Gwenevere is a child of infinite possibility, and she has five thousand competitors playing her game. For Eliza, Nox, Zola and Bleidd, this means facing down thirteen floors riddled with dragons, cat kingdoms and cabbages. Yet in a world where anyth...
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Nox was beginning to think that his body and the ground were having an affair.
Judging at least by the fact that the two had met up four times in half as many hours.
He groaned as he slowly came to consciousness again, and using his arms he pushed himself onto his knees. The last thing he remembered was being chased by a dragon... A quick survey of his body proved that he had not been eaten... And then tripping over something and hitting the ground hard enough to knock himself out cold.
Scratching the sore side of his head with a hand, he peered around for the treacherous root or rock that had brought his downfall.
Yet instead of one of these things, his gaze settled on a leather satchel.
He stared at it in surprise. Someone else must have been running from the dragon and just dropped it here... But he halted himself before he could pick it up and took a moment to glance around, making sure that it's previous owner wasn't anywhere nearby.
Finding the coast clear, he grabbed the satchel and pulled it over to him. He flipped open the flap and pawed through the satchel's contents.
To his delight, the previous owner appeared to have not had enough time to get around to using anything inside, as it all appeared relatively untouched. He pulled out a canister of water, a couple rolls of brown paper, and a folded piece of parchment.
His attention went to that water canister first. He hadn't realized how thirty he felt from all the running till he spotted it, and within seconds he had unscrewed the cap and was downing the contents, savoring the feeling of the cool liquid rushing down his dry throat.
He would have been more than happy to drink the whole bottle, but seeing as there were no obvious sources of water nearby, he opted to save what remained.
Speaking of no obvious sources of water... Where exactly am I...
He realized that in his distraction with the satchel, he hadn't taken taken the time to figure out exactly where he had ended up after the chase.
The gray, skinny fingers of leafless trees seemingly reached towards him and stretched across the canopy. Insects marched up and down the twisted and knotted trees, and spiders of alarming size and variety watched him from their myriad webs. The earth was cracked and dry and covered with the remnants of withered foliage. The sky was dark and violet, affording him very little light to work with. Judging by the height of the sun, he probably had two or three hours at most before night.
Taking a deep breath, he started sorting through the things in the satchel. "Okay," he said aloud, as if just hearing a voice, albeit his own, would help him think. Pulling out the small slip of paper, he unfolded it, revealing a blank sheet. "Why would we be given a blank paper..." He muttered, frowning. "Are we supposed to draw our own map or something?"
