Weird.
It was weird.
The further he went from the stone, the less accurate his squares became. It wasn’t much, a few steps too many to the side of where he should have ended up. In regular circumstances, he would have accepted he made a mistake.
But here…
He didn’t know. It was hard. He had no clue how to proceed.
Should he even be trying to solve this riddle?
Feline had told him he should try to see through the fog. See through the fog.
He didn’t get it.
He tried circling around the stone but noticed nothing special. He tried walking back and forth along his footprints, same. He even tried jumping up and down to see if height changed his perspective but, of course, it didn’t help.
He came up with another idea: walking in a straight line away from the stone.One thousand steps. Take a few steps to the side until he could not see his trail and turn around. Logically, he should have been walking parallel to his original path, toward the stone. But it never came.
It was a clue. At some point, when he traveled far enough into the fog, the rules changed. How and why? He didn’t know.
He was stuck.
The only thing that kept him going was that it was less boring than walking aimlessly in the white void that was the rest of the rift.
Sometimes, he noticed Feline looking at him from the stone. The other two didn’t seem to care what he was doing. As for Feline, he wasn’t helping either.
Diven wondered if he was being treated as a distraction. Those guardians must be bored out of their minds if they spent all their time hanging out by the stone.
He wondered why they were here, guarding the rift. There had to be a reason behind their presence. Finding sentient humanoids in rifts was rare, but not unheard of.
But why did they style themselves as guardians?
The place was bare, inhospitable, covered in a fog so thick you could not see past your own nose. Sure, they seemed to “see through it” as Feline put it.
But still…
If they knew where the exit was, they could have pointed him in the right direction instead of sending him on a quest.
Through all the time he spent trying to unravel the mystery of the fog, his facet had not advanced at all. Likely because he wasn’t in any danger since he was so close to the three masked guardians.
It was a good indication that they had no intention to hurt him. In the short-term at least.
Tired of counting his steps and obsessing over whether his experiments succeeded or failed, he decided to give up and make a beeline away from the stone.
After a good hour of walking, he reiterated his square experiment. This time, solely for the sake of seeing if there was anything unusual about the space here.
His square didn’t line up at all. In fact, the only way he managed to return to his starting point was by tracing his steps backward.
Just like the day before.
But there was no stone here, no way to see what was really happening.
Once again, he wasn’t making any progress.
He could repeat this experiment all he wanted, it wouldn’t change the fact that something was wrong. And he didn’t understand what it was.
He was about to resume his roaming when a flash of inspiration struck him.
If the stone wasn’t there to serve as a reference point, he could make one. He was surrounded by a seemingly endless amount of snow. Building a snow tower visible through the fog would take time, but he could manage it.
The snow wasn’t even cold. Aside from a bit of effort, it would be painless.
As a bonus, he was far enough from camp that his facet should be slowly progressing. When he checked his inner garden, he didn’t notice much change since he last checked. But in theory, the branch representing the Facet of the Survivor should be growing.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Without further ado, Diven got to work. He only had his hands and his shield to move the snow. The latter was unwieldy, after struggling with it for a moment, he gave up his idea to use it as a shovel.
With his hands, scoop by scoop, he built a tower of snow.
After shoveling and piling snow for an indefinite amount of time, Diven was too tired to continue. He took a quick bite of his dried fish ration and made the call to sleep near his two-meter-tall snow tower.
He had tried working with a smaller version but the tower was made of snow. White snow, the same color as the mist.
Something he should have thought about before he got started. Now he was too far along the project to give up but his hopes were very low.
Anyway, he couldn’t abandon his tower so he would sleep here. So far, he hadn’t met a single monster. He hadn’t heard a single noise.
Surely, he could take a nap without being attacked.
With this in mind, he drifted out of consciousness.
Diven was startled awake by a deep rasping sound. Circling around him, the noise was rattling on his ears used to the silence of the rift.
His awareness returned to him in an instant. Before he could think more, he was standing with his spear and shield raised.
His gaze and guard followed the sound. Yet, he could not see anything, his vision obscured by the mist. It was as if something was being dragged on the floor.
The feeling was disturbing. He felt his hand twitch, cringing as he remembered the sensation of his nails scratching a blackboard. His muscles tensed. He tried his best to ignore it. He couldn’t afford to get distracted.
This was what the sound was for.
What the monster wanted.
It didn’t take a genius to guess it was a monster. After all, he was in a rift and the guardians had warned him about monsters roaming around. Despite not having seen any so far, he remembered his time in the forest. There too, the monster encounters were not that frequent, but each one had left him scared for his life. He wouldn’t take the threat lightly.
Pushing aside the temptation to chastise himself for taking a nap in hostile territory—he didn’t have time for that—Diven followed the sound. It was coming from behind the wall of fog. Yet the monster had located him.
Could it be that the beast had seen through the mist as Feline said?
Maybe, but Diven thought more likely that the predator relied on another sense to “see” him. There were too many possibilities to assess them all, but he considered smell, sound, and the vibration his steps sent through the snow.
It didn’t help.
Seconds passed. The noise’s intensity constantly rising in an endless crescendo.
He expected the monster to attack.
Any moment now.
It was circling around him. Stalking him. Looking for an opening. Diven didn’t dare to do anything but guard the side from where the sound was coming. If he turned his back, the monster would pounce on him. If he retreated, he would cross the monster’s path.
It was fast. Faster than him.
He could not escape.
He had to fight.
He wanted to fight.
“Come!” He shouted to the wind as if the beast would understand him. “Stop hiding and fight me like a man!”
As if it cared. It was the predator, he was the prey. The hunt was methodical. Calculated.
It was getting on his nerves and when he was crippled by anxiety, his body frozen by fear and his head throbbing from this horrible, horrible noise…
It would strike.
One well-placed strike. And it would be the end.
Diven didn’t want that. He didn't accept that. But what could he do?
He wasn’t the one dictating the rules here. It was a rift and he couldn't even see the thing stalking him.
Was there even a beast stalking him?
There had to be. Right?
The noise didn’t come from nowhere. Or did the isolation coupled with the disorientation mess up his head so much that his mind was making it up?
No…
Diven refused to follow this line of thought. He could only rely on himself, he had to believe his brain was working. There was a monster circling around him.
Behind the thick, impenetrable fog. It was there.
He kept turning in his spot, making sure his shield was facing the right direction so he could block the beast’s assault when it would inevitably come.
But it was going faster, faster, faster. He was having difficulties keeping up. With only the white snow and the white fog and his white tower in sight, he was spinning and spinning and spinning on himself to the point it was disorienting.
He stopped. Wobbling a little, he swallowed a trickle of bile that had made his way up his throat.
The monster kept circling. At some point, it got so fast Diven couldn’t pinpoint where it was. It was as if it was all around him.
He wasn’t ready. Any moment now. He kept scanning the scene with his gaze, trying to catch a sign of the incoming attack.
It didn’t come.
The buzz in his ear was splitting his head in pain. He wanted it to stop, he wanted the monster to attack.
He wanted it to end.
He shouted, taunted, and jeered at the beast, trying to provoke it. But the sound of his voice was drowned in the incessant screech filling the world.
Suddenly, Diven felt his whole being scream in alarm. Something was very wrong.
Trap Detection!
In an instinctual move, Diven threw himself to the side, the ground exploding under the spot he was just standing on.
Under the snowfall and the rapidly encroaching mist, he could discern the indistinct shape of a large monster. Locking eyes on his target, Diven refused to let it return underground where he couldn’t reach it.
He didn’t want to hear this sound again.
Raising his spear and clutching his shield, he charged.