I named her on the sixteenth day, while I was grinding charcoal for the ledger.
It had been bothering me for a while, the way a missing word does. For two weeks I had called her the doll. I had talked to her more than to any other living thing in two months. She had listened more patiently than most of my coworkers. And I had been referring to her like an item on an inventory.
She sat against the bank with her glass eyes on the creek, a little muddy, a little scuffed, serene as ever. Dolls like her do not come with names. Hers had been a secondhand auction find, and the card that came with her had been lost long before I met her.
I wanted a name that would suit a girl who had fallen through a wall, and survived a goblin, a boar, and an owl, without so much as blinking.
Clara.
In the old ballet, Clara is the girl who is given a toy nutcracker, and who falls asleep, and who wakes to find the toys alive. I have always loved the idea that someone could care for a toy so much that the world made room for it. It also means bright or clear, which seemed right for a pair of glass eyes.
"Clara," I said.
Nothing happened. Nothing is expected to. But something in my chest warmed, small and firm, and I realized it was the third time that warmth had come, and each time it had been about her.
The weeks after that blur together in my memory, which is strange, because I wrote every one of them down.
I will not describe each fight. They followed a pattern. I would find something stronger than me, and learn what it did every day, and build a way for its habit to kill it. A pale, slick thing called a Bog Lurker that lay in the mud at the creek mouth and snatched anything that came to drink. A Thornback Lizard, spined like a hedge, that I lured out of its burrow with the marionette dancing on a cord. A Greyback Wolf, alone and starving, that came sniffing for my smoked boar and found a pit I had dug under a skin of bracken.
I was careful. I was patient. I never fought anything I had not studied for days. The ledger filled with columns.
Day 19. Bog Lurker (Lv. 7): 91 XP + 259 first-time bonus = 350 XP. Level 7. Max HP 24.
Day 24. Thornback Lizard (Lv. 8): 104 XP + 296 = 400 XP. Level 8. Max HP 26.
Day 29. Greyback Wolf (Lv. 9): 117 XP + 333 = 450 XP. Bog Lurker x2: 182 XP. Level 9. Max HP 28.
Wire: eleven feet, untouched. Putty: gone.
I looked at the numbers. Level 9. One more to go. I had killed things that would have killed me a month before, and I was still alive.
But the arithmetic had turned unfriendly again. By my count, Level 10 needed nearly seven hundred more points, and nothing I had left to hunt in my corner of the woods could give me that.
Then, on the thirty-fourth day, something came to find me instead.
I knew before I saw it. The air in my camp pressed down, as if the sky had gotten heavier, and the smoke from my fire bent sideways and would not rise. It was not the suffocating wave of the skeleton, which had turned me off like a lamp. It was something I could breathe through, if I breathed carefully. But every hair on my body stood up and begged to be somewhere else.
It came to the drying racks. It was a bear, if a bear were built from boulders. Its hide was gray and ridged like slate, and its shoulders were as high as my head, and it walked on the stones of the creek without a sound. It ate my smoked boar, all of it, with enormous patient care, and it did not look at me. It did not need to.
Stonehide Bear Lv. 12
Twelve. I was Level 9. I had read the arithmetic of three levels above me before, and I knew it was not a thing I could fight.
I lay in my shelter with my hand over Clara's painted mouth, as if she might cry out, and I listened to it eat all my Food. When it was done, it turned and went away, and the air eased, and I lay there for a long time shaking.
It came back the next night. And the next. I don't know what came over me maybe hunger driven desperation? but..
I tried the dagger once, on the third night, when it was drinking at the creek and had its back to me. I crept up and drove the blade into its flank with all my strength. The tip skated off the stone-colored hide with a dry screech and left a scratch no deeper than a fingernail. The bear turned its head, slowly, and looked at me with small, sleepy, amber eyes.
Then it went back to drinking.
I have never in my life been so insulted, or so grateful.
It took me four more days to find the answer, and I found it in the one place I had been refusing to look.
Redthorn.
The red berries had been hanging by my camp since the first morning. The Registry had given me their name and nothing else, and I had never touched them. Now I crushed three of them into a puddle of creek water, and I dropped a minnow into the mash.
It turned over within a minute and floated on its side.
The Registry had told me what the berries were called. A dead minnow told me what they did. I'm so glad I saw that documentary about that poor guy with the survival guide and learned that some berries are deadly poison... Also sad because they looked tasty.
I spent two days gathering. I mashed a whole basket of Redthorn into a thick scarlet paste and soaked what little food I could gather in the time it was gone. Until it stained my hands. My fingers went numb, then tingled, then stopped, and my Vitality, I think, saved me from worse. Then I set it on a flat stone at the creek, where the bear would find it, and I withdrew to the far bank, and waited. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
It came at dusk. It sniffed the food once. then ate every scrap.
Then nothing happened...
The bear sat on the stones for a long time, looking faintly puzzled. Then it swayed. Then it stood, and sat down again, and shook its great head the way a man shakes off a bad dream. I held my breath. It lurched into the creek and stood there, water running down its gray hide, and it made a low, miserable, bewildered sound that I felt in my chest.
