Jolting awake with images of the snake still fresh in mind, Tedrick looked around frantically, completely confused and disoriented. It was apparent that he was in a familiar place, the needles still all over the floor, but the images were there all the same, seemingly just behind the veil of the stone floor. The air was a bit stuffy due to limited airflow, but that was the only real problem…

Emphasis on real. The acrid scent of the digestive fluids of the snake surrounded him like a phantom miasma. It wasn’t real. He wasn’t there. He was here, in a stone room of his own design, with strong, thick walls with spikes inside, disguised as a beehive big enough nothing would want to fuck with it that climbed trees, and he even had multiple escape routes. Shit, he could just tear part of the wall down and leave that way. He was safer than he’d ever been here.

Yet, the dread was still as real as ever. In truth, it was far worse than it was even in the moment. No doubt the encounter was scary enough to haunt him for some time to come, impactful enough to represent the worst nightmares he’d had since he first lost mobility.

But this time, there was no urgency or adrenaline to save him from the maelstrom, nothing to cushion him from the emotional impact that such an event causes.

His back was tense, feeling a specter of toxic thorns digging in and planting their own innumerable seeds of death into his flesh. The back of his scalp in particular burned. His hair, which by now reached his lower ear, was still full of tangled knots from his mad flight trying to escape, and trapped his fingers whenever he touched the spot.

Thankfully the encounter with the reaper didn’t involve any actual pain, but the dread was no lesser for it. The feeling of a certain end that emanated from the door the reaper had was palpable.

Truth be told, neither the snake nor the door and certainly not the bird was as bad as the moment after the reaper slashed him. The moment before he came back from the dead.

It was… indescribable, the way that it felt to feel nothing at all. Even losing a limb had some kind of phantom sensation. That moment, it had… nothing at all. Almost like a sensory deprivation chamber, except there was no heartbeat or pulse to hear, no fluid to feel.

He supposed flashbacks were quite something else when you actually died and nearly passed into the afterlife. He’d heard about the experiences, but the strange metaphysical sensations Tedrick had experienced during the encounter certainly added a bizarre feeling of weightlessness.

This carried on for some time, sometimes worse and other times better, before it finally ebbed off entirely. His breathing began to stabilize, and his energy levels had started to recover sufficiently so his suffering was… limited at least, and fading off to nothing.

He was alright now. It took a while, but he weathered the storm.

Maybe it was time for a break.

When he was only beginning to acclimate to his disability, he had gotten pretty seriously into meditation. No doubt part of why he hypnotized himself so heavily so easily; he knew how to relax his mind, at least to a point. Making his way out through the wall and up to his little chimney, he made a temporary cover and sat on it, staring out over the forest that was now his home. He noticed something odd that had slipped his mind ‘til now; it seemed like the very air around the area almost… shimmered and muttered, in a way.

In a way, it was like the phantom sense he had during his PTSD episode. Like there was more to be seen, just beyond a paper-thin veil. Thin enough it couldn’t hide the mutterings from beyond, and if he really looked, he could see through it a little bit. The wooshing of wind that wasn’t present, motion all about, a place very thoroughly occupied. A place that, even from his fuzzy glance, didn’t seem to follow the same laws of space, like any little motion could take you anywhere you wanted to be. Like your location related more to your thoughts than your motion.

He became certain of that one because he decided to test this theory, thinking of the village he saw before, full of Sprites. Like a detailed mirage, he could almost see it in a way. But here, on the other side of this thin sheet separating realities, it was no tiny village, and it certainly wasn’t only Sprites. It was expansive, consuming a huge swathe of land. It crossed the river, which was alive with water fae as if the surface itself was writhing and glowed like it was bioluminescent, and went beyond what his eye could see in every direction. Miles and miles of will-o-wisps and music. Livelier than Marti Gras and brighter than New York City, but with the sense of peace and tranquility matched only by the small towns found in places like rural Kansas.

But just as quick as he was there, he was back, sitting on his treehouse with a calm breeze. This place was… certainly deeper than he knew before.

Tedrick suddenly had an uneasy sense, though, shaking him out of his pseudo-meditation he’d fallen into while idly pondering. Come to think of it, he’d felt it a little since he peered into the other place. Like he wasn’t the only one noticing.

He suddenly felt very exposed.

Deciding now was a good time to go inside, he dropped down through the chimney, and sat at his desk, deciding to experiment with his illusions and enchantment. It seemed clear that he had to work out his thoughts before they got the better of him again. It was completely natural to feel as he did after what happened, but if this happened out in the field...

He may well have bigger problems than a panic attack.

Well, he could carve into stone, but he already had a pretty good idea how that would work. A quick test showed how easy it would be; a simple willing of a little gouge into stone he made, and he could write.

Albeit, only in English, French, and Spanish. All languages he learned for trade, since he mostly planned on keeping his business in the Americas. He never did finish learning Portuguese, for when he eventually reached out to South America. A shame. Not that any of them would be useful now, though they may be helpful as a code language of sorts.

It’s not like this place would have any of these languages after all. That would just be ridiculous.

No matter what language though, he wanted to be able to do something he could turn on and off. So illusion and enchanting it was.

Fiddling with both for a while, he sorted out how to write out a message partially in the stone and partially out of it with an illusion, binding the two together with a mesh of energy. It didn’t take long to figure out how to write and bind it in such a way that the mesh would let the energy leak away but for a trace amount, keeping it there. When refilled, it would display. He even got a little tricky and made it so that it would fall apart if fed energy from all but the right spot by making it relatively delicate unless energy moved the right way. It was a little like fluid dynamics. He never did too well with science, by his standards at least, but his perfect memory came in handy. Not to say that just because he could recall information it would be correct. That was something he’d have to be wary of. Probably best he didn’t try to build a bridge or something.

This was all very satisfying and distracting, and he’d even gotten a message during the meantime.

Well, wasn’t that convenient.

None of this distraction could get that sense of being watched out of his head though. Finally too annoyed by it to ignore it any longer, he zipped up into his chimney and looked through the peepholes, checking around.

Well, he wasn’t being watched… But he was certainly less alone than before. Way below him, on the ground, there was a man. A human, at that. Or at least they looked that way. They hadn’t noticed him yet it seemed.

What a coincidence. Well, back to work. He immediately zipped back down into his house, more irritated than anything.

He was enjoying his quiet isolation so much. Why should he bother with other people when he was doing just fine on his own? They just complicated things.

He ignored them for a while, but he found that the feeling of being watched didn’t go away. Checking again, it seemed clear they didn’t know he was there, but they were looking around the area thoroughly. They couldn’t have been searching for too many things, he opted for here specifically because of its lack of attractive features. Nothing like beehives, plants that analyzed to show any interesting properties, you’d have to be stupid to go digging for minerals in a fae forest, and even the trees around here weren’t anything to write home about.

Could they be looking for him in particular?

If so, they could keep looking, because he had no intention of showing himself. Who knew what their intent was? Not worth the risk.