The Misadventures of a Squirrel
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Tue, 03/15/2016 - 23:40
OOC:
This is meant to explain what happened to John after he went into a tunnel during the kidnapped Abbot TP in this log.
(I used dice to figure out where he ended up. ARE YOU PROUD OF ME, DYLAN?)
Dark
Five days.
Five days by his count. That's how long he'd spent in these cursed tunnels - five days since he followed that gleam of light down a side passage, thinking it might have been some of the beasts he and the others were pursuing.
He counted the days by how much food he had in his pack; so far he had only eaten enough for five days, and even then he was only eating when he was truly hungry.
So it may have been a week.
He really hadn't a clue. His torch died out not long after he parted from the others, leaving him to grope along in the dark by himself. That was really the reason he got lost.
He shook his head, muttering dark words to himself.
If only he hadn't been so stupid...
Why didn't he tell the others where he was going?
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Every so often, the wall he felt under his paw would drop away, into nothingness. No doubt other passages leading to who knows where.
When John came upon these, he would walk straight forward until his hand - or his face - met the wall across the way. He never turned down any of these side passages; nay, they would only get him more lost. Better to move straight, at least then he may find the end. And so he continued, lost in the dark, unknowing where his path would lead.
Often times when he rested, his cloak drawn about him, he would feel almost as if the darkness about him was a solid thing, something that was crushing him; suffocating him.
He slept little.
Other times he would hear the dripping of water, and would pray he wouldn't stumble into an underground lake or river. However, there was once where his feet splashed into something - it may have been just a puddle, or it might not have been. Either way, he clung to the wall and skirted along the edge for a long time, until he felt safe to step out more into the tunnel.
And still at other times he would here the shuffling of something; some nameless creature of the dark.
He tried not to think hard about what they were.
And so his days passed, moving along the passage walls and eating little. He lost count of days after 20, and soon ran out of water - he had to resort to squeezing it out of the moss which clung to the walls. It tasted horrible.
Food, of course, was the next thing to fail him.
Even though he had rationed it to only a small meal a day - or as close as he could tell to a day - he ran out. He had had enough for easily two months.
A little while into having no food, the squirrel started wondering if the moss was edible.
Judging how he kept being able to eat it, he assumed it was.
It tasted just as vile as the water, if not worse.
In truth, he knew not how long he spent in those caverns, those tunnels, those mazes. Nor will he ever be truly sure.
But he did find a way out.
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It was an odd thing, really.
It was the first time he had seen light for a very long time - a shaft coming from the roof.
When he came to it, he was nearly blinded when he looked up; the moon was like a sun to him.
And he laughed. A deep, genuine laugh. A laugh of relief, a laugh of reckless abandon.
He was finally free of the dark, the small spaces.
Finally free of the hellish way he had been living for so long.
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It was dark when he managed to climb out of the small hole.
But not so dark as the tunnel.
No, John thought, nothing will ever truly be dark again.
He sneezed after a moment.
The hole was in the roots of an old and gnarled oak, one of the larger ones John had seen. It was alone in the middle of a field. Snow covered everything. So it was winter.
John looked around, wondering where he was.
It was utterly alien to him.
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He stayed by the tree for a long time, debating what to do. John finally settled on picking a direction and walking that way. He was bound to run into something eventually.
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And so he did; a village where he learned it was the dead of winter. And that he was nowhere near Mossflower Wood at all - Most of the beasts living there hadn't even heard of it, or if they did it was but a rumor to them, nothing more.
So he stayed there, doing odd jobs here and there for gold. He worked primarily for a weaponsmith, a large otter by the name of Bergin; someone who John never forgot.
A month or so had passed, and he was able to buy a substantial amount of food for travel. He said his goodbyes and departed. Before leaving, though, the otter gave him a crossbow to better defend himself with. "Ya may be good with a sword, but y'got a bad leg - this may help pick off one o' two beasts before a group attacks y', mate."
North was his safest bet - there was talk of a northern sea, which John had the suspicion was actually the East Sea. If it wasn't, well, it wasn't.
But if it were...
He may very well make it back to the lands that he knew. Back to Mossflower. Back to home.
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