Rolling along the river had proven effective, at least for the most part. A few small rapids along the way had threatened to upend the boat, and it had gained numerous cracks and one large bite mark from animals investigating him, but Marcus was still happy with how it was going. Being able to sleep and move at the same time let him cover almost twice the ground, but it was beginning to concern him.

He’d been travelling in a largely straight direction for weeks now, and at a decent speed at that. Yet there’d been no change in scenery, no end of the forest around him, just an ever widening river. Gone were the days where it was something he could step over, now it was hundreds of meters wide, and deep enough to hold some horrifyingly large fish and lizards. A goldfish had nearly thrown him overboard when it swam past, as large as any shark he’d seen in an aquarium. Mr. Squeaks hadn’t managed to stay aboard then, and had left him alone as the squirrel became fish food.

With no way to steer he was at the mercy of the current and it was beginning to be a problem. Trying to paddle to shore with his hands had proven both ineffective and dangerous, his ineffective flailing luring in fish that tried to take a bite at the movement. He was left just lying back, unable to reach the shore he’d been close to all this time.

It’d been days since he’d touched ground, and he was getting hungry, or at least the Wood walker equivalent of hungry. Empty, he supposed. After three days he wondered if he’d reach a lake eventually, and be stuck out there instead. By five days he gave great thought to jumping out and trying to swim for it, but each time he got ready to jump in, something from the water would show itself and keep him on board. It was on the sixth day he began to hear it.

It crept up so slowly that Marcus couldn’t tell when it began, but there was a low drone in the air, a background noise that seemed to the world. As the day dragged on and he floated onwards, he swore it had gotten louder than when he first paid attention to it. Whether it was from his focus on it, being half delirious with hunger, or an actual increase in volume, by nightfall it had grown from a low buzz to hum that left odd ripples in the water. He watched how they caught the light until exhaustion took him, letting him sleep.

In the morning when he awoke he thought he’d gone deaf. But it wasn’t that he couldn’t hear anything, rather he couldn’t hear anything else. The sound had become an oppressive wall of noise, so powerful it hadn’t shaken the leaves off all the trees in the area, leaving it barren, and giving him a clear view of what was up ahead.

The edge of the world.

Marcus was at least seventy percent sure it wasn’t actually the edge, given that there was still sky beyond it, but up ahead the river and surrounding countryside had a definite edge.

“I'm not this slow normally.” He thought groggily as the sound hammered on him, “but that’s a damn waterfall.”

Sure enough, now that he could put a name to the noise, it was water hammering down on a scale he couldn’t fathom. But unless he could think of something quick, was going to experience it firsthand.

“Okay Marcus, you got this.” He said to himself, unable to hear his own voice. “What can I do? Can’t steer the boat away, didn’t work before and the currents are even stronger now. Change the boat somehow..? No mana for it, I’d just pass out and go over unaware, and that’s quitter talk. Call for help..? If that could work I wouldn’t BE in this mess! That leaves... fuck it.”

With no further reasoning he leapt from the side of the boat, diving into the freezing waters. He was buoyant enough that he didn’t have to worry much about being pulled under, but the current still threw him about, his arms lacking the strength to fight it. As he desperately tried to swim for the water’s edge, part of his mind noticed he was calmer than expected, wondering if it was the lack of adrenaline. And as he felt the waters shifting around him as he got pulled under and gravity took over, he wondered if he actually needed to breathe.

~

The area was a swampy morass, enough of the falls breaking up above to turn it into a constant rain that wore away at everything, rotting what it could and eroding what it couldn’t. The rats were one of the only creatures that lived near the bottom of the enormous falls, and had evolved to suit such a niche. Deaf by nature, they were immune to the roar of the waters, though they still felt it shake the ground. They fed off the bodies of the fish that fell from high above the clouds at the start of the falls, cleaning up the mess of scattered seafood.

A lone rat had moved out from the edge of the group, looking for any food that had landed that would be big enough to feed the swarm. They’d gotten lucky with a particularly large serpent that had fed them for weeks, but that had run out a few days ago and now they were back to constantly scavenging scraps.

The area was a swampy morass, enough of the falls breaking up above to turn it into a constant rain that wore away at everything, rotting what it could and eroding what it couldn’t.

It felt it had struck gold when it came across most of a fish that had struck the ground hard enough to bury most of it in the mud. Rushing up to the corpse, it began marking it to claim it for its own swarm before any other could find it, checking that it was safe from other scavengers. When it crawled over the body to check it over, it was startled when a chunk of wood on top of it moved, a mouth opening and closing for some reason.

This close to the falls, even if it wasn’t deaf, it wouldn’t be able to hear the screaming.

~

Marcus was alive, but only just. Whether by planning, fate or pure dumb luck, his flailing in the water had caused a massive koi fish to try and bite him before they went over the falls. Nothing in his whole life, which had flashed before his own eyes several times, was as bad as falling to his death while a giant fish tried to eat him. Even when the world itself had disappeared from underneath him, it didn’t hold the same terror as the several mile fall of trying to stay on top of the panicking fish.

When they’d hit the ground they’d hit hard, and like he’d prayed, the fish took the worst of it, but not nearly enough. Below his chest, his body was gone, a ragged stump that was oozing sap at an alarming rate. His right arm had gone the same way, and to make it somehow worse, half his head was gone, leaving him with just one arm, half blind and completely deaf.

