I awake with sore muscles and a slightly pounding head, my body slumped against a slab of stone jutting out of the ground, and the deep orange light of a setting sun shining through the forest.

I gingerly test my head, but luckily, there's no blood. Neck hurts a little, probably because of whiplash, but my backpack cushioned my impact - else I'd probably be dead.

Raven's gone, not sure where. I protected her with my body, so she's not dead or injured, but she still flew away somewhere. Hell, maybe she's scouting the countryside. I wouldn’t be able to linger the night, not with the icy wind blowing through the trees, so I get busy collecting dry moss and deadwood to start a fire.

The area I've arrived in is almost completely destroyed, whatever structure was there before blasted apart by my explosive entry. I'm noticing a trend with that. What happened? What went wrong? Did they destroy the gateway on the other side, and the teleport redirected itself here? If that's the case, I'm probably lucky the network has a safeguard for that. I don't think whatever space those teleport conduits run through is very hospitable to life.

I resign myself to waiting for Raven to return, and look for something to light the fire - need two rocks, preferably flint, and a piece of metal...

Wait, what am I saying? I have Magic. Duh.

I sit down cross-legged, and stare at the quickly arranged campfire. There's dry moss stuffed in the bottom, with a bunch of branches stacked over it. Closing my eyes, I go through the motions.

Call forth a spark of power from the Lake, bring it into reality. Run it along my arm, down my finger, and hold it there. Gently...

Slowly opening my eyes, I smile at the little point of green light between my two fingers. I slowly bring it down to the moss, hold it against it, and feed it a bit more magic. It glows brighter and brighter, and as soon as it starts stinging my fingertip with heat I let it go, sending it drifting into the stack. Yet despite its distance, I remain aware of it in a way I still don’t really understand.

It’s like I finally get it, I finally know what to do to make it last, to be aware of it even when it isn’t directly connected to my body.

With a bit of careful attention, the spark ignites the moss, then the wood, and I stack a bit more on top to stave off the biting wind.

I've just done my first bit of active, conscious, controlled magic not borne from emotional turmoil.

Nice.

***

Raven returns when the last rays of the setting sun wane into a brilliant night sky. I'd been warming a bit of jerky (not actually made of meat - I'm holding onto my habits for as long as I can) over the fire, and she flutters into view, circling overhead before settling down on my backpack. She craws once, somehow conveying a sense of negativity, then puts her head under her wing. Didn't find anything interesting, then.

I'm wary of the night, there are noises in the dark - rustling, crackling, creepy noises, but the fire seems to keep any curious wildlife away. There's some sort of animal call in the distance, similar to the howling of a wolf, but different. Because of the higher pitch and warble, it almost sounds like a human screaming. I'm glad I know how to use a sword, now.

Suffice it to say, I don't get much sleep that night. The silver lining is the night sky, which is incredibly clear and bright. I hadn't ever seen such a starscape before, at least not in reality. Neetu's overlay was pretty, but still obviously fake. This was real. And breathtaking.

There weren't any constellations I recognized, which was probably to be expected - I wasn't on Earth anymore, after all.

Hell, I didn't even know where I was in a greater sense. I wondered if Neetu and the others knew what happened.

Probably not.

From their end, the teleport must have just turned off without me. Why did it redirect itself here?

***

I experimented with magic a bit more during the night, surprised at the ease with which it came now. The spark of light quickly became my favourite, closely followed by the other thing I tried: slowly heating up an object I was holding. Sadly, I didn’t actually have any protection against the heat I was imparting, which limited the trick’s usefulness somewhat. No cooking without fire, then.

I didn't manage to make the spark much bigger than before. It seemed to expel mostly heat instead of light, so it quickly became too hot to handle.

I experimented a little with feeding it energy in different ways, and managed to get it to slowly pulse light and heat, but not much else. Trying to increase the distance between it and my hand also found some tangential success, but it quickly faded out unless I pushed more and more energy into it. And even then, it quickly destabilized and winked out of existence.

