The forest was alive this morning. Birds chirped from concealed nests with frivolous delight. The wind swept the tree tops like whispering fingers. All around, animals were awake and moving; grazing, foraging, and hunting. Vibrant and beautifully green, the forest hid these treasures among its many branches, ivy vines, long grasses and shrubs, among the roots and burrows, and in the hollows of tree trunks. One such secret crouched in thick shrubbery with a makeshift spear at hand… me.

  If you had known me before, you would barely recognize me now. Hiding in the shrubbery like a wild cat, I looked more animal than human, a true wildman that fit in place with the rest of the wilderness.

  My hair was far longer than when I’d arrived. It curled around my ears and fell over my face. The sun had bleached it almost blonde but the color had been far darker when I first came to this world.

  My clothes had finally gone the way of the dodo, falling apart one morning as I tried to put them on. Too much wear and tear.

  Now, I wore the clothes of nature. Bare skin. Rough leaves. A hide leather poncho fashioned from boar skins, covered in scavenged leaves and branches for camouflage. My bronzed skin completed the look, matching the natural browns of the forest. I’d gone feral and could melt into the forest becoming completely invisible whenever I so desired.

  Even my sandy beard, though not long, had come in thick. A patchy beard was always something I struggled with. I guess I hadn’t let it grow for long enough.

  Spot was with me. The rabbit rested on my head, back legs standing on my neck, body resting on my crown. That was how we traveled together on our scouting adventures.

  Currently, Spot and I were staring out of a bush at a muscled deer chewing grass just ahead of us. The creature was magnificent. Its antlers had twelve points.

  I could feel Spot chewing on my hair nervously. I swiped at him.

  “Stop that,” I whispered.

  Spot sniffed my hair.

  “No,” I replied quietly. “This one’s too big. I’d never eat all of that before it went bad.” We just watched as it nibbled on grass.

  Trekking through the forest had become second nature. My feet were a lot quieter as I knew where to step now and I blended in fairly well with my wild look.

  It had been… I couldn’t remember how many days. I’d been scratching the numbers down on a tree trunk back at camp. There were seventy one notches carved into the bark before I stopped counting.

  Since the last time, I’d level up three times.

  !Achievement you have achieved level 5! …6! …7!

  Each time, I got a free class change and one wish. At 5, I wished for a compass because I kept getting lost in the woods.

  At 6, I wished for a water drinking apparatus, having to wish several times to get the terminology right. The thing in my head didn’t register a “canteen” as a thing.

  In the end, I was given a capped drinking horn after specifying the exact words “water storage vessel that I can carry and drink out of”. I guess it threw me a bone.

  At 7, I was going to wish for a keg of salt but the axe and sword I’d been using had grown quite dull. Instead, a sharpening stone was the wiser choice.

  “I’m getting that salt at level 8,” I told Spot defiantly, even though Spot stopped believing I’d get the salt any time soon.

  “Yeah, I don’t care what you think. You know if you tried meat you might like it…” I trailed off as we stumbled out of the thick woods into a large clearing. The trees here acted as a roof, shielding a large… construction.

  My eyes widened.

  “What is this?”

  A ruin of some sort, like a broken tower shaft, rose more than fifteen feet into the air. The top of the stone structure was broken like a jagged stone tooth. I laughed suddenly, frantically excited.

  “Do you see what this is, Spot?” I drew into the clearing to get a closer look. The sandy stone had been bleached by the sun. Its jagged peak towered over me, much to my delight. The trees of the area had grown in a large irregular circle, shielding the tower with its leaves. I laughed again.

  “It’s a structure! It’s a man made structure!” I tried to keep myself from bouncing up and down with delight. Spot jumped down from my shoulders, sensing I was about to get physical.

  “It’s so beautiful! Look at it. Look at it! Made by human hands.” I danced around it finally, my joy bubbling over. The tower wall was even graced with a couple thankful kisses… before Spot interrupted my celebration. Flatly, I looked over at the little rabbit.

  “I know it’s a ruin. That’s not the point.” I looked over the tower again with awe.

  It hadn’t been used in some time. Judging by the height of the trees, my scout class hinted at over fifty years. The decay of the stone backed that up, though, of course I had no real way of knowing that. It was just an uneducated guess.

  “Don’t you get it? It had to be something before it was a ruin. And that means…” I waited for Spot to get it first.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Somebody had to build it, that’s right.” My fingers ran the length of a stone block, tracing all the bumps and lines made over years of erosion.

  “There’s no way this is goblin-made. Come on, let’s take a look around… Oh, come on. It’s not dangerous,” I reassured Spot as I climbed around the stone to see if there was a way in.

  Spot went to a nearby grass clump and found a blade or two to chomp on experimentally.

  I poked my head out from around the corner at the animal when I found something.

  “Hey. There’s a tree over here that goes right up to the top. Come on. It looks easy to climb.”

  With my newfound agility, my own, not my class', I climbed up the tree like a veteran monkey. Of course, the tree was tilted sideways, as if the ground had melted on one side and the trunk had leaned over against the tower, so it was a pretty easy tree to climb. The tree had very clearly grown that way, too. It hadn’t fallen over, so the head branches dipped right into the top of the broken structure.

  “Woah,” I gasped as I climbed down into the heart of the ruin.

  It was dark here, much darker than outside. There was a coolness to the place too, and a mysterious quietness. One half of the walls had crashed in, making a pile of bricks that buried half of the room but I could still see most of the floor. It was made of marvelous tiles. Gold, black, browns, and blues… It had once been a mosaic of something that was now lost to time.

  A spiraling staircase built onto the wall led further down where it was even darker. Oddly enough, I wasn’t nervous entering despite the darkness. For some reason, it just felt safe here.

