It's been three months since you've landed on this continent in the New World. With the crunch of gravel stuck under your boot, you step up the tangled roots onto a boulder slick with moss, scaling it with careful footholds, over the apex, and above the undergrowth's canopy, basking in mist and filtered sunlight. Strung from a stone stuck in a narrow crevice hangs a cache of supplies you've left the week before. Crouching low, your arms reach into the crevice and work the knot on the stone, untying it and pull the cache out onto the boulder. You rummage inside and discard a letter, crumpling it and pocketing it for fire starter. The letter was there in case others found the cache, and it only asked for their courtesy when using the things you left behind, but no longer.
This place is too close to the relic you found, an old home, decrepit and vacant. The entrance is tucked into the foot of an ivy hill. At first, by some magic, it kept you from discovering it, anywhere else and it would have gone unnoticed, but since there was an inexplicably blank spot on your map next to the cache you put, it left a sour feeling on your hard work. You hated it. It made you doubt your eyes, your methods, and so you spent a week retracing your steps in circles with stubborn tenacity. Each approach became an experiment. Every branch, every root, tested, written down with trial and error, until, finally, you got through, and soon after you discovered the entrance of a burrow and the relics of a home inside.
The rekindling of mystery and adventure is why your thoughts return to those windless waters. The wondrous sight of the endless night sky above, reflected below on still waters, as if you sailed through the stars and nebulae itself to another dimension. Two seperate worlds, the old and new rung true. Curiosity urges you to quickly pack your things and return to those relics you found. The cache slings over your shoulder and you descend disgracefully with a few steps off balance. Ultimately, it's a sharp fall, and a heavy thud below. Dumbass. You gather yourself, brushing the dewy moss off your clothes in spite before walking it off.
You face the hateful barrier once more but first bury the remains of a firepit that served you well these past few days. With everything sorted on the outside of the barrier, you proceed until the frontal bone of your cranium starts resonating. Two days ago, after countless wild ideas and attempts against the barrier, you identified eight wards placed within it, all hidden into the natural undergrowth and forest. Two knotted roots, a shrub, a split rock, and four trees are all imbued with magic that spreads out from them. You trained yourself to hear their humming resonances in your skull. It'll harmlessly cloud your thoughts and confuse your limbs if you don't resist, but you won't get close to the entrance at all either.
You adjust your mental state, not fully resisting the influence of the eight wards but just enough to break their stability. The resistance is like ripples in a pond, the eight intersecting fields of magic become unstable and variable. You'll know when the headache suddenly spikes or something scratches your bone that you should retreat, but when it randomly dissipates, inactive for just a brief second, you jump forward. With luck, patience and mental fortitude, you grasp every opportunity to leap across, once, twice and thrice, until the pressure dissipates and never returns. One hour had elapsed in that manner.
Ivy squash under your boots in the entryway and you toss the cache beside your other things in some corner. There's camping equipment, chainmail, greaves and gauntlets, a pair of spare boots and a few changes of clothes in a relic laundry basket you scavenged. You sit heavily on the chair pulled from beneath a table, the relics creaking beneath your weight, and massage the fatigue out of your brows as all of the fatigue built over the last few days starts catching up to your body. A deep and guttural sigh escapes your lips. Fuck. That hateful barrier keeps ruining your week, and it's all because you wanted to be thorough for a damnable cache, at the start when completing your map, and now when you're making sure no one takes your opportunity away from you.
The room around you is small and arranged like a scholar's dorm. The kitchen connects to the study, a nook with a narrow shelf of books written and printed in a script you don't recognise yet find beautiful. An empty countertop except for the dry aged chops from an animal you didn't know the name of. Beside it, empty pots and baskets are on the floor. There are cutlery, plates, cups and utensils for a single person or two inside the drawers and cupboards. One for the owner and perhaps the occasional guest you guess. Then there is also a washroom, bedroom, pantry in the back and a small workshop with miscellaneous equipment for extracting natural products from raw materials. Pigments, powders, liquids, ingots and other such substances are stored on four rows of shelving.
It takes a week to transform the old relic into something lived it, though you keep most things unperturbed, the study nook and workshop is where you reside day and night. You connect characters to various ingredients, equipment, sketches and concepts, identifying components that their create characters, trying different meanings, learning words and phrases, and theorising grammar. Beautiful. You remark, though the entire language still alludes your comprehension, you can't help but admire a text in your journal that's copied from a book on the study's desk. The text is a description of a woman's appearance, and her beauty is not only described in metaphor, but also by the script's logographs as well. It's an artistic piece itself. That's enough. You set your journal and fountain pen aside on the desk.
You glance back at the page of text you referenced and wish you could listen to how it sounds and articulate it yourself, if only someone could read it for you. Lost in thought, the question of where their people had gone crosses your mind. Questions like, where is their cities and what their population was like, because since the Old World had landed, the continent has not shown any signs of civilised people. This single home defies that, and furthermore, its abandonment by the owner is a little worrying fact that haunts you every night. Forget it. There is nothing you can do about the destruction of past peoples, but you hope to at least meet one of their kind before your people might meet the same destruction too. Not to sow bad luck or anything.