Author's Note: In a post last week I asked my readers whether or not they thought I should start a Patreon after one of my commentors said they really wanted to contribute. They were pretty clearly in favor of it, so I've done just that. You can check it out here.( https://www.patreon.com/DWinchester ) This isn't something I'm going to flog on regular basis. I just wanted to make everyone aware. Feel free to check it out, or just enjoy the story here. 

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When he left the cabin that day he never planned on coming back. If that damn path looped around then he would just take a different route. Anything that got him out of this crazy hall of mirrors was okay by him. He checked the satchel on the end of his spear one last time to make sure he wouldn’t lose anything, and then he started walking. 

“There has to be a way out somewhere,” he mumbled to himself as he walked to the ruins of the temple. It was as good a place as any to get started. As he headed for the stream that would lead him there he decided that there had to be more to the ruins. Maybe a tunnel underneath, or a city further back amongst the trees. He couldn’t say precisely what he hoped to find, but he was sure he’d find something. Games like this always had shortcuts and secret paths, and so far the only thing he’d found that remotely qualified was a watery grave on the fourth floor. There was no way that was a secret passage, it was just a dick move. 

He got to the ruins quickly enough, and spent an hour searching, but found nothing new. There were some inscriptions that were still legible, but it was in a flowing picture language that he was pretty sure had never been written on earth that looked sort of like cursive hieroglyphics, so whatever it was trying to tell him was lost to time. There was one spot next to the temple that was caved in that might have once led to a basement or a lower story of some kind - but he’d need rigging and a crane to find out. Reluctantly he abandoned the place and started heading further south along the river. 

Simon wasn’t really sure that the river was south of course, but that fit the map he’d laid out in his mind. The river went north and south, and the path went east and west, so  if this really was as small a world as he thought, he should be able to get back to the path in a few hours if he just stayed in the same direction. 

A few hours came and went though, and he found nothing familiar. There was no path, no ruins, and no other signs of civilization. Just a few small animals, some song birds, and endless trees. The only consolation was that this deep into the forest, the canopy was high and thick so there was very little in the way of underbrush. He tried to keep an eye out for goblin tracks, but that was difficult since he wasn’t too sure what they were supposed to look like. Around the middle of the day he reached a point of no return and spent a few minutes trying to decide if he wanted to turn around and sleep in a warm bed tonight, or if he wanted to keep going and sleep in the woods where anything might get him. 

In the end he decided that it had to be the woods. He’d never find a way out if he could only ever walk half a day out from his cabin. So towards nightfall he walked away from the river to an ancient live oak. It looked very climbable, and he thought it might be a good place to spend the night. He was half right. After eating about half his remaining food, he tried to sleep. The lower branches were indeed wide enough for him to sleep on without serious fear of falling off, but it was incredibly uncomfortable. He tried to do it several different ways, but no matter how he maneuvered, he definitely wasn’t getting any sleep. In the end he climbed down in the dark and slept at the base of the tree. Whatever happened, happened he supposed.

In the morning he woke and was as surprised as anyone to be whole and uneaten. Between the thin blanket and the damp earth it had been freezing last night, but he’d still managed to get a couple hours sleep. He had a sausage for breakfast, and then he started following the stream again. He did this for half a day, growing more and more sure that he was making progress. Slowly he left the forest behind and entered a boulder strewn scrubland, but when he found the source of the small stream, he stopped to drink his fill before he left the spring behind.

The scrublands turned into hills, and from the tallest hill he could see he was surrounded by forest on most sides, with some marshy areas. He tried to avoid those, and instead re-entered the forest on the opposite side of the boulder field near sunset. By then he was most of the way out of food, and his water skin was completely dry. He sighed and found himself a place to sleep in the lightning damaged trunk of an elm. It was as safe and warm as he could hope for given the circumstances. 

Simon tried to stay positive, but he knew that tomorrow was going to suck, and it turned out he was right. Tomorrow did suck, and so did the day after that. The forest went on forever, and despite the fact that nothing had killed and eaten him, he was kind of starting to wish that they would. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for over a day and so he was miserable. That misery would last for two more days before he finally succumbed to exhaustion, and dehydration. When he eventually woke up in bed, he honestly wasn’t even mad that he’d died this time. He was grateful. Instinctively he started to wolf down the bread that was always waiting for him, before he stopped himself. He wasn’t actually hungry anymore, so he shouldn’t be eating out of habit. 

