Oliver headed downhill.
A stream was his best chance. People needed water, and settlements tended to grow around it. If he could find running water and follow it, he might reach a village or town. Failing that, he could keep going toward the coast and look for a fishing village or a harbor.
Unless he was on an uninhabited island.
He pushed that possibility away for the moment. Whoever had gone to the trouble of bringing him here and emptying his inventory around him surely hadn't done it merely to watch him spend the rest of his life alone in the woods.
The ground fell gradually between the trees. He walked for a long time before he found a narrow stream threading its way through the forest.
At the bank, he crouched to look into the water. A human face looked back. He held still until the reflection settled. Dark brown hair, gray-green eyes, a face that was recognizably human and rather better looking than he'd expected. No broad muzzle. No horns. He hadn't been certain what he would see until that moment, and the relief came out in a long breath.
Being stranded was bad enough. Being stranded as a bull would have complicated matters.
He took out the empty bottle and lowered its mouth into the stream. The water looked clear, but looking clear wasn't a guarantee he cared to trust. Parasites and disease would be an exceptionally stupid way to die with all this equipment. He lit a small fire and arranged stones to support the broad-bellied bottle above it.
When the water had boiled, he cooled the bottle in the stream, keeping the mouth clear. He ate a cherry pie and drank the warm water slowly. For the first time since waking, he had something to do that felt both ordinary and unquestionably useful.
Then he packed up and followed the current, keeping the stream in sight whenever he could. Where the banks became impassable, he worked around the obstruction and came back to the water. A short detour was tolerable; wandering off into the forest and hoping to find it again was not. He climbed when he had to, waded when that seemed the better choice, and grew thoroughly tired of the metal he was carrying.
Toward sunset, the stream joined a small river scarcely wider than a man's height.
Oliver stood at the meeting of the waters and smiled. There were still no houses, no boats, no marks of human activity at all. But the water was going somewhere. If he stayed beside it, he had a route through the trees, and perhaps a route out of them.
The light was failing. Shadows thickened between the trunks, obscuring roots and hollows he'd have seen easily an hour before. Walking on would risk a fall, quite apart from whatever animals might hunt after dark.
He'd spent most of the day hauling metal through dense woodland, and the strength that had so impressed him in the clearing had not prevented exhaustion. His legs needed rest. If he drove himself much farther tonight, he might pay for it tomorrow.
He chose the largest tree he could find near the river. Using the dagger for purchase against the trunk, he climbed to a thick branch and settled where he could lean back against the wood.
Above him, the gaps in the canopy had darkened into pieces of sky. He searched them for familiar stars. He kept searching longer than he wanted to admit.
He couldn't find the constellations he knew. Even the Milky Way was missing.
The trees, the river, the hills, the birds he'd heard and the animals he'd glimpsed could all have belonged to Earth. The sky wouldn't cooperate with the resemblance. Sitting there in his stolen evening, he could no longer make himself believe this was a place he might leave by finding a road and asking someone for directions.
Why should everything else look so familiar? He tried to think back, to find something in what he'd seen or read that might help. A memory surfaced: a poem a teacher had made him learn at school. Not a few lines. The whole thing. He could hear the words as clearly as if he were reciting them in that classroom again.
Other memories followed. Pages of Capital he'd once read to seem clever. A documentary about old methods of working iron. Things he would have sworn he'd forgotten returned with detail he hadn't known he still possessed.
He followed one memory, tested another. Where he had expected the blurred impression of an old photograph, he found something closer to a recording. He could move through it, return to a moment, examine it again.
Oliver straightened against the tree. This might be useful. More than useful, if it worked with everything.
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He tried to reach farther back. For a short while the memories came readily, clear and complete. Then the effort caught up with him. His thoughts slowed. The next recollection slipped away before he could hold it, and he found himself too tired to chase it. Apparently there was a cost.
He let his head settle against the trunk. Just before sleep took him, it occurred to him that, whatever else this new talent could do, it was an excellent cure for insomnia.
* * *
Oliver woke on the branch and sat staring east. Pale light spread through the trees. For a while he waited for the room around him to return: the desk, the monitor, the things he hadn't put away. The bark pressed into his back.
Still here, then.
He slapped his cheeks, climbed down, and went to the river. Drawing water, building a fire, washing while the bottle cooled: yesterday's precautions were already becoming a routine. He ate breakfast with warm boiled water and set off downstream.