I am not proud of what came next. The poison was not fast. It took the bear most of the night to die. I sat across the water with the doll in my lap and watched it stagger, and fall, and rise, and fall again, and I did not feel clever. I felt like a man who had found out exactly how cruel he could be, and was no longer sure he was glad.
I waited an hour before the registry read my notification.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a stonehide bear.
Experience gained: 156 XP (Stonehide Bear, Lv. 12)
First-time-defeat bonus (Stonehide Bear): +444 XP
Underdog bonus (target 2 or more levels above): +35 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 10.
Max HP: +2 HP 30 / 30
As i read it. I did not laugh.
The panel changed before I could close it.
STAT POINT AVAILABLE (1)
VIT 6 END 4 STR 4 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 0
I looked at my numbers the way I look at a trial balance. I had been feeding the columns that kept me alive. Vitality had carried me through every fight injured but alive, and Dexterity had carried me through every delicate carving or wire twist. But one column had sat at zero since the day the wall opened. Next to my HP there was a second bar, MP 0 / 0, that I had never been able to stop noticing, like a blank cell in a spreadsheet.
A sensible man, alone in a forest, after a night like that, would have put the point into Strength. But I have never been able to leave an empty column alone.
I chose Attunement.
Attunement 0 → 1
MP 0 / 0 → MP 5 / 5
VIT 6 END 4 STR 4 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 1
I waited. I held my breath. I flexed my fingers and looked at the sky and tried to feel whatever a man is supposed to feel when a bar of magical energy appears inside him. A warmth, perhaps. A hum. A tingle in the fingertips.
Nothing. I felt exactly as I had a minute before, which is to say tired, damp, and faintly sick from the smell of a dead bear. The bar said five. I felt nothing at all.
"That's it?" I asked the air.
It had no answer for me. I was beginning to get used to that.
The panel opened again, wider than before. It unfolded across the dawn like a page being turned, and I knew, with the part of me that has always known when a deadline is here, what it was.
CLASS EVALUATION
Deeds considered:
Repaired a doll.
Crafted a puppet.
Lured prey with a puppet (x6).
Made fire. Built a shelter.
Defeated 31 creatures.
Survived 34 days alone.
That was the first time anyone had made a list of everything I had done, and it was uncanny how much of it was true.
SELECT A CLASS
Puppet Maker. Deeds: crafted a puppet; repaired a doll. Potential Skill unlock: puppet craft, improving the crafting and handling of puppets.
Trapper. Deeds: set snares; built a deadfall; dug a pit trap
Potential Skill unlock: Trapcraft, improving the building and placing of traps.
Woodsman. Deeds: made fire; built a shelter; hunted game.
Potential Skill unlock: Survivor, gives a vitality buff while in wild terrain.
Hermit. Deeds: survived 34 days alone. Potential Skill unlock: Solitude, easing the strain of living apart from others.
Warrior. Locked. Requirement: Strength 5. (Current: 4)
Apprentice Mage. Requirement: MP 1 or more. (Current: 5) Potential Skill unlock: Heightened Mana Sense, allowing the user to better feel mana.
I sat on the creek bank with a dead bear at my feet and read the list over and over, the way I read a menu in a restaurant I could not afford.
I went down it line by line, because that is how I make any decision.
Woodsman was sensible. It would keep me alive. Trapper was sensible too, and rather more efficient, and had the advantage of being what I was already doing. Hermit was funny, and also a little too accurate. Warrior was grayed out, its requirement written beside it in pale letters, like a note on an application I had failed. Apprentice Mage was lit, and only because I had spent a point on a bar that did nothing. I had five MP and no idea how to feel a single one of them. The skill on offer was called Heightened Mana Sense, which would let me sense mana maybe? But i highly doubted the Registry would hand me spells...
I looked at Puppet Maker Again.
It did not make me stronger. It would not feed me or keep me warm. It was the worst option on the list in every practical way, and it was the only one that made my heart beat faster.
Beside me, Clara sat against a stone with her glass eyes on the dawn. A little wooden marionette lay in my lap, with one slightly bent arm and a faintly surprised face. I had made that. I had made her smile, in a way, and kept her safe. I had felt, for four seconds, on the worst night of my life, like a man who was very good at something.
I chose Puppet Maker.
CLASS ACQUIRED: Puppet Maker.
New skill: puppet craft (Lv. 1).
The air hummed. A feeling ran down my arms to the tips of my fingers, a warm and settling sense, like putting on a glove that had been made for me. I turned the marionette over in my hands and every joint was clear to me, every cord, every flaw. I could see how to make it better.
Then, very quietly, a final panel appeared, thinner than the others, in a paler shade of blue.
POSSIBLE EVOLUTIONS
Magic Puppet Maker (Level 25)
Locked. Requirement: craft a puppet from a magical material.
A magical material?
I had no idea what that was, or where one found it. The Registry did not say. It only held the line in the air, patient and faint, like a hand held out in the dark.
The bear's body lay in the shallows. By morning, I knew, there would be a root where it had fallen. I stood up, with my knee complaining, and the marionette in one hand and Clara in the other.
Fifteen more levels. Fifteen, and a material I did not know the name of.
For the first time since the wall opened, I had more than survival.