  The ground floor was strange. It was very dark, as if light refused to enter the room, or perhaps the walls were made of black stone. But there was light in this little room. It poured in from holes in the roof.

  Here, the tower was much more intact. The staircase, which spiraled down the wall led to a similarly tiled floor mosaic as on the floor above. This time though, there was a large stone table at the center of the room. It had a fat lip and the middle was bowl shaped like it used to hold some kind of shallow liquid, though none was there now.

  The walls used to have murals, too, I could tell. There were lines of old paint or inscriptions or something, but unrecognizable now. Each mural was framed by two arches and rested at the end of a shallow inlet.

  “Wow. I wonder what this place was?” I looked over the face of the table but got more questions. What was the use of such a table? It didn’t look very comfortable to use at its current height and you couldn’t even rest your arms on the edges because of the stone lip. Maybe it was an altar or…

  “Just a decoration…” I said to myself.

  Spot eventually followed, cautiously gauging the room step by step with each hop.

  “Wow,” was the old word I conjured as I swept my palm across the rough stone walls. I couldn’t believe it. A man made structure. There were people in this world. Something in my soul let loose and it felt like a weight had been lifted off of me.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” I asked Spot, my mind running wild with ideas of its constructors.

  !Achievement

  The old ones

  Find evidence of an older civilization

  50XP

  I had to convince Spot to stay just a little longer. Something about this tower was relaxing to me, human almost, and I didn’t want that feeling to go away just yet.

  I hung my leg off a branch of a nearby tree as I chewed on some nuts from a pouch. I watched the tower as if it were doing something grand, eyes glazed over with imaginings. But, it was just sitting there.

  Around what remained of the tower’s top, where the tower room would have been, the same columns and arches motif of the bottom room stretched around what was left of the walls. Except there were no paintings on the outside for decoration. I gestured at the architecture, nodding to myself.

  “Yeah, you see that artistry? This was made by some competent people. Artists of some kind. Sophisticates. That means civilization. That means laborers and stone masons and planners who… you know planned this whole thing. I bet there’s a town somewhere around here.” I cracked a relatively hard nut with my teeth. I was lost in the fantasy of the tower and all its wonderful possibilities. That’s when Spot interrupted me. I looked at him annoyed.

  “What?” I looked at the tower, frantically. Spot was right, it was going to get dark soon.

  “Oh, okay. Fine,” I whined.

  It was early evening when we tracked the boar down to its resting place. I had done this plenty of times by now. I didn’t even need the hunter class’ skills to hunt easy game like this anymore.

  Despite the game ahead of us, we waited just to be sure, Spot was on my head again. Both of our eyes were alert and scanning the forest.

  “You see any goblins?” I whispered. “Yeah, me neither. But you never know when they’re around.” Goblins hadn’t been a problem for ninety nine percent of the time since I’d moved far away from their little hidey hole. The percent of trouble typically came when I was hunting, specifically boar. Like me, the goblins were decent hunters and they seemed to really like boar meat.

  Unfortunately, the animal’s popularity meant I ran into goblins quite often when tracking boars, especially of this size. Being so small, it was perfect for hunting. With suspicious eyes, I checked the bushes, the thickets, and the long grasses. Nothing.

  “Okay,” I said, cautiously. Spot took that as a sign to hop quietly off my head. I snuck out from the bushes like a silent wild cat, slinking in for the kill on quiet paws.

  The boar twisted and sniffled and stamped the ground before finally laying still and falling asleep. Boar usually herded together in small groups so one on its own like this was prime getting. And it was resting. This would be simple.

  And it was. In a flash, the boar was skewered, wildly calling out and flailing around. The activity surprised me. The hit hadn’t been as clean as I thought.

  The boar dashed by me into the thicket with my spear still attached to it. I ran after the creature, keeping pace with it until the spear fell out.

  The weapon landed in a thick patch of grass and I dove in to snatch it out. The boar would be alright. WIth this scout class, the blood trail would be easy to pick up. Even my warrior class could follow it. All I had to do was pick up the trail and put it out of its misery when I found the poor beast.

  I confidently stepped out of the grass, ready to start tracking, when suddenly something shot at me from a hidden thicket. It was a howling goblin, spear out and ready. Behind it, two more goblins dashed out of the grasses in the opposite direction, chasing down the boar.

  “Damn. They were waiting there the whole time to poach my kill. This guy was the distraction.”

  I blocked a spear thrust, thinking I could get away quickly like I had previous times. Oddly, this goblin was no ordinary foe. Instead of throwing wild stabs at me like other goblins would have, he used the haft of his spear to trip me backwards onto my back.

  I landed like a sandbag, the wind knocking out of my lungs. I coughed helplessly.

  The goblin put both hands onto the haft of its spear, readying a strike intended to thrust downwards into my belly, but I kicked around as hard as I could. One of my sandals smacked dead center into the goblin’s goblinads. I felt sick as my toes touched raw goblin flesh, goose bumps going up my legs and spine.

  “Yuck,” I cried out. But I’d wasted my chance.

  The goblin doubled over in pain, but, instead of running screaming away like other goblins had done some many times, it jumped on top of me, legs on either side of my waist. I was pinned.

  With fury it held up its spear, intending to drive it into my skull.

  I gripped the end of the weapon and held it back. Because goblins were so weak, I expected to easily hold the beast off but… it was too strong. Instead of falling back, the goblin pushed in harder, the spear head drawing in closer and closer to my face…

  I was trapped and the spear tip was drawing nearer. For the first time since I’d arrived in this strange new world, I felt it. I was in trouble.