The camp was in ruins. The firepit stones were scattered, his pottery broken on the ground, and his cache of salted meat stolen. Even a small cache of spare javelins was destroyed, snapped in two and littered on the ground.

Paul had no doubt it was the troll’s work. The ruined cache was one of his closest stashes to where he had first encountered the trolls, the destruction was too methodical to be anything but deliberate. He winced as he held up a piece of shattered pottery, recalling how many days of practice it had taken before he could make a serviceable pot.

The discovery, as painful as it was to see his hard work destroyed, helped reaffirm Paul’s decision to find a way past - or through - the trolls. Any fantasy he had entertained that the trolls would just forget about him and leave him be was dispelled, which made Paul’s course of action clear.

It wasn’t the first cache that Paul had found disturbed, but he had held out hope that the missing pouches of salted meat that he had secreted through the caves were the work of one of the cave’s less intelligent denizens. He let the piece of pottery slip between fingers, letting it fall along with his hopes for a peaceful resolution. Seymore nuzzled at Paul’s chin. Paul wasn’t sure if the lizard was trying to comfort him or if he just wanted more food, but at times like this, the simple reminder that he wasn’t alone helped Paul calm himself.

If the trolls keep coming for me, they’ll eventually find my home cave. And that can’t happen. I’ve put too much effort, too much of myself into it. His home cavern held all of Paul’s hard-won efforts to scrape together the trappings of civilization. His leatherworking, his kiln, his crude loom, his rough-hewn but carefully crafted tools he used to fashion weapons and clothing - all were there. Just the thought of the trolls finding the cavern made Paul nauseated.

When he first came to the caverns, dread immobilized him. Now Paul channeled it. If I don’t want what I dread to come to pass, then I better goddamn take steps to prevent it from happening. He took one last look at the ruined cache, turned on his heel, and tucked Seymore back in his pack

----

Paul earned the [Traps] skill while he was finishing up his first deadfall. While Paul didn’t know if he would ever get used to the notifications, he no longer flinched when he received the messages - a fact that he was deeply thankful for as he slowly removed his hand from the branch that kept an enormous slab of rock precariously balanced above his head. He painstakingly extricated himself from beneath the trap, unspooling a length of braided sinew that was tied around the branch at one end. He walked down the cave until the sinew rope reached its end, and tied that end around a loose stone one the cave floor. Once that was done, and the end of the rock slab remained balanced on the branch, Paul finally released a breath that he hadn’t known he had been holding.

With a thought, he added the trap to his mental map of the caves.

With one trap done, he moved on to the next location he had picked for a deadfall trap. When Paul first came up with the idea to set traps for the trolls invading his home, he had grand visions of arrows fired from holes in the wall and spring-driven spears plunging from the cave’s ceiling. His dreams of complicated mechanisms, pressure-plates and spinning sawblades were quickly dashed as he took an inventory of what he had to work with - including his limited know-how. The [Traps] skill, however, helped him come up with some other simple - and he hoped effective - designs.

Animal skins stretched over small crevasses in the caves were covered in dust and rocks, making them look like solid ground, only to give way when a creature stepped on them. Obsidian shards tied together to form crude caltrops, ready to cut through the soft under soles of would-be trespassers. Rendered fat slathered over smooth stone to make every step treacherous. Hour after laborious hour, the tunnels leading to Paul’s home cavern in his mental map became studded with traps.

Traps weren’t Paul’s only preparations. Between building obstacles for the trolls, he returned to his home cavern and made more weapons. He knew from hard-won experience how easily the sharp but oh-so-brittle obsidian tips of his javelins and spears could shatter, so he secreted more about the tunnels at key points where he imagined he may make a stand. Before sleeping, he continued his practice with his orbs of light, weaving them as quickly as possible and then pumping more and more intent into them until they shone so bright they hurt his eyes to look at. He hoped it would hurt the Troll’s bulbous eyes even more.

Seymore voiced his complaints when the light got too bright, making a dissatisfied ‘chirp’ and burrowing his head in the pack.

Paul still hadn’t seen the trolls after several periods of sleep, but he found more of his outlying caches destroyed. In his mental map of his caverns, the territory where Paul felt relatively safe began to shrink. While sifting through the ruins of another of his camps, he cursed as realization dawned on him.

“I’ve been stupid Seymore. I’ve been so stupid,” Paul buried his face in his hands as he crouched over the remains of one of his hunting camps. “I’ve left them a damned roadmap.”

He kicked at what used to be one of his precious, carefully whittled arrow shafts, now broken in pieces. “All my carefully prepared camps, all my food caches. I might have well written ‘You’re going the right way’ in pictogram on the fucking walls!”

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” He began running, dread heavy in his gut. I’ve got to clean all my camps. Remove any trace that I was there. I’m not ready for them yet. Hell, I don’t know if I’ll ever be, but I’ve only finished half of the traps that I planned on...

Paul half-ran half-jogged into the darkness of the caves, absorbed in self-reproach. He quickly wove a light above his head, illuminating the cave. In his frustration, he pumped more intent into the light, and he could feel the strain on his woven intent as the gossamer strands of will stretched to contain the glowing sphere. Until they didn’t.

Paul stopped short, catching himself on the sharp walls of the tunnel as he felt his weave break. The sensation was like a rubber band snapped directly onto his brain. He briefly registered pain on his left palm, sliced open on the jagged rocks, but then his attention was captured by the damaged orb, which resembled nothing more than a balloon that had escaped before it was tied off, spiraling across the cave, casting strobe-like shadows as it corkscrewed through the air impossibly fast toward the far wall, where it connected with a burst of blinding light, a puff of dust, and a sharp report that echoed through the labyrinth.

Blinking after-images from his eyes, Paul nearly missed the notification that he had gained a new spell:

*New Variant Spell Gained: [Weak Spiraling Missile of Concussion]*

Paul steadied himself as Seymore complained vociferously in his ear, summoning a new orb - slowly this time, and without pumping it full of power - to light the tunnel. His palm was slick with blood, but he absently wiped it on his buckskins as he slowly approached the wall where the out-of-control ball of light had impacted.

Through hours of experimentation, Paul had thrown his conjured orbs of light hundreds of times - many times at himself - to gauge how hard they hit. Every time, the answer had been ‘not very hard’. Certainly not hard enough to even scratch stone.

Paul ran his fingers over the speckled granite rock wall, stopping as his fingertips found a small, divot surrounded by a tiny starburst of dust streaks. My light orb did that?

Paul’s mouth gaped open, his mind working furiously.

This changes everything.