I had spent a good part of the afternoon following the slope, the quartz clenched in my right hand. The vegetation thickened as I went down. So did the smell of wet earth, without a single stream deigning to show itself. My throat was so dry that swallowing took effort. As for the light, it was dropping far faster than my chances of finding a hotel.
When the sun slipped behind the trees the strands of Ether seemed to intensify. I first suspected the darkness of strengthening them before settling on a more plausible explanation: visible light was gradually ceasing to wash out the other layer, the same way the blue of the sky hides stars all day though they are very much there.
The gray band I had spotted from the birch began at the first wounded trunk. The trees there bore long vertical wounds where the bark had blackened without the slightest trace of flame, as if burned from within. I brushed one. The surface was smooth, almost waxy; in the second layer the wood fibers kept reorganizing without ever regaining their alignment.
The leaves had lost their chlorophyll in patches. In the discolored spots the blade became brittle, almost glassy, so that the wind snapped some clean off. I picked up a fragment. It crumbled between my fingers leaving on my skin a fine golden smear, a remnant of Ether clinging to the last molecules, which took several seconds to dissipate.
The soil explained the smell. My steps sank into it too easily. Waterlogged, the handful of earth I picked up broke apart into irregular, faintly luminous grains that no longer held together. My paraglider's reasoning held only halfway: the water was indeed there but it soaked a sick earth instead of flowing somewhere I could drink it.
"Did Thanos come through here or what?"
Here the Ether no longer circulated in orderly strands. It swirled and piled up in tight knots whose sickly pulse hurt to look at. Merely looking at one sent a dull pressure into my skull, that of a thumb pressing on the eye from the inside. I tightened my grip on the quartz. The pressure eased without vanishing. I skirted the next knots, deciding for lack of a better term to call them hot spots.
Tonight's program lacked originality: water, a dry place, something to keep my temperature from dropping too low. I had an hour of daylight left, maybe less. I sat against an oak leaning over the slope, long enough to catch my breath and decide what next. The quartz, cold in my palm, remained the only object in the landscape whose behavior I roughly knew.
A crack of dead wood rose from below, heavy, followed by a guttural growl that scared the hell out of you in no time. I froze, my back pressed to the bark. My heart pounded so hard I had the absurd conviction it must be audible at twenty meters.
Between the trees a shadow moved. Squat, hunched, with limbs too long for the rest of its body, it had something humanoid rather than human about it. In the other layer it distorted the Ether around it in irregular waves. Several incompatible flows overlapped in its body, poorly connected, like the parts of two different mechanisms forced to turn together.
It stopped. Its head swiveled slowly toward the slope. Was it looking at me or at something behind me? I stopped breathing. My free hand instinctively reached for the piece of beam and met only the oak's bark. The passage had taken it from me; I wouldn't have thought I'd miss it so soon. After a long moment the creature resumed its walk toward the east. The sound of its steps faded between the trunks until it was lost in the wind's.
I waited several more minutes before moving. When I decided to my hands trembled enough that I had to try twice to pick up the stone lying at my feet.
It was a pebble barely larger than my fist, rounded the way only centuries of current know how. Somewhere, not necessarily far away, a river had polished this one, here. In its structure the bonds loosened in places; the Ether circulated in fits and starts like a current in a poorly insulated cable.
I had no weapon, no combat experience and no proof that my perception let me act on what it revealed. Before the sick oak I had given up trying. The creature had just made the question far less theoretical.
I squeezed the pebble and kept to a single instruction: hold, don't break. Instead of trying to change its shape I followed its most fragile zones, the spaces between the grains, the flaws. Then I pushed with something that was neither a muscle nor quite a thought, roughly the way you press a finger into dough to tell whether it has risen.
A small area of the surface became denser. A few bonds tightened; the others resisted or slipped out of my attention. A pain crossed my temple from left to right. I let go at once.
The pebble had changed neither shape nor weight. I struck it gently against another stone picked up beside it: a chip came off the second; the first stayed intact.
I reinforced a pebble. The Stone Age enters a new era.
