As the timer hit zero Wilhelm scrambled to his feet and began looking around to see what was available to him, He knew the basics of survival thanks to his past as a fisherman, however, brief it was. As his grizzled old captain loved to remind him, You can survive for 3 Minutes without air (oxygen) or in icy water, 3 Hours without shelter in a harsh environment, 3 Days without water, And 3 Weeks without food (if you have water and shelter).

Bottom line was he needed water and shelter; the rest would fall into place as animals needed water, so a water source meant food. So the first thing on his list was to start towards the sound of running water. At the same time, he kept his eyes open for any well-known edibles, as well as anything he could use as either a weapon or to help him build a shelter once he found his water

After only a few minutes of walking, Wil groaned in pain as his feet were sore and he was sweating bullets, Remembering that he was never the most active child until he turned seventeen. But that would have to change this time around. He pushed himself harder, picking up decent sized branches as he walked which only made things worse, the weight of the branches plus the bark on his flesh soon rubbed his shoulders raw.

By the time he reached the sound of water his shoulders were bleeding, panting he dropped his bundles of branches and all but collapsed into the small stream. His chest heaving as he struggled to take in air, his blood washing away in the water as he lay in the shallows. Wil could not remember the last time he had ever been in so much pain, Long before he was an adult that was for sure.

Once his heart felt like it wouldn't explode and his lungs could hold oxygen again Wil pushed himself up from the water and moved towards his small pile of wood, It was hardly enough for a decent fire, something he still had to build. But for now, he grabbed the most club-shaped branch and began walking around the area to look for the best spot to make his shelter, something which would require as little effort as possible would be the best.

When he was younger, he loved to watch reruns of Alone with his father, an avid outdoorsman who was quite understanding of his son's dislike for the outdoors lifestyle but still liked to make him watch shows with him. Something that always stuck in his mind was the way they chose their camps, Always picking the high ground in the case of rain to prevent their shelter from becoming a pool, choosing something that was already semi-decent to improve upon such as a downed tree that had hollowed out.

But for Wil who currently had the body of lazy little shit, things would need to be as simple as it could be. Hopefully, he could find a small rock overhang he could sleep under while stacking up rocks or branches to form a wall. For nearly three hours he roamed the woods, always staying within three hundred yards of the stream, not wanting to get lost he would also drag the makeshift club behind him to leave a mark in the fallen leaves of the forest floor.

As one would expect from the Scandinavian area it was filled with huge spruce trees, so there were plenty of needles along the ground, It was noon by the time Wil found a suitable place to stay. A ten-minute walk north of the stream he found a large spruce that had been stuck by lightning. As such it had burned from the inside out and left only the trunk of the tree on three sides of the tree, The inside still had a good bit of solid wood, so he didn't has to worry about it falling apart too quickly.

Wil looked around the area and was pleased, the inside of the tree was large enough for him to sleep inside of as long as he curled up a little. Checking the ground he saw no prints other than his own to indicate an animal living nearby, He then began the work of making a roof for his new home. As the stump was only around five feet high, he was able to comfortably lift and set small thin branches up at the top in a mesh-like pattern.

He then began gathering pieces of bark to layer on top to act as an improvised shingle. While far from beautiful it would hopefully last him long enough to scout farther out. For now, he sat on a small log he had brought with him and began devouring the little handful of blackberries he had found nearby. Wil sighed as he looked outside and up into the sky, the top of the massive tree that had caught his attention before still visible, sending a shiver down his spine as he began to wonder what was under its broad blackish green leaves.

After a few minutes of rest, Wil stood up once more and decided to use the rest of his time today to gather more berries, firewood, kindling, and most importantly, starting the fire. To begin with, to prevent setting the tree on fire again he built a small pit out of stones he gathered from around the area, leaning a large slab-like rock against a log to act as a heat reflector to direct the heat into the tree a little more.

While he was gathering rocks, he found a large piece of flint that was naturally in the shape of a triangle about the size of his hand, smiling Wil held onto it, and once back at camp he began working on making his fire. As he had no lighter or steel to go with it, he would have to resort to a friction fire. To do this, he needed a few things, a thick piece of bark, a small bundle of kindling, And a smooth, straight stick.

From there he would place the bark down on the ground with the bundle on top of it before he would begin rolling the stick between his hands while pushing downwards with the tip in the middle of the bundle. Doing this fast enough would in time make him a small coal to build a fire. However, it would take its toll on his tender hands.