Manipulating magic, I realized, was very unlike anything I'd ever done. It felt at once like thinking outside my head and flexing a muscle I didn't know I had, and it slowly made me groggier the more magic I attempted to channel. When I tried to push as much magic into the spark as possible, all I got was a set of burnt fingertips for my trouble, not a ray of heat or a small flame, like I’d hoped. The energy seemed to adhere to rules, still, and couldn’t exactly act unprompted. I had to know in some way what I wanted and how to achieve it, or it just wouldn’t do anything.

I also spoke with Ref some more, but she didn’t have any useful advice for me. It seemed that our two ways of using magic were fundamentally different - hers was based on intent, and essentially "seeing" the world as you want it to be, while mine was based on the conscious manipulation of inner energy. I had to directly influence the power, while she had to believe the world is different strongly enough for it to override the way it actually is.

It was a bit more involved than that, and apparently required very precise ways of thinking, but that was the gist of it. It also reminded me, once more, of the fact that she wasn't human. I witnessed first-hand the way she could actively manipulate her own mind (and therefore her shape, in some strange way that made me want to look away), bend it into shapes that were completely alien.

When she tried to teach me one of those strange mindstates, neither of us could really put into words what I was supposed to do, or what I was actually doing.

***

I eventually did fall asleep sometime after midnight, the lonely moon shining a crescent above, the animal-calls and the rustling all around dying away, and slept until the first rays of the sun shone through the forest from the other direction. In the morning light, it became obvious that this entire area had been constructed artificially - most of the boulders and blocks of stone were too flat, their edges too straight and their positions too geometric for them to be natural.

A closer inspection showed that some of the stones from the inner area (which were sadly also the most damaged by my entry) had actual markings on them. They resembled runes, but no language I'd ever seen before. All the letters were very angular, and coiled themselves around a single vertical line for every symbol, but from what I could see, that was where the similarities ended. I counted forty-seven unique symbols, and absolutely zero sentence structure or spaces or any sort of punctuation. The writing was just an endless series of symbols coiling along the stones in a spiraling shape.

We eventually decided to travel in the opposite direction of the icy wind, figuring that the other direction would only become colder, and set off on a trip through the slightly autumn-colored forest.

All the trees had bark that was varying shades of grey, and their actual wood was an eye-biting orange, but apart from that, the forest looked very... earth-like. I knew none of the plants, of course, but apparently leaves and chlorophyll weren't unique to Earth. It made me wonder about the origin of plants in general.

I continued playing with the spark of light during our walk, trying to make it as small as possible without winking out, and found it to be surprisingly difficult. The energy within me coiled itself against my will, trying to overpower it and either flow freely or taper off, and holding it steady at an increasingly smaller rate proved to be extraordinarily hard.

I eventually managed to impart a tiny bit of momentum into the spark, which made it fly off my finger like those on an open fire do, but it was still quite useless for anything other than lighting dry moss or leaves on fire, which I quickly stamped out.

Raven was also circling overhead, scouting out the landscape from above, and directed me around several obstacles in the forest. One time, she had me walk a large circle around a darkened cave, and when I whispered to her asking what it was, she only shivered slightly before lifting off my shoulder again.

It was likely an animal den of sorts. I definitely didn't want to meet those screaming beasts I'd heard the night prior.

Morning turned to midday when we finally broke free of the forest into a gently hilled plain that stretched beyond the horizon. It was a grassland, the shrubs and things growing almost to my waist, but still traversable.

I started walking, stepping over large stones and spying grazing animals in the distance, with the forest slowly shrinking behind me. As I neared one of the herds, I saw that they had very pointy antlers that looked almost too big for their heads, but that they scattered at the sight of me striding towards them through the tall grass.

Raven had abandoned the skies for my shoulder after spying some very large birds circling overhead, some of them focussed on the herd, while another one apparently had its eye on me. As one, the larger group swept down on the herd, and grasped one of the fleeing animals. They slowly flew off with the poor thing struggling all the way.

When I saw the one circling overhead dive down as well, I drew my sword, and took a swing when it got close, slicing blindly at it while jumping to the ground. It screeched in pain, and quickly flew off, cradling its injured foot.