I started over on a handful of pebbles. Some resisted, others split or crumbled under the pressure. I stopped at the fourth failure, when the pain behind my eyes seemed to look for an exit through the middle of my forehead. Three stones had kept a reinforced zone. I broke them along their natural weaknesses with a big pebble; all three yielded a usable edge, one of them frankly worrying, enough to open skin in a single motion or convince a creature to dine elsewhere.
The wind rose. The first drops clattered on the leaves then the downpour fell all at once, dense enough to erase the forest at ten meters. In the other layer each impact briefly scrambled the Ether circulations; the whole landscape filled with static.
I curled up against the trunk. In two minutes I was soaked to the waist. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun but the temperature, dropped all at once, was climbing back too slowly for my taste. I had no intention of waiting for the next downpour in the open.
My thirst, at least, gained something from it. A curved plate of bark, fallen between two roots, had caught a little water. It tasted of wood and earth; I drank it with a delight few great vintages had ever given me.
I needed a shelter, or better, to build one.
If I build something solid, the tax man will find me.
The thought made me laugh in spite of myself, which set me back on my feet.
After surveying the surroundings I chose a slight rise between two roots where water would run down either side instead of gathering beneath me. A leaning trunk already formed a ridgepole. I propped against it the least rotten branches I could find, then covered them with twigs and plates of bark.
The roof barely exceeded my height on all fours. I had wanted it so: less air to warm, less hold for the wind. With a stone I dug a shallow furrow along the most exposed side. The sick earth disintegrated without resistance, which suited me fine: within minutes water was flowing around the shelter.
Something was still missing to close the entrance. I took from my pocket the stone that had reacted best, whose edge cut fine fibers easily and scraped bark. If I could harden a stone I could perhaps harden wood.
I chose a straight, more or less sound branch the length of my arm. Trimming its end by hand took several minutes of short motions. The damp wood resisted; twice the stone slipped a hair from my thumb. When the point became acceptable I laid my palm on it, closed my eyes and searched under the bark for the other reality: the fibers, the trapped water, the Ether following the grain in loose spirals. I tried to tighten those spirals.
Some of the water left the first centimeters of the point. The fibers drew together but several split to the side. I corrected, slowed down, followed the wood's natural direction while that damned pain behind my eyes intensified.
When I opened my eyes the branch was still a branch. Its end, however, had hardened, enough to probe the ground or deter whatever might want to come in.
"I have a pointed stick and three sharp stones. I'm practically a warrior."
This time the laugh came more easily.
I set the stake within reach, then piled inside the least soaked leaves, gathered from beneath the leaning trunk. The bed stayed thin but it would insulate my back a little from an earth that chilled the bones. When the last branch lay across the entrance I let myself drop, drained, in a mood I wouldn't have thought possible two hours earlier. I was pleased with myself.
Characters then floated in my field of vision, crisp as equations on a screen:
[SURVIVAL: CREATION OF A TEMPORARY SHELTER]
[Bonus: First time / Extreme conditions / Use of Ether / Innovation]
+27 XP
Progression: 27/100 toward Level 2
"Twenty-seven XP? Seriously?"
The characters lingered a moment before fading, leaving me with the satisfaction of a long calculation that comes out right.
"Am I in a game or what?"
The scientist in me first noted an obvious thing. Nothing had appeared when I reinforced the first stone or the following ones. The message had come with the shelter finished, which suggested that the completed work counted for more than the isolated act.
The gamer, for his part, retained only the number. A clear reward, visible progress, an incomplete objective: enough to upset anyone's dopamine production like those lab rats pressing a lever for a piece of cheese. The rat in this experiment wore soaked pants and talked aloud to rocks.
The rain returned at nightfall, steady this time. The shelter held. I sat cross-legged under the branches, the quartz on my knees. It gave off a very faint glow, barely enough to make out my hands; I caught myself watching it the way you watch a campfire.
A drop came through the roof and fell on my nose. I let it run, wedged my hand on the stake and listened to the rain until sleep won out.