In the time it took him to get an ember using this method the skin on his palms were completely covered in blisters, and some had already burst open. When he was originally this age he would have quit long ago, But now it was different, Wil knew he would die if he didn't get this fire started. While it was comfortable out right now at a nice seventy degrees, he knew well that at night the temperature would plummet.

He took the time to nurse his fire up using bundles of dead spruce needles and small sticks before laying a large log next to the fire on the edge of it, just enough so that the fire would slowly catch it on fire. Once he felt safe with his fire, Wil ran down to the stream and began washing his hands thoroughly, taking a few long drinks of the icy cold water before he went back to camp.

Along the way, he was happy to find a few small Sage plants, Carefully uprooting them, he would replant them closer to his camp. Sage had great medicinal properties which he would no doubt need in the coming months. He took one of the leaves and placed it into his mouth and began chewing it idly, Smiling as he remembered his best friends Alice and Lily.

They had been his friends since childhood, Their parents had been neighbors, and as a result, they ended up playing together a lot. The two were twins who last he saw were charming girls, Both were only 4'11 and weighed around a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. Both girls were well toned as a result of their hobbies, Alice was a swimmer for their college team, whereas Lily was a member of the track team.

But what was truly unique was that both of them were Wiccans, Though in slightly different ways. Alice was a Green Witch as she liked to be called. She had a love for herbology, gardening, and the outdoors. Choosing to spend as much time as she could outdoors, Truthfully she was the reason why Adam went camping so often. Lily, on the other hand, was a Kitchen Witch, though she liked to be called a Hearth Witch. She had a gift for making gemstone jewelry by hand and natural remedies or potions as she preferred to call them, Between the two he never had to worry about a cold.

And while he did not have the same talents as they did Adam was a Wiccan as well, though this was simply because he could not find a name for someone who believed in both the Celtic and Norse mythology. His parents had been Wiccans of different covens, but after meeting each other at a gathering of local Wiccans, they were inseparable. Back then Adam, Alice, and Lily got along so well that their parents always joked that the three should just get married, Something that may well have happened if Adam had not changed so much when they entered high school. Whereas the girls became more involved in their studies, he fell in with the wrong crowd, A young group of kids who were the sons and daughters of a biker gang.

It had all started there, to be honest, His sudden shift from an A student who was a bit of a geek to being a rebellious punk who would skip school to go drinking. As a result, he got pulled into the gang lifestyle for nearly six years, Hell they were the reason he had a job as a bouncer. It was only in the year before his accident that Adam had begun to make things right again with Alice and Lily, though they were still more than a little pissed at how he brushed them off for so long.

As he spat the pulp of the sage leaf into his hands, he winced but began rubbing his hands together, While not what it excelled at Sage was a bit of an antibiotic plant though more for the respiratory system. Wil smiled as he remembered playing dungeons and dragons with the girls back in middle school, silently wishing he had never stopped talking to them, That he had never tried to impress the gang. All because he had wanted to get with a young woman who was the daughter of one of the members, the same woman who moved on after only a week of him being in the hospital.

Gritting his teeth, Wil shook his head and knelt down before the fire and taking his triangular piece of flint and placing the narrower, sharper end into the fire to let it get hot. He then grabbed a thick stick about the length of his forearm. He began using it to carve a hole into the stick. He was planning on trying to fashion an improvised hatchet, after getting the rock in the place he wanted he began knapping the edge of what would be the blade.

A process of carefully hitting it with another rock to chip an almost serrated edge onto it. While not too effective it would do for now. Though he would have to be careful with it as he currently had nothing to lash the flint in place. But by now the sun had begun to set, and Wil resigned himself to stopping for the night and moving inside of his tree hut. Laying on a bed of soft green needles and fir leaves he made sure to keep feeding his fire to last through the night, and right before he went to bed he built it up to a larger flame.

The next three weeks went just like the first day, Scouting just a little more each day, gathering more wood, building up his shelter slowly and steadily. He had begun stripping the bark carefully from saplings to make an improvised rope to lash his flint into place, once that was done his hut grew from the inside of the trunk. He made an A-frame style shelter with a long thick branch coming off of the roof with more smaller branches being leaned against it with leaves and debris being thrown on top of it to act as insulation before more bark shingles.

