I lay in a fetal position, wracked with pain. My constitution fought to keep me alive, but it was a losing battle. Even with all the points I had put into it, my body was still succumbing to my wounds here in this cursed place. With all my potions gone and no healing to be had, death was reaching his cold hand through my battered, broken chest. The battle still raged above me, though I knew not who was winning.

All my efforts undone. My life draining…draining...away. I had sacrificed so much. And for what? I didn’t want to die! My mind raced. Was there a way out? Surely there was some loophole...some trick...anything that would allow me to survive!

I heard scratching in the darkness. What was it now? Some animals in the depths, come to finish me off in my weakness? Or perhaps the enemy had won and was tying off loose ends.

Though I pressed the wound with all my might, blood still drenched my fingers. Or perhaps it was the blood of those who had fallen at my hands?

My breath heaved, and I could hear the bubbling of fluid filling my lungs. I coughed, and wetness covered my lips. My legs were growing cold. Though my efforts were partially stemming the lifesblood running out of me, my hands were weakening. Soon, I would no longer have the strength to partially dam the flow and then it would flood out until my heart no longer beat and I was overcome.

A light flared and shone in the darkness.

I gasped and sat up, clutching my chest and searching for a wound that wasn’t there. That dream had been so real! I had been afraid...so afraid. Maybe it wasn’t a dream but a memory? If so, I was glad to have forgotten it. When I had died at the hand of the orc in the prison cell, it had happened so quickly that I barely had time to register what was happening. But this? Dread had stolen my courage. A visceral fear had drowned hope and left ashes and blood in my mouth as I slowly felt life leaving my body.

The scent of forest loam filled my nostrils, and faint sunlight glanced off my face after filtering through the leaves of the tree under which I had fallen asleep. My back hurt from lying on hard tree roots, and my neck was tight from being crooked to one side all night. The sounds of chirping birds must have woken me.

I had run as long and as far as I could the night before, just barely retaining the sense to keep the sun at my back so that I was going west as I had been told. My stomach had ached in hunger, but my fear had been greater than the hollow feeling in my belly. I had paused at a stream to drink and then continued running until I was too exhausted to continue.

I had collapsed then and rested for a while before forcing myself up to run some more. When night fell I had tried to find an area with many bushes to hide in and had huddled up to sleep at the base of the tree against which I was now leaning.

Shaking the grogginess from my head and trying to ignore the sense of foreboding left over from my nightmare, I took a deep breath and listened intently. I heard nothing beyond the birds greeting the morning and felt a small amount of relief. It had seemed unlikely that anyone had survived the awesome destruction of Spiral Castle, but I had not wanted to take any chances.

Hunger roiled my stomach as I had eaten nothing since waking in my cell. Food. How would I find it? Outside of the orcish knife and Veritas, all I had was a couple of pouches and my leather armor. I didn’t know if Small Blades would help me kill an animal by throwing my knife at it, so I was at a loss as to how I would keep myself from starving to death.

Looking down at my clothes and unwashed state, I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose. I smelled of dirt and sweat and what could only be unwashed orc. Remembering that my benefactor had said that there would be clothes in the pouch he had given me, I pulled it off my dirty orc belt and looked inside.

With a shout I threw the thing from me.

Inside the pouch had been nothing but...blackness!

I pressed myself back against the tree, watching the pouch intently for any sign of danger, but it merely lay where I had thrown it. After several long minutes, I reasoned to myself that the man in brown would not have gone to all the trouble of saving me so that he could harm me in some strange, pouch-like manner.

All right, time to use my head a little. I picked up the pouch and peered intently at it. Nothing. I ordered my Identify skill to activate.

Pouch. ???

Well, that was helpful.

I pulled the mouth of the pouch open again and looked warily inside at the blackness I had seen before. Tentatively and with a reluctant grimace on my face, I slowly slid one of my hands into the darkness. It felt like absolutely nothing, as if my hand was waving around in mid-air. I pushed my hand in further, all the way up to half the length of my forearm while thinking clothes to myself, and the feeling of cotton made itself known between my fingers. With a swallow, I grabbed the material and pulled it out.

I was holding a plain, gray cotton shirt with simple ties down the front and long sleeves. In wonder, I stared at the pouch again, and suddenly words appeared before my eyes.

Bag of Holding.

Congratulations! Your Identify skill has increased to Level 2!

Well, that was helpful. Using the object and understanding its purpose must have triggered the Identification. Did skills level up so easily for everyone? Or maybe each level was incremental so that people had skill levels in the hundreds or thousands? There was so much I didn’t know.

After quickly dumping my orc leather onto the ground, I stripped out of the filthy tunic I had been “born” with and pulled on the cotton shirt. Much nicer. Warmer, too.

With only a tinge of apprehension this time, I reached into the Bag of Holding again and pulled out a pair of well-tailored, everyday pants made of some kind of hide. I slipped into them as well. I was about to throw away my prison clothing and then thought better of it, tossing it into the Bag of Holding. As expected, it disappeared into the darkness with no trouble at all.

