'I can move my...' he paused, remembering there was a term for this. '...body? I think this is my body.'

He smiled with satisfaction. He had a body. He had eyes and ears. He could move his neck to change what he was seeing. He could even sit and stand up and... walk around if he wanted to!

And in fact, that's what he did.

The 'grrr' sounds were coming closer but they were of no immediate interest to him. His body was so fun to look at!

He got up and jumped up and down. He looked at his hands. He had five fingers! And oh boy the nails on them looked so pretty and just right. He looked down and saw toes sticking through the throngs of leather sandals. He had shoes on and that was another interesting discovery!

'Oh, what are these things on my chest?' That was one part of his body that he couldn't remember the name of. They were round but not too big. Not to the point of impeding him from looking at his toes at least. He felt a bit sad that they weren't any bigger, but he remembered that people with really big chests ended up with bad shoulder pains and back pains.

'Hm, I guess they are fine as they are now.' He decided not to be more greedy than what he was given.

He was about to take off these... extra layers of skin covering his body when he heard,

"Grrrrr."

He wrinkled his nose. The sound had come right behind him and whatever said 'grrr' had a terrible smelling breath!

He really wanted to take this... skin off so he can learn more about his body, but the stench was so bad that he was getting headaches!

He looked back angrily. He was furious that this 'grrrr' person had interrupted him! But the second he saw the 'grrrr' person, he realized that it wasn't a person at all.

"Oh...," his voice came out surprisingly high-pitched and soft. "You're a rat..man."

Again, he wasn't entirely sure how he knew that the growling creature was a ratman, but the knowledge came to him in an instant and with certainty that he could not deny. The creature of thick gray pelt and wriggling wormish tail stared up at him with menacing black eyes that bulged out from its head with nearly no whites. It wasn't that big of a creature—it barely stood up to his shoulders—but its rotten yellow fangs and blackened claws, in addition to its sewage-like breaths, made gongs and crash cymbals clash and bang in his head like a siren though he didn't know what a siren was.

'Uh, oh.'

He was in trouble. The ratman looked like it could rip his throat off with just one bite at any moment now. Sure enough, the ratman hunched its back and sprang at him like a catapult.

'Oh god!'

He threw himself to the side and gawked as his chest landed on the hard stone below. Before he could process what to do next, a shadow fell upon him. Apprehensive, he looked up and saw the ratman in mid-air, its claws held back up and high to strike him. As the rat descended on him, he wanted to cry.

It was so ugly. Not to mention, stinky.

The combination of ugly and stinky was making his heart race and cold liquids form on his forehead and back. And that did not feel pleasant.

He pushed off the ground, rolling himself out of the creature's way. There was a horrible screech as the rat's claws broke off against the stone. No more time could be spent in ponderance and fascination. The ratman, although balled up in pain from his broken claws, was already giving him a hateful glance. The creature looked determined to hurt him the second the shock of its broken claws subsided, and getting "hurt" just sounded painful. Whatever painful meant.

He scrambled up on shaky knees and distanced himself from the ratman.

'What do I do to not get hurt?' he asked himself. The answer wasn't so clear to him. After all, he had just woken up from... Well, he didn't know the answer to that either.

'This is frustrating,' he thought. Why didn't he just know what to do right away?

The ratman was already back on its feet and eyeing him like a cat on its prey. He had to do something right away or he was going to get hurt more.

He wanted to cry. This situation was... new to him and he didn't know how not to get hurt. He had figured out what an orange was, but that wasn't helping him right now. Nor was kindergartener or vines on the walls. His heart began to thump harder in his chest as the ratman began sprinting his way. It looked way uglier than it did before, and in no way did he want those horrifying teeth to bite him.

He wanted to... He just wanted to get away from the ratman.

'Ah, that's what I need to do! Run away!'

He had never run before, but this was no time to think about if he could or could not run. Without time to spare, he put a foot forward and propelled himself out. The wind gushed on the sides of his face. His arms flung back and forth opposite to the motion of his legs like that's what he was supposed to do when he ran. His first few strides were wobbly, like a goatkid that had just learned to stand up and run, but his body quickly stabilized as he picked up speed, and before he knew it, he was running as fast as the wind. Not that he knew what wind was.