What he needed to do was exactly what he did last time: cook the sausage, pack up some gear, and go explore in a different direction. This time he chose to follow the stream the other way, to the north of the path. His second trip also lasted three days, though they were a little more miserable and bug ridden than his first trip. The first two were in the forest like before, but then he found his way blocked as the stream he followed emptied into a swamp. He kept doubling back to find a way around it, but without much luck. This whole world was basically just forests and swamp, as far as he was concerned. There was literally nothing to find. 

“Talk about broken,” he muttered, as he sat in his bed after his most recent death, and tried to think about what he should try now. There didn’t seem to be a way out here, and there definitely wasn’t one on the first or second floor of the pit. The third floor though - that was a possibility Simon realized. He’d seen goblins flee him out of the mouth of the cave, into what looked like a sub alpine valley. He could go down, kill himself some goblins, and then instead of going to fight the skeletons, he could go out and explore that world instead. It was a solid plan, and he congratulated himself for it. Just because this world was in its own little bubble of forests and swamp didn’t mean they were all like that. That one at least had mountain peaks. Maybe he could climb to the top of one for a better look around.  

So that’s what he did. This time though he actually wore his armor. Even though he knew that hiking in it would be just awful, hiking with a few rat bites or goblin arrows stuck in him would be much worse. The fights down to the goblins were almost trivial, and Simon was embarrassed that he’d actually died several times to get through those floors the first time. The goblin’s didn’t fare much better because he was able to get the drop on them again. Before he left the cave he looked around to see if they had anything worth taking, but the half eaten deer carcass they’d been devouring looked none too sanitary, and even if this cave had a fire he didn’t relish the idea of spending the night in a place that stank this bad. 

After that was decided, all he needed to do was decide whether he actually wanted to hike to the top of one of the nearby mountains to get a look around, or if he wanted to make for what looked to be a pass across the valley and see what lay beyond. Simon went with the easier option; he was going to walk through the forest to the far side of the valley. Unlike the previous forest this one was all pines and spruces, and there was still snow in the shadows under the shadows of some of the trees, so it was a completely different experience. He was glad that he chose the easy route pretty quickly too, because even walking slightly downhill, he was quickly exhausted. 

At first he thought it was the armor that was tiring him out, but even after he took it off and left it behind, he was still sucking wind before he’d walked another half mile. At first he figured that this was some sort of debuff he was getting as punishment for not doing what he was supposed to, but after admiring the snow capped mountains on his third break he came up with a second more likely theory. He was somewhere way above sea level, like Denver or the Himalayas, and the air was just really thin. That made him feel a little better. At least it was this screwed up game’s fault and not his. He was only a little out of shape after all. 

He made good progress throughout the day, and even found a pond to refill his water from after he broke the thin sheet of ice that covered it. Things were looking good. That was until it was time to try to find somewhere to sleep. As the sun started to set it got cold, really cold. It quickly got so cold that before he lost the light Simon could see his one breath fogging up. The last two nights seemed like a summer camping trip in comparison to this. Simon used his blanket and a bed of pine needles as best he could to stay warm, but he was soon shivering. He slept fitfully, but he managed to survive the night. 

Simon started walking at sunrise as much to stay warm as anything else, and had to warm his water skin under his shirt to melt it before he could drink. When he finished all his food he actually managed to shoot a rabbit when he was stopped for a break, but the triumph from the momentous success was short lived when he realized he had no way to cook it. He carried it with him anyway, in case he found a fire along the way. He watched the sky with some trepidation as it slowly turned to lead, and the temperature never really rose enough for him to feel halfway warm. He regretted tossing the armor now to save weight, because that would have kept him a little warmer. Sometime in the midafternoon, it started to snow lightly. It was impossible to know when because the sun was hidden behind the clouds all day. 

“Come the fuck on!” Simon yelled. “Can’t I catch a break even one damn day!” 

It shouldn’t have come to a surprise, Simon realized, but somehow it still did. That bitch Helades had obviously designed every last aspect of this game to make him miserable, and it was working. He walked on, desperate to find any sort of shelter, because he definitely wasn’t dressed for a blizzard. Over the next few hours it started snowing harder and harder until he had trouble continuing. Simon huddled for warmth under the oldest, largest tree he could find, and after a couple hours of misery he finally fell asleep. Sometime during the night he froze to death and he found himself once again in the cabin. 

“Well,” he sighed, “So much for a way out.”