Next I examined my feet. I had been surprised that they had weathered the run yesterday much better than I would have expected. Whatever the reason, though I did have cuts on the bottom of my feet, they had not been torn to ribbons like I would have thought. Odd.

With a thoughtful “hmph” I reached into the Bag of Holding again and extracted a pair of thick woolen socks and also a pair of well-made leather shoes. The shoes would have been a tad large, but the socks helped make up for any excess space, allowing me to walk without too much slippage against the soles of the shoes. No matter what, it was better than going barefoot.

Finally, I wrinkled my nose and then re-equipped the orcish leather. I would have preferred something different, but reaching into the Bag of Holding had elicited no armor whatsoever. Protection was important, even what little this nasty orcish leather granted.

With a sigh I wondered to myself how I was going to hunt anything down with a sword and one dagger. I knew nothing about forest craft. I didn’t even know how to make a fire, let alone how to track and kill animals for food. And foraging? I couldn’t tell an edible mushroom from a poisonous berry. I suppose if I ate just small amounts of plants that I found maybe I could figure out through trial and error…

My glance fell on the Bag of Holding that I had re-tied on my belt. Cocking my head to one side, I reached inside it thinking food to the bag. I pulled out some kind of hard biscuit and then a full waterskin. It looked like my benefactor had been well-prepared for a journey.

After eating, I dropped the half-full waterskin back into the Bag of Holding and then dropped my orcish pouch into it as well. The pouch held some small amount of copper as well as the blue resurrection location gem I had been given.

Finally, I let the frustration and fear back to the forefront of my thoughts.

What was going on? Who was I? Who was the man in brown? I didn’t know ANYTHING. How could I make any decisions with no knowledge?

Then I remembered...what had he told me to do? He told me to think Status.

NAME: PAOL

LEVEL 3

ATTRIBUTES - 6 UNASSIGNED POINTS

STRENGTH 10

DEXTERITY 11

AGILITY 12

INTELLIGENCE 10

WISDOM 12

CONSTITUTION 10

SPIRIT 84

HIT POINTS 30

STAMINA 30

MANA 30

SKILLS - 4 UNASSIGNED POINTS

ANALYZE - 2

BLUNT WEAPONS - 1

DODGE - 1

HIDE - 1

IDENTIFY - 2

SMALL BLADES - 1

STEALTH - 1

SWORDS - 2

Okay. So this was a measurement of...me? Since my Attributes were all close to 10--except for Spirit--I assumed that 10 must be some kind of base or average amount. Some of the attributes appeared fairly self-explanatory, but some things…

HIT POINTS - A MEASURE OF YOUR LIFE FORCE. IF THIS DROPS TO ZERO, YOU WILL DIE.

All right. Clear and succinct. I definitely needed more of this. It was at 30 instead of 10 which suggested that it had gone up with each level since I was level 3. I had 6 unassigned attribute points, so maybe I could assign it to Hit Points. It looked as if thinking at the Status was the way to manipulate it, so I thought to it, “place Attribute Points into Hit Points.”

HIT POINTS ARE NOT AN ATTRIBUTE. PLEASE USE ATTRIBUTE POINTS ON ATTRIBUTES.

That must mean that the attributes were those first seven numbers that were grouped together. I focused on “Strength,” which gave me a brief description of how my Strength number affected me. Strength determined how much damage I dealt during a fight as well as the amount of weight I could carry. That made sense. It also determined the speed at which my Stamina refilled.

Dexterity and Agility were interesting. Dexterity was related to how good you were with your fingers and hands (and maybe your toes), while Agility determined the speed and responsiveness of your entire body.

Intelligence was fairly self-explanatory, but outside of making you quicker and more flexible mentally, it had some kind of affect on how much mana a person had. Wisdom determined the speed at which you regained mana.

Constitution would increase your--

YES! This was what I needed! I was too damned easy to kill! Without a second thought, I pumped all 6 of my Attribute Points into Constitution. I saw my Hit Points leap from 30 to 48, and I calculated that each Constitution point would grant me one extra hit point per level.

I finished reading the description of Constitution to find that a person’s ability to resist poison and illness were also dependent on Constitution.

Finally, there was Spirit.

AFFECTS ALL THINGS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.

That was distinctly unhelpful.

Stamina basically determined how quickly you got tired. Mana points would power your spells, if you had any.

As for the Skills, they weren’t difficult to figure out, even without reading the descriptions. However, I did have 4 Skill points. I pondered what to do with them when it occurred to me that I was already gaining skill levels at what appeared to be a quick pace, so perhaps it would make sense to save these points for sometime in the future when they might be able to help me out of difficulty by boosting a skill instantaneously.

Finally, I felt like I was beginning to understand what these words meant. The man in brown had told me that the Status would tell me about myself, and it had worked out exactly as he had said. Gratitude beat in my chest for the rescue while guilt at his death gave me a heavy heart.

Time to start off, I decided. I put my hand on Veritas’s hilt so I could keep her from getting entangled in plants as I marched through the forest. I took a deep breath and turned to face away from the sun which rose in the east.

"If only I knew how long it would take me to get to the kingdom of Paravel!"

Maybe I can help, said something in my head.

I screamed.