"Teach you not to mess with me!" I shouted after it, scattering the remainders of the herd of grazers, which had looked on with interest.

***

I eventually reached a very fast, roaring river - and saw something on the other side. A sign of civilisation! There was a road running along the other side of the river; A trodden path, no cobblestones or asphalt, but still very obviously a road. Raven and I wandered along the meandering river for quite some time, before we ultimately reached a crossing where the river grew in width and became much calmer. I was suddenly very grateful for the new shoes Neetu had given me after I disintegrated my old Earth ones during a lesson with Ska'an.

They were very utilitarian, made of some weird space-material that felt like synthetic fabric, but had about 20x the tensile strength and was completely water- and fireproof. Well, to a degree. I could walk across a burning desert without my feet being singed, but glowing embers would likely melt the soles.

The crossing led to a three-way fork in the road, one path leading back across the river and towards the biting wind (which had abated a lot since we'd come out of the forest), one leading back along the river we'd just walked, and the third slowly snaking its way over a hill and out of sight.

I examined the trodden path for tracks, and found none - either the wheel was never invented here, or it wasn't as widely used as it had been on Earth. Most of the tracks were deep, cloven-hooved footprints, possibly the same as the grazing animals from before, as well as strangely deep pawprints which were both longer than those of earth-animals and did not appear to belong to an animal that moved on four legs.

I decided to follow those, they'd likely lead me to a town or village of sorts. My food wouldn't last forever, and I did not trust the water in the river running beside me.

***

The road seemed to meander on without end. Over hills, under fallen trees and rock formations it went on and on. I saw the occasional alcove on the side of the road, usually with a pit in the middle, but those pits were filled with nothing but cold, dry ash. Come nightfall, Raven and I made another stop in one of those alcoves, partly hidden by a large rock beside the road.

I lit another fire, this time simply pointing my finger and loosening the spark (and then slowly nurturing it), and we settled down for another night. Perhaps when out of the forest, this one wouldn't be so sleepless. I was somewhat wary of the fire on such an empty plain, because it would be visible for miles.

After eating, Raven settled down to sleep, and I began playing with my magic once again.

This time, I lit a small splinter of firewood, and slowly fed it magic. I wanted to see if I could manipulate existing elements instead of creating my own, and the result was very inconclusive.

Fire appeared to have a mind of its own, flickering this way and that, but I could somewhat manipulate its size and intensity by feeding or tapering magic into/out of it. The air was a dreadful conductor for magic, and I would have had to put my fingers as close as possible to the flame, but I discovered that the wood the little flame was slowly consuming was much better in this regard.

I managed to bolster the flame to such a degree that it lit the surrounding area, but it consumed the splinter in record time and I almost burned my hand. After that, I was much more careful, and managed to smother another flame down to only a glowing bit of ember at the end of the splinter, and bolster it to the intensity of a small candle. Keeping it there was very taxing, though, as my magic wanted to rush out and infuse the flame, and the flame wanted the same.

After playing with the fire for a bit, I set it back down into the pit and took leaves and cuttings and flowering branches from the shrubs surrounding the alcove, and tested them out as well. The common grass growing all over these plains was a very poor conductor for magic, and quickly dried out as I fed into it. The rest was about the same as the wood, but there was one exception. One of the rarer flowers growing on the plains, a brilliant blue tulip-like plant, seemed to be able to accept magic to a certain point. Too much burned it like the grass, but below that point, the plant slowly regained color and its petals opened as though the sun had risen.

I kept it up, carefully controlling the flow, and the flower became more and more vibrant, the blue petals almost seeming to glow from within. It could've been a trick of the light, but at some point, those petals loosened from the flower and slowly fluttered to the ground, while the stem in my hands quickly shriveled up into ash.

Carefully picking them up, I marveled at the slightly luminescent petals, which even now still felt warm and alive.

After carefully securing them in an empty bottle, I looked into the night sky, huddled under my blanket, until I fell asleep.

***

The three of us set off in the morning after I smothered the flame and rolled up the sleeping bag received from Neetu while cleaning out his storeroom, and we set off once more.