"Kyahhhh!" The ratman screeched behind him and made his heart pound even harder.

He wondered why the ratman's ugliness or its screeches made his heart thump like elephants. Did everything ugly in the world make hearts thump? Like ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump?

The greenish glow of the vines blurred on the walls as he ran through a series of rooms and narrow stony corridors. The angry screams of the ratman grew fainter as time passed and eventually, he heard nothing but the sound of air swooshing by his ears.

He knew that no sound meant no ratman, and that no ratman meant he would not get hurt anymore. In other words, he could stop running and go back to where he left off—figuring out what this extra-skin thing on his body was.

However, he kept running. Running felt so good! His body was so light. He wanted to keep running. It was so fun to run!

So he ran without realizing that he had passed by furballs of gray and blue and critters of many eyes and legs. He kept running, not knowing that there was a horde forming behind him, chasing him from corridors and rooms behind, trailing his faint scent. He kept running, so invested in his joy of the motion that he didn't realize that the vines were getting thinner, the corridors were becoming brighter, and the air he was breathing was becoming infused with the scents of the outside world: Of trees, grass, flowers, and dirt. Of dews remaining on the leaves and grass blades from condensations of moisture in the air. Of a world where one sun ruled the day and two moons ruled the night. Of a world where his kind had disappeared long ago and was forgotten in their existence...

Then, at last, light unbeknown to him, brighter than anything he'd seen since his awakening, embosomed him in a sensation of warmth he had never known before. He slowed his step and stopped in front of a stone statue... A statue of a smiling person with round chest things like his own and wings of a bird holding a shepherd's cane across his chest.

He looked up at the statue person. There was something familiar about his face, but he couldn't recall where he'd seen this statue's face before. All he knew for certain was that the statue made him feel nostalgic.

'...Nostalgic?' He kinked his eyebrows. How was he using all these words that he didn't know? 'Mmmm, I don't know... this is too hard for me to figure out.'

He really wished he knew the answer. It was very frustrating to not know. Also, his head hurt when he tried to think hard.

'I'm such an idiot. Why do I not know things I'm supposed to know? Like... like for instance, what is an idiot?' he thought and then instantly felt like an idiot. 'There, I am doing it again!'

He stood there with a sullen face.

Then, suddenly, something swooshed near the tip of his nose.

'What was that?'

He turned in the direction where the 'swoosh' had gone and found something stuck on a stone. It was a thin and long piece of wood. His eyes sparkled. Didn't it feel like running just now? The way the air swept by his nose?

Excited, he took a step towards it, wanting to examine it in detail, when another swoosh passed above his right ear from behind and got stuck in the same rock. That did not deter him from getting close to the objects in question. It only made his curiosity grow.

He ran to it and tried to pull out the long and thin woods from the rock.

"Hey, you! Don't you dare touch my arrows!"

Someone sounding as angry as the ratman jumped out from a bush nearby and scurried to him in a hurry. It was a... human but with no chest things and the human was holding a piece of curved wood tied with strings.

"Wow... that's... that's a bow isn't it?" he asked the human, remembering that's what a curved wood with strings was supposed to be called.

Hearing him speak, the human with blazing red hair widened his eyes as though he had heard what he shouldn't have heard. "You can speak? Your ears... you're not one of them?"

"Yes, I can speak," he answered. He did have a larynx, but he wasn't sure what the human meant by he wasn't them, so he left that part out. "Do you know what a larynx is?"

"A la... what?" the human said.

"A larynx. I think I can speak because I have a larynx, but I don't know what it is. I was hoping you could tell me what a larynx was," he said all the while stroking the soft feather parts of the long wooden things—the arrows—stuck on the rocks. They were soft to the touch.

"I don't know what you're talking—hey! I said to leave my arrows alone! Don't touch them, you!"