The river widened as other streams joined it. He kept walking. By noon on the fourth day, the last of his provisions was gone, and the trees finally opened onto a blue expanse that reached all the way to the sky.
Oliver fell to his knees. He braced his hands on the ground and tried to catch his breath.
Three days of hauling armor and supplies across broken ground had exhausted even this stronger body. He had held himself to the river because it had to lead somewhere, because every bend might reveal a roof or a boat. Now it had brought him to the sea. There was nowhere left to follow it.
He lay down where he was.
Eventually, the afternoon sun heated his armor enough to drive him into the shade. He sat there with aching limbs and an empty pack, searching for a good reason to get up and start marching again. Nothing came to mind. He needed food, and he needed rest. The river mouth would have to do until he had both.
When he could face moving, he went a few dozen meters upstream. On the eastern bank, a rock face rose about four meters above the water, its sheltered side turned away from the sea wind. Across from it lay a flat stretch of bank backed by grass and dense woodland. The river ran slowly along the foot of the rock, clear enough to see the bottom and roughly waist-deep in the middle.
Oliver stripped off his armor and waded out. From the water, he studied the face of the cliff. If he could hollow out a space above the river and close it with wood, mud, and stones, he might have a proper shelter. Anything trying to reach him would have to splash through the water. With luck, that would wake him before teeth did.
He crossed barefoot to examine the rock. Several cracks ran through it. He chose one roughly a meter above the water and scratched an outline around the area he wanted to remove, then went back into the trees for dry branches.
The first fire burned against the rock face, its heat working into the crack. When it had almost spent itself, Oliver filled his helmet from the river and threw the water over the blackened stone. Steam billowed into his face. He stepped back, coughing, and waited for it to clear.
The crack had widened.
Once the rock cooled, he fetched the mining pick he had carried all this way. Chips broke loose under the first few blows. Larger pieces followed, and he levered them out until he reached solid stone again. After that, the pick accomplished very little. He scraped the wet ash into the river, gathered another load of branches, and started over.
This time, he left the fire to work. The shadows were lengthening, and he had yet to find anything for dinner.
* * *
He cut a sapling about two fingers thick and stripped its bark. Split into narrow lengths and twisted together, the bark made a line a little over two meters long. He pulled it hard between his hands. It held. He tied one end to the top of the pole, carved a wooden hook with his dagger, and fastened that to the other end.
Snails clung to stones in the riverbed. Oliver pried a few loose, cracked the shells with a rock, and threaded the meat onto his hook.
Making a fishing rod was one thing. Catching dinner with it was another. Before today, his practical experience had amounted to a few childhood outings with his grandad at a reservoir. He remembered sitting beside the water. He did not remember being responsible for feeding either of them.
In Warcraft, though, he had fished for hours. Some of the better potions required particular fish, and buying finished potions from an alchemist cost a small fortune if you used them as freely as he did. Bring your own ingredients, and the price dropped. Find somebody leveling the profession, and they might even supply the other materials in exchange for the practice. Saving gold was as good as earning it. He had learned to fish, maxed the skill, and spent plenty of evenings at some scenic bit of water when he wasn't raiding.
Those evenings had involved a mouse. The knowledge coming back to him now concerned the line between his fingers, the bait beneath the surface, and the moment to pull.
Soon an unfamiliar fish was thrashing in the grass beside his feet.
Oliver crouched over it. He had felt what to do, and his hands had done it. Somehow, hours in a game had become the memory of a skill he could actually use.
If fishing had come with him, what about mining? Smelting? Blacksmithing, cooking, first aid? He had spent a great deal of time and gold mastering those too.
Cooking would be easiest to test. Dinner was waiting.
He searched the memories now available to him and chose a grilled-fish recipe. He cleaned the fish, skewered it on a branch, and built a separate cooking fire. As he turned the skewer, he found he knew when to shift it, how close to hold it, when the flesh would be ready. The smell made waiting increasingly difficult.
He tore off a piece and tasted it. Juicy, firm, cooked through without being dried to shreds. He could not have produced that on his own before today, especially over a campfire with a sharpened stick for equipment.
“Right,” he said, and took another bite. “That one works.”
First aid would have to wait. Making bandages required material he didn't have at hand. Testing his ability to recognize ore would mean searching the hills, and it was much too late to start turning over rocks in the dark. Smelting and smithing needed ore and a furnace. Once he had food and shelter sorted out, he could try building one. Better still, if he found a village, there might be a smith willing to let him use a forge.