I kept my eyes open for any more unknown plants, and managed to pick a few more of the vibrant blue flowers, securing them in another one of my empty bottles with a bit of river-water.

It was a few hours past midday when Raven spotted the smoke over the horizon, and after urgently directing my head away from the side of the road, I saw it too. There were a few tiny pillars of smoke rising into the sky, perhaps from chimneys?

I lengthened my strides, crossed a few more hills and then stopped with a start, sniffing the air. It didn't smell like any sort of city or village, it smelled like burning. Burning wood.

Cresting the next hill, I stopped dead, looking at the round bowl in the earth before me.

I was standing on its edge, the whole thing perhaps ten or fifteen kilometers across, looking very much like an ancient meteorite impact site. I'd seen them on Earth before, usually large, bowl-shaped and incredibly old, and this one fit the definition to a T.

However, the smoke wasn't coming from the bowl itself, but what lay within. At its very center, there was what appeared to have at one point been a small town, with buildings of clay, brick, wood and thatching, but it was now only a burning ruin.

As I crested the hill, a faint noise had also become audible: the distant ringing of a large bell.

The rest of the bowl was taken up by fields, though these hadn't fared any better than the town itself. There were large furrows slashed into them, many sections of the crops were burned or burning, and there was at least one large silo-like structure that had spilled a large amount of grain, which was also burning.

I also saw small black shapes moving through the burning buildings, as well as a small collection of tents to one side.

***

Beholding the scene for a moment, I soon shook myself from my funk, and started down the rim of the crater, along the road, which was almost carved into the smooth edge of the caldera. I sent Raven up ahead, to scout the situation and determine their hostility (or benignness), and put on a brave face.

I was still a med student, even after all these months, so what if there was nobody to test me, to grant me a title? I still had that conviction to help. Especially the victims of a disaster such as this.

On the way down, I weighed in my mind the risk of becoming involved in this war, because that's all it could be - the burning was too regular, the destruction too absolute to be anything natural short of a firestorm or a volcanic eruption. The fields surrounding the little town had been systematically burned, and what little greenery remained on the side of the crater I was approaching from looked to be withering, as though it hadn't been watered in weeks.

I noticed a small group of people assembling themselves into a group on the road I was on, forming a thin line of shapes. As I got closer, I could spy the glinting of metal as it reflected the light of the sun, which was setting behind me. These were most likely the remaining defenders.

Climbing over a toppled wagon, the grain within having the same strange withered quality as all the plant life around, I got my first good look at the inhabitants.

I'd been right, they were most certainly military of a sort, perhaps town guards or even some kind of official military, but I began to get concerned. No advanced weaponry? No laser cannons or plasma casters? Not even ballistic weaponry? Their tech was advanced enough to cover them almost head to toe in steel and leather, but all they wielded were swords, pikes and shields.

I stumbled a little when I realized that I likely hadn't landed in a "freed" world. No, this one was still trapped under the Illusion.

While thinking about the issue of communication - I hadn't forgotten how MBasic had affected me in the beginning - I saw that they were mercifully humanoid in stature. Not human proportions, but they did have two legs and two arms, as well as only a single head. Some of them had noticeably broader torsos and comparatively shorter arms and legs, while the other half had very bulky legs, but a lithe torso. Possible dimorphism?

I still didn't have the foggiest as to how I would talk with these people when I finally stopped walking a small distance away. Their helmets were metal as well, and what little of their faces I could see looked like a mix of canine and feline, but I couldn’t discern more from this distance. The two protrusions at the top of their helmets gave the illusion of ears as well. Were I still a normal human, their faces would likely have terrified me just a bit, especially the sight of the leader's teeth, but I wasn't. I had drunk several kinds of alien under the table (and was beaten by more than that). Appearance really didn't have that much of an impact on me anymore.

After a tense minute of staring at each other, one of the line stepped forward, keeping his (maybe? The broad torso and stocky limbs somehow seemed more masculine to me) spear pointed at me. He opened his mouth, and uttered a string of very incomprehensible sounds, the end bending upwards in question.

I panicked for a brief moment, then heard a voice in the back of my head.

Foreign language detected. Would you like to engage the translator?