The human slapped his hands away from the arrows and pulled them out of the rocks before he could touch them more. He watched in astonishment as the human hid the arrows in a long tubal container, which had more arrows inside.

"Wow, you have so many... arrows. Can I have one?" he asked. The swoosh of air had felt so nice. However, the human backed away before he could reach into the arrow container.

"Are you mad? Do you think I'd really give out my arrows to anyone? Let alone a strange woman with freakish ears like you?" the human barked at him.

"I'm not mad at you," he replied. "What's a woman? And thanks, I do have ears, but what does freakish mean? Is that a compliment?"

He touched his ears to check if there was anything 'freakish' about them. They were long and flat and they came to a nice point at the end. They were also very soft when he touched them. Not to mention, he began to feel so....

"Ahhhh.... I feel like I'm melting away," he said. "Thanks. I didn't know how relaxing it was to touch my ears. Ahhhh."

The human's eyes went saucers again.

"What in the world of Erinn is wrong with you?"

"Nothing is—wooo, this feels so nice—wrong with me. Like I said, I've never touched my ears before. You're a great human being for telling me about how 'freakish' my ears are."

"Oh, Lymilark!" The human went pale. "Stop! Stop touching your ears you freak!"

The human grabbed his hands and forced them down to his sides.

"I'm a freak?"

He tipped his head a bit to the right. Was this another compliment after 'freakish' ears? Then realizing that the word 'freak' sounded like 'freakish', he smiled. The human had complimented him twice in a row!

"Why, why are you smiling? I just called you a freak!" the human said.

"Yes. Thank you so much for calling me a freak! I really appreciate your kind words," he said and he really meant it from the bottom of his heart.

The human stared at him lost for words, but before the human could get too lost, a loud band of growls and threatening clacks of furry mandibles arrived at the foot of the cave. It was the horde that he had gathered without knowledge.

The creatures... rats, ratmen, snakes, and giant spiders pressed up against each other at the entrance of the cave, hissing and screaming, trying to reach their appendages at him and the human. But for some reason, the creatures could not reach them. It looked as though they were up against an invisible wall that they could not pass. And in the midst of all the noise and chaos brought on by the horde, he found the very ratman that had broken its claws against the stone floor.

"Oh... I guess I didn't lose him after all," he murmured.

"Oh? Ohhhh? What do you mean you didn't lose him after all? Did you bring those monsters all the way to the entrance? Are you insane?"

The human grabbed his collar and pulled him up close to his face. His chest things met the human's flat chest and the human's face suddenly went red. Then the human coughed and pushed him back just a little so the chest things were not touching the human's flat chest anymore. It was a small victory for him. A big loss for the human.

"What were you even thinking?" the human asked. "Even with the protection of the goddess statue, the barrier isn't perfect and monsters had broken out in the past! How can you let this happen? What were you even doing in there? More importantly, where are your party members? Why did you come out of the dungeon alone?"

The human stared into his eyes with the intensity of molten iron straight out from a furnace.

He couldn't understand why the human looked so enranged. All he did was run from the ratman that was trying to hurt him.

"I didn't want to get hurt so I ran away," he told him.

"You... ran away because you didn't want to get hurt." The human looked back at him like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "So you left your party members and ran off on your own? Is that what you're saying?"

"What are party members?" he asked innocently, but his question seemed to have angered the human even more.

"You savage freak! I knew there was something wrong with you the moment I saw you!" The human threw him to the ground and looked down at him as though he was a worm. "You're a monster. You hear me? You're a monster!"

"I'm a monster?"

He cocked his head. The human shook his head with a sigh.

"Forget it. It's a waste of time talking sense into you," the human said and ran back into the trees and the bushes that formed the woods around the entrance of the cave.

He watched as the human's figure grew smaller in the woods. The human was a good runner. Suddenly, he felt an urge to run after the human. After all, he loved running!

His eyes twinkling red in the sunlight, he began to run after the human who was nearly gone from his sight.

A little later, the woods East of Tir Chonaill shook violently with a young man's scream.

"Don't follow me, you freakkkk!"