The first distance after that bend was completely silent, just the sound of his steps on the dirt and the rustle of some leaves.
He didn’t know exactly where he was going. He just needed a point to start from, and the nearest point was a small market he saw at a crossroads.
Sitting there was a map seller, a thin man with narrow eyes that never left Loki’s hand holding the small money pouch.
"Three silver pieces." The seller said.
"Two." Loki replied with a smile not devoid of artificial warmth. "I’m a poor orphan trying to find my way in this world, and you’re a kind man, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes."
There was no kindness at all in the man’s eyes, but something in Loki’s tone made him hesitate. "Two and a half." He finally muttered.
"Two."
The man pushed the map for two pieces, grumbling something about "the youth of this generation," while Loki walked away folding the map carefully, stifling a small laugh. It wasn’t about the money at all.
He opened the map at the edge of the road. A large forest, far away, its name written in small script: Aris. A quick calculation of distance on the side scale put the number in his head: about three hundred miles. He whistled without enthusiasm. "Three hundred miles. Great. Exactly what I needed."
He folded the map, looked at his feet in their simple shoes, then at the road stretching before him with no clear end, and began to walk.
The first day wasn’t bad; the curiosity of the new road was enough to distract him from tiredness. The second day was a little harder, and the third shattered any illusion he still had that this was a romantic journey. His feet blistered, and every step felt like walking on light embers.
He sat by a tree in the middle of that day, took off his shoe, and stared at two red blisters on his heel. "I’m an eighteen-year-old man." He said out loud for no one but himself to hear. "I’m an eighteen-year-old man, my soul transferred to another world, and I possess energy no one else has, and here I am silently crying because of two blisters on my feet."
He didn’t literally cry, but the feeling was close enough to write the sentence this way in his head, then laughed at himself with a tired laugh, and wrapped his foot with a piece of cloth before continuing.
On the fifth day, the bread he had prepared from the orphanage ran out. He tried to hunt something in the side forests along the road, grabbed a stick and ran after a rabbit for ten whole minutes before falling on his face into a small hole he hadn’t noticed. He stayed lying there for seconds, his face in the dirt, and the rabbit had long disappeared.
"Excellent." He muttered into the dirt. "Just perfect."
He had to buy food from a passing village at higher than its usual price, because the merchant there felt he wasn’t in a good negotiating position, and he was right. He ate the dry bread while walking, cursing stinginess and hunger equally.
One night, he sat under a bare tree, shivering from the cold, trying to light a fire with sticks he had gathered with trembling hands. He lit a match he had bought, it went out with the first gust of wind. He lit a second, it went out too. The third went out before it even touched the sticks.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!" He hit the ground with his fist. "I’m eighteen, stuck in a body that’s not mine, and I’m dying of cold because of wooden sticks that refuse to ignite, what a stupid life this is?"
No one was hearing him, and that didn’t matter. He finally succeeded after the sixth attempt, sat close to the small flame warming his hands, and felt a silly relief as if he had accomplished something great.
"I think I’m starting to understand the meaning of strength."
On the seventh day, he passed a small village, its houses more dilapidated than his village, and barefoot children playing in the mud. He sat at a well to fill his waterskin, when an old man approached him dragging an injured leg.
"Young man, can you help me carry some firewood to my house? It’s not far, and I’ll feed you a hot meal."
Loki looked at the man, then at the nearby pile of firewood, then at a sun beginning to tilt toward sunset. "Sorry." He said, without any real trace of sorry in his voice. "I have a long road ahead of me, and I can’t delay myself."
He walked away drinking from his waterskin, leaving the man to look for other help. He didn’t feel guilt. Nor did he feel satisfaction. It simply meant nothing to him.
By the tenth day, the trees of Aris began to appear on the horizon, taller and denser than any forest he had seen so far, a dark green wall separating the known world from what lies beyond. He stopped at its edge, panting from the exhaustion of the past days more than from that moment itself.
He sat on a nearby rock, took out the map, and examined it. Small marks on the edges of the forest indicating scattered villages, and a faint red line extending deep inside, with one word in bad handwriting: "Danger." No one wrote more details than that.
He took out of his bag a dark piece of cloth he had bought from the same merchant who sold him the map, and tied it around the lower part of his face. He looked at his reflection in a small puddle nearby. Nothing showed of his face except two eyes above the dark cloth, and a face that didn’t resemble Loki the innocent friend that Kaiden and Lucy knew.
"From now on." He said in a voice lower than usual, trying a new tone on his tongue. "No one here knows my name."
Before entering, he sat a little watching the edge of the forest, and took out the last piece of bread from his bag, chewing it slowly while thinking. He didn’t have a perfect plan, nor a teacher waiting for him inside, nor a clear training map. Only a blind desire to become strong by any means possible, and a quiet conviction that what happens to the Empire, and its six kingdoms, and any war that may erupt in it one day, is not his concern at all. As long as he is weak, he is nonexistent to this big world, and that was exactly what he wanted, to remain nonexistent until he himself decides when to appear.
Suddenly he heard the sound of leaves moving behind him, not wind. He turned quickly, his hand instinctively reaching for the knife tied to his belt, but he found nothing but a large black crow staring at him from a low branch, its head tilted with strange curiosity. Loki stared at the bird for a second, then laughed with a trembling voice. "Even crows are watching me now. Welcome to this welcoming world."
The crow suddenly flew toward the depths of the forest, as if showing him the way or fleeing from him, he wasn’t sure which.
He got up, dusted off his clothes, and carried his bag on his shoulder. He stopped for a moment at the line of the first trees, feeling something like coldness running through his stomach, not exactly fear, closer to that feeling before jumping from a high place, when the body knows there is no return after the next moment.
"Okay." He said to himself in a low voice. "Let’s see what you’ve got."
He took his first step inside the shadow of the dense trees, and the light behind him began to diminish with each additional step, until it disappeared completely behind a wall of dark leaves, leaving behind the last sunlight he saw that day, and the last trace of the name Loki that the people of that small village knew.
Ding.
[Endurance increased.]
[Endurance: E+]
Loki stopped.
"...Huh?"