He had even begun fishing by fishing a gig from a long stick, carefully splitting the end of the green wood into a cross shape, lashing some of his rope between the pieces to keep them apart before burning them carefully carving points onto them and burning it in the fire to help harden it. Though allergic in the real world he was pleased to find that eating fish here had no effect on him. Something he was very grateful for as he would have wasted away without some proteins.

Even now he had lost a shocking amount of weight, Though all of his running around and working to survive had served to tone his body at the same rate, He almost wished this had been an option when he was younger. But the biggest catch was happening upon a dead wolf down by the stream at the start of the second month; The beast was massive, Nearly the size of a fully grown horse and while its silver gray pelt was covered in a large number of scars there were no fresh wounds. However, its age was apparent.

While he had never been a hunter, his Irish grandfather had practically beaten two valuable lessons into him, How to skin a kill, And never eat that which you didn't personally kill. There was no telling what happened to the wolf be it just its age or if it got into something toxic, some disease, or all of the above. But that was aside from the point, After carefully laboring over the old wolf Wil had a large gray fur pelt. He grimaced at the task but began to carve the beast into smaller, more manageable pieces. The smell of blood would attract predators sure enough, But to leave an entire corpse near the water he drank was worse.

Instead, he took the body back to his camp in five trips, hanging the wolf pelt near his main fire to help it dry out while taking a burning branch and forming a new fire a few yards from his shelter. He worked it up to a great blaze before kneeling before the fire; He laid the pieces of the wolf onto the fire before he bowed his head and offered a prayer.

"I offer this ancient one to the All-Father, And to Flidais. May he find peace in the next life.." Though this was all in his head as try as he might he still could not speak, His best guess was that this was a part of the game, planning to make him learn the language once he was found. But something caught his attention; the fire began to glow with a soft golden light, A light that soon grew until it took the form of the giant wolf he had found.

It stared down at him intently, tilting its head before it walked over to its pelt, brushing against which caused the pelt to glow brightly before falling into the fire, The flame flared up before going out, and laying in the pit was the pelt. The Wolf grabbed the now slightly charred fur and brought it to him only for him to see that it had changed to become a large hooded robe, like one would see a sage wearing though the hood was that of a wolf's head. Hands shaking Wil reached out and grabbed the clothes, his body growing warm just from touching them.

The wolf nudged its head against Wils shoulder before it began walking away only to stop and look back to him expectantly. Swallowing the saliva in his mouth, Wil hurriedly stood up and pulled the robe on, a small bone toggle holding it shut, Without worrying about anything else he began to follow the wolf despite the fact that it was getting dark. His eyes were fixed to the graceful form of the giant beast loaping through the woods, each of its strides was ten of his own, so he was forced to run to keep up. Though the wolf would stop and look back towards the small fur-clad human, making sure he had not lost him if he got too far ahead.

As night engulfed the forest, only the beast was visible, a golden beacon of light in the darkness. Wils heart was pounding violently in his chest as he forced his tired undernourished body to its limits to follow the beast. He didn't even know why he had left the relative safety of his camp; Wil could hardly believe he had run off into unknown territory without anything to defend himself. As he was lost in thought, he slipped and came crashing down, rolling down the hill that they had just crested, Only coming to a stop as he slammed violently into a tree.

He let out a yelp as the wind was knocked from his lungs, The hit was hard enough that Wil ended up vomiting what little food he had managed to get that day. As he was struggling to catch his breath, the wolf stood over Wil, looking down at him more annoyed than worried, as though it were disappointed by how weak the boy was. Noticing this Wil forced himself up to his feet and looked once more to the wolf and nodding as a sign for it to continue through the forest.

This continued through the night, from dusk till dawn Wil followed the wolf. And finally, they arrived at a vast cave, But as he stepped foot inside of it, Wilhelm collapsed and blacked out. When he next opened his eyes, he found himself staring at the roof of his debris hut, Sitting up and looking around revealed that he still had the fur robe. However, his feet were uninjured.

If not for the robe he would have written everything off as a dream, however, he began wondering why he was suddenly back at his camp rather than in the cave. Did it have to do with him passing out? As he wondered this Wil crawled out of the hut, stretching his arms up above his head before reaching down to his toes, letting out a strange laugh as none of his joints ached or popped.

His entire adult life had been spent working either as a bouncer or a fisherman, so both were rough on his body be it the constant standing weighing on his knees and back, or being hunched over a pile of fish and shrimp for hours on end. At the tender age of twenty-three, he had monthly visits to his local chiropractor to help keep his bones in proper alignment lest he permanently injures his back.

