On earth, I had been an avid hiker and had even dabbled a bit with survivalism a bit as a hobby. In the ordinary course of events, I would have just set up my tent and fallen asleep without any issue. But either I was out of practice sleeping in the wild or some second sense was keeping me awake because I shut my eyes, but I could not drift off.

About a two hours after I started faking sleeping, the man that my father had placed me into care with got up started to quietly move around. I slowly opened my eyes just a sliver and saw him looking at me. He had a dagger out and was playing with it, but was staring at me as if trying to make up his mind.

I opened my eyes, and said, “Time to move again?”

He just looked at me, staring. The steel from his dagger reflecting the moonlight. Trying to make up his mind.

I said. “Harrion Wolverine Oak will gut you if anything happens to me.” I enunciated my Father’s name slowly and clearly. He might not speak my language, but he undoubtedly knew my father’s reputation, because he put away the dagger and moved back to where he’d been sleeping.

It took me a little while to close my eyes again, and when sleep came, it came fitfully.

We broke camp with the sunrise. I hadn’t been able to check the site before we set camp, but Wilmette had chosen a great site. There was a rock face just a ways off protecting us from northern winds, and a bank of pine trees blocking the winds from the west. Down a small hill, maybe 200 yards away a small stream ran from further up the mountains, with clear fresh cold water.

Wilmette filled his water bottles and threw me one. I drank deeply and tried to hand it back to him, but he indicated that I should keep it.

Then, instead of continuing down the road like we’d been doing all day yesterday, he turned and began walking upstream until he found a game trail leading further into the mountainous terrain.

He moved like a whisper, and I would like to say that I did too, but the way that he glared at me, at every crunched up leaf, or broken branch spoke otherwise.

Finally, after about three miles of my crashing through the wilderness, he slowed down and began showing me how to step. He pointed to a patch of grass with no leaves here, or a soft spot there.

At first, it was difficult, and I spent most of my time just staring at the ground, and our progress ground almost to a complete halt. I could tell that Wilmette was frustrated by this, but accepted it too.

As the sun went down, he moved ahead and found us another camping spot, this time not quite as good as the previous night’s. He motioned that I sit and he went out quietly into the woods with mine and his water skins.

About an hour later he came back. He was carrying a couple of fish and threw the water skin that he’d given back to me, full again. He looked around the site he had chosen for a camp and not seeing something that he wanted, looked at me as if I was mentally incompetent, then quickly gathered wood to build a fire.

After we ate, we went to bed, and several hours I woke up again, almost by instinct and saw him watching me in the darkness fondling the edge of his drawn dagger. I kept my eyes closed, but slept fitfully for the rest of the night.

This is how the next few weeks passed. Moving deeper and deeper into the forest. Over time I began to speed up with the ability to walk quietly.

When he knew that I could at least keep up and stay mostly quiet, he was teaching me to track the various animals that we passed. He showed me deer and bear and cougar scat. He showed me how to identify goblin totems and troll mounds.

My clothing, of course, was nearly useless. My parents paid almost no attention to me, but they were rich, and so the servants dressed me in the finest velvets and silks. All of which were ripped and torn by the briar bushes and thorns of the deep woods.

After about two months I was starting to look like a castaway on some shipwrecked southern island. The remaining bits of my pants and shirt were in shreds, and my feet were a mass of blisters from trying to walk silently through the woods in hardened leather dress boots.

But we were constantly hunting, and Wilmette was collecting a large cache of furs and skins, that he had left curing in various caches. I was under the impression that he made his living as a trapper.

One day I pointed at the barely functioning shreds of clothing I was wearing, at the entirely useless pair of boots I was wearing and pointed at one of the deerskins he had covered in salt to begin the tanning process.

He looked at me for a moment, then pointed at my bow and pointed out into the forest. I was going to have to do this myself.

Resolving to start right away, I got up and headed for a game trail that wound down to a nearby lake, that I’d seen a few days earlier. Deciding that with my boots it probably wasn’t a good idea to climb a tree, I found a deep patch of forest downwind from the lake and trail and hid there.