Looking into the sky he could see it was still before noon, so he decided to be bold, Grabbing his little hatchet and the fish gig he set out into the woods, Wilhelm had grown tired of fish and wanted to try hunting small game. And after seeing what happened when he offered the body of the wolf, he wondered if perhaps he could re-trigger the event somehow. At the same time, he began making his way through the forest in the direction he could remember the cave being, any sign of him fumbling through the woodland was long gone.

It all baffled Wil as he knew that the way he moved there should have been visible marks of his passing, snapped limbs, disturbances in the nettles on the ground, Something. But there was nothing to be seen; He kept coming back to the idea that it was a test, one he failed miserably, A test of endurance to keep up with the wolf and make it into the cave.

As he was lost in thought, however, he was being watched by a little raven fluttering through the tree tops, A beautiful young bird with bright red eyes that seemed to glow like the embers of a fire. Silently it kept watching over the boy as he pressed on, never hesitating as he kept making his way deeper and deeper into the forest. It refused to let him out of sight though never getting close enough to be heard or seen.

Relying purely on his seemingly drunken memory and instinct he pressed on. Though his pace slowed over time as he began hearing wildlife, the faint sounds of leaves rustling, The stream was near enough to pick out the sound of water going over small stone ledges. It had been hours since his little search had begun without a single break or drink of water, Making his way down the small hill and towards the sound of water Wilhelm froze in place as he cleared the brush.

Before his eyes stood a monstrous wolf much like the one he had found the day before though this one had a brilliant white coat like freshly fallen snow. However this wolf's fur had intricate symbols laying across it, but they drawn on these were naturally grown into its coat. Before he could even consider turning to run the wolf caught his scent and looked up at him, letting out a savage growl as he saw the boy as another wolf thanks to the hooded robe of fur, Unfortunately for Wilhelm the scent of the clothes original owner still evident.

While he wanted nothing more than to run away, Wil knew he would die the instant he turned his back, his breathing quickened as his pupils dilated, allowing him to take in more of the scene around himself as his eyes remained locked on the wolf. An icy tremor ran along his spine as it always would when he was about to fight, the feeling of fear and adrenaline kicking in all at once.

Without thinking, Wil lifted the fishing gig up and grasped it with both hands in front of him, much like a spear, though as soon as he did this, the wolf snarled and began running full bore at the boy. SO much rushed through his mind all at once seeing the horse sized wolf charging him, unquestionably knowing it could tear the tiny boy to shreds with ease. Though as he thought of the beast's size, he remembered something done by soldiers long ago.

As the beast got within range of the gig it leaped into the air to pounce upon his body; it was at this exact moment that Wil dropped to his knees and slammed the base of the gig into the ground with the spikes up. It was something much like a band of Infantry would do when faced with cavalry, They would take to their knees while raising their shields to defend from weapons while their spear went up to kill the horse or hopefully the rider. At the same time, he reached down to grab his hatchet, which was a good thing as the instant the wolf saw the gig suddenly in a place to take its throat it began to flail, turning somewhat to make the gig slam into its side just behind its front right leg.

The gig shattered and cracked while Wil dove to the side to prevent being crushed or caught by the beast's claws. However, he failed to some extent as the massive claw raked across the left side of his forehead, down across his eye, cheek, jaw. And down to his collarbone before carrying down from his collar to his hip. While the fur robe luckily took everything from his collar bone down his left eye was ruined, one of the hook-like claws having torn right into the tender organ. A savage, guttural cry of pain tore from his throat the instant he hit the ground, the icy water of the stream covering his face.

At the same time, however, the wolf was in a similar state, howling weakly as the gig had managed to puncture one of its lungs, But it was far from done with the boy, spinning around and preparing to take another lunge when a small raven swooped down and began harassing the wolf. Clawing and pecking at its eyes while narrowly avoiding its fangs. After a moment the wolf growled and ran off, leaving the pesky raven and the boy, Though it stopped to look back at Wilhelm, Without knowing it the boy had just made an enemy that would haunt him for the next five years.

Gasping for air as the pain wracked his body Wils vision began go grow dim, But the last thing he could see was the shape of the raven changing into that of a young feminine human, and the last thing he had heard before he blacked out was simply "Amadain...."