And waited there.

And waited there.

It wasn’t until nightfall that the first sign of anything began to make its way the water’s edge. Unfortunately, it was a doe with two young fauns. I lowered my bow and chose not to take the shot.

From the darkness behind me and slightly to my left, an arrow came whistling out of the woods and struck the doe in the heart. A second arrow came speeding out of the forest and hit the first faun just as it was deciding whether to run or not. The second faun almost made it back into the trees when a third arrow took it in the heart.

I turned around, and Wilmette stepped out of the forest. He looked angry. He raised a hand as if to strike me, then slowly lowered it. But his eyes were filled with anger, and he marched off to the doe’s body to retrieve his arrow.

That night I woke up for the first time in weeks to see Wilmette looking at me through the darkness slowly cradling his drawn knife against his body, and rubbing the flat of the razor-sharp edge with his finger. I did not sleep easy.

After about a month of traveling with him, I discovered that he spoke Cretan which was the language of one of the kingdoms that bordered the south of the empire. His accent was thick though, and I picked up the same accent as I haltingly began to communicate with him.

In a way it was strange, Cretan was a beautiful language, full of idioms that it had borrowed from the sizable Elvish population within its border. I had learned to read it through books, memorized some of its poetry and marveled at the epic scale of its heroic narratives. Now when I was finally learning to speak the language, I was talking like some inbred hillbilly yokel. There were times I imagined that all I needed was a banjo and I would be hankering after piggies and their delicious squealing.

We moved through the woods, slowly making our way south. Gradually I learned how to hunt, to track, to move like a shadow through the woods, to speak Cretan like a bumpkin. I learned which plants were edible, and which were poisonous, I learned how to sew my own cloths, how to tan a hide, how to turn the resin from certain trees into glue, and how to make my own arrows and construct my own compound bow. I could even chip a knife from certain rocks in a pinch.

In my past life, I had spent some time to learn survivalism, but Wilmette’s teaching took it to an entirely different level. Back on earth, I was always within a few hours or days from civilization.

Here it was just me and this man who… well, I got the feeling that the only reason he cared if I lived or if I died was the off chance that my father would spend the time to hunt him down. And often, as we made our way south, and I woke up to see him slowly watching me in the dark, I got the sense that he was wondering if he could safely dispose of me and make a break for it.

To be on the safe side, when I was on my own. When Wilmette was off hunting, I would make small experiments with magic.

I woke up before the first break of dawn breached the sky, and pretended to sleep until Wilmette woke up too. Sometimes he would stir up the remainder of the fire and cook something warm, sometimes he would wake me, but on this day, like most days, he just got up and wandered off.

After he left, I got up too. The first thing I did was try to find the faint trace of his passing. There were no visible signs that he had passed. As a woodsman he was impeccable.

But I had stayed busy through the eight months that we had been traveling southward together through the forests and marshes. I had long since learned his soul’s signature.

If I extended my mages sight, I could see faint traces of where his very life had interacted with the life force of leaf of grass, or on the movement of a leaf or an insect. Where he stepped disturbed the earth, and with my earth sense, I could see faint traces of that too. The air was too ephemeral, but if he was up wind from me, I could sometimes if I was lucky even see his smell if I looked hard enough into the air.

He might be at home in the forest, but to me — every time I woke up and saw him watching me in my sleep, my paranoia had grown — and his trail had become as obvious as if he had been driving a fleet of Zambonies through the woods.

So I set out to follow him. Here again, I had grown. Wilmette walked through the woods like a predatory cat, and I had learned when I was around him to emulate that. Silent, sticking to the shadows, leaving little or no trail. Never seen or heard until either of us wanted to be seen or heard.

But, I when I was alone, I knew that being as quiet as any mortal forest animal simply wasn’t enough. And so, I had practiced, slowly adding my affinities for sound, nature, life, earth, and light, until I faded to match any background, and when I moved, I made less noise than the air in the windowless room.

There were days when I followed Wilmette all day long, sometimes coming within a dozen feet of where he stood and he never gave the impression of noticing me.

There were times when I wanted desperately to slide my dagger into the space between his brain and spinal cord. To finally be free of my father and my family. On my own. However, there were four things kept me from doing it:

The first was that despite occasionally waking up to seeing him leering at me with his dagger, he hadn’t actually done me any harm. Actually, if I could somehow forget the look in his eye that sometimes seemed to want to take me apart, and a lot of the night time horror episodes. Well, he was crude and gruff and to be perfectly honest, sometimes he was funny in a disgusting and offensive kind of way. There were times when I could see myself growing to like him.

The second was that given how easy it was to follow a distinctive soul’s mark. I’d learned how to track Wilmette after about three months. And I was a rank amateur. After that, it was just practice. If there was one thing I knew about the Inquisitors, it was that they specialized in tracking people down. They had to have people who were even better at it than I was. They might even have people who could do it from a distance. There was just too much I didn’t know about magic.

The third reason was that I had so much still that I need to learn. Status magic. Advanced magic. So far I had only had access to beginner materials and what I had managed to work out for myself.

The fourth and most important reason was that I had no abso-fucking clue where I was.

The last reason was that I wasn't as completely silent and invisible as I thought. Once when I was testing myself by sneaking up on Wilmette, I tried to simply place a rock next to where he was sitting. It had seemed easy, and I had approached as quiet as death. Then he turned and looked at almost exactly where I stood and shook his head. Then went back to waiting for some animal to walk by. I tried to tell myself is a fluke, just luck…

Then I remembered something that I hadn’t thought about in quite a long time. Wilmette Bear Trillium. Trillium was a peasant name, but while a bear was an omnivore, in this culture, it was considered almost a carnivore and no simple trapper would be named Bear without something to back it up.

Which meant that Wilmette almost certainly had some sort of magic.

And if he had mage sight and could see life forces, I most certainly was blazing like a beacon whenever I tried to approach him. If he cared to look.

That had thrown a damper on all my ego trip driven fantasy of being some sort of shadow killing silently deadly assassin. Until I learned to mask and hide my soul signature — something I was having no luck whatsoever at doing — I might as well be sneaking around with a million watt spot light on my movements at all times.

So this time instead of following Wilmette, I traveled a short distance hunting. In his way, he’d said I could sell any furs I’d caught and tanned next time I got into town.

Or rather his exact words were, “U’s cun tik teh frig’n bes’t hide yas-kills un mook sun cuns yas-litta shit.”

But for clarity I will try to relay his speech in the future as "You can take the fucking best hide you can kill and make some coins ya little shit."

And so I moved from shadow to shadow, blending into beams of light, making no marks as I cross dead leaves, making no sounds as I left dead twigs unbroken in my steps.

I crested a hill that I expected would provide a good vantage point. Instead, I saw a small green-skinned humanoid with a long tail that looked almost like a monkey, as it scampered up a tree. It was filthy, and it held a stone knife in its hand. A goblin. Wilmette had described them to me and I had read about them in a book back home.

Looking around carefully I made my way back to where we had set up camp. A couple hours later Wilmette came back carrying a deer that he had already gutted and skinned.

I said “Gobbles” and pointed in the direction I’d seen the one in. “Five Miles.”

He looked at me. “Truth?”

“Yes. I seen them, wid Deez-nuts I means eyes.” I said

“Wait, I go see.” Wilmette stood and walked in the direction I’d gone in this morning.

Instead of waiting, I spent the time salting his deerskin. I was a little concerned about setting up a place to turn the deer meat into jerky since there were goblins about, so I made a smokeless fire and simply fried most of what he’d brought back.

A few hours later I was resting pretending to sleep when I heard a rustling in the trees. Wilmette stepped out and entered the Camp.

“Gobbles,” he said. “And dungun. Fun starts now.”