And in pain.

Everything hurt, more than he knew things could. Even though his wooden body had managed to survive so far, part of him still thought of itself as human, and that part wanted to die. Trying to move set off sharp new waves of agony, feeling splinters of his skin break off as it bent, his flinching at the pain only making it worse. He knew he was dying, and the system agreed.

-Warning! 4% health remaining-

“The ground.” He thought, the pain snapping him into lucidity for a moment.

If he could just get off the fish, and to the ground, he could pull in nutrients, stem the bleeding, and slowly recover. He just needed to move a little closer to the edge and get down...

With agonizing slowness, he dragged himself forwards, choking down the pain as his wounds ground on the scales of the fish that had saved his life, but was now at risk of killing him. After minutes that seemed like hours, he got far enough that the rain slicked scales and gravity took over, sending him tumbling into the mud.

-Warning! 2% health remaining-

If he hadn’t already been screaming, the pain from the last impact would’ve broken him, causing him to black out momentarily. But he’d made it, and could finally start to recover.

-Unable to root into soil. Roots unavailable-

His legs were gone. The roots that he needed to heal and regenerate his legs, were gone. He could feel the mud between his fingers, but couldn’t do a damn thing with it, and was going to die.

...

Mary. Thomas. Samantha.

“No.”

Mom. Dad. Smalls.

“Not like this. Not now.” He growled silently.

Burying his hand in the mud, he pushed down as far as he could reach, and then pushed further mentally, looking with his Greensight. There was nothing growing for as far as he could see on the surface, but he just needed something, a single drop of mana to try and force his injuries closed. The earth around him was rich from the river creatures being pulped into it constantly, surely something lived in it. A mushroom, a buried root, just a single blade of grass...

-Warning! 1% health remaining-

The warning was meaningless now, it wasn’t that he was betting it all on this, he just had no other bets he could make. Deeper he pushed, ignoring the pain, the cold, the loss of feeling in his body. All that mattered was that he had to find a way to live, to get back to his family.

He would not die here alone.

With the last of his strength he reached out, and found nothing. Just more mud, dense and lifeless from the years of being battered by the unforgiving water. He’d reached with everything that he had, and failed.

Then something reached back.

A blast of energy unlike anything he knew ripped through him, filling his mana pool entirely at the briefest touch, then kept on going. For a moment Marcus felt saved by this miracle, the energy giving him another second of life, but then he realised that too much mana was going to be just as bad as not enough.

-Warning! Mana: 87286/6000-

-Mana Burn imminent!-

His mana pool was larger than average, apparently a hundred times what a normal person would have at his level, and it was nothing. Already forced far beyond the limits, he could feel a part of his soul beginning to buckle as it tried to hold the mana that was still pouring into him.

Not knowing what else to do Marcus tried to push some of it into his body, hoping to replace his missing pieces the same way the boat had created more wood out of magic. It worked, if inefficiently, the mana being broken down and becoming new wooden flesh filling out his body and healing his wounds.

-23% health remaining-

-Warning! Mana: 214423/6000-

-Mana Burn imminent!-

It was like trying to bail out a ship with a thimble, and he could tell something was about to give out. He tried to break the connection with the source of mana, but it had a grip on him rather than the other way around, there was nothing he could let go of. He tried to push the mana out, let it go into the air, but he couldn’t dump it fast enough.

-Warning! Mana: 629431/6000-

-You have entered a state of Mana Burn.

His spirit broke, his soul cracked, and his body burned.

The mana, no longer contained in his pool, ran riot through his body, ripping through muscles before violently leaving his skin in the form of searing blue flames. His body broke under the strain, falling to the ground as the mana flooded the area as it poured from him. The blistering heat of the flames hissed as they touched the water from the falls, bathing the area in steam, lit up from within by flickering blue.

The mana kept coming in, adding fuel to the fire that was still growing inside him, that burned at everything he was.

His family was still out there.

“I. SAID. NO!” he screamed as the flames lashed him.

Knuckling down with every scrap of will he had, he grabbed mana from inside himself and forced it to heal his body. He had no control left in his state, the aspects needed burned away entirely, but at the moment precision wasn’t needed. With the mana so dense around him that it was becoming a solid mass pooling on the charred ground around him, he just reached out and took all he could.

Lumps of charcoal fell from his body, replaced by new wood, only to ignite and burn once again, then replaced again. The damage appeared to be on his body, but the fight took place in his mind. If he gave in for even a second to the pain, he’d lose his grip on the mana he was using, and it would consume him. Unable to do anything but hold on, he lost track of time, his surroundings, even pain eventually faded compared to his desperate focus.

The only thing keeping him going was a memory. He’d just graduated from college, and had come back to spend time at home while applying for jobs. With him there, his parents had trusted him to look after his little sister while they went to work instead of putting her in day care. When they’d come home, the house a mess, pancake batter on the roof while he gave Samantha a horsie ride, that trust had been taken back for quite some time. But that day, the laughter, the lightness of it all, became his focus.

He had no idea how long it took, but with glacial slowness the burning began to subside, the mana flow not slowing, but becoming more bearable. With every fibre of his being he held on, pushing through what should have been his death, and took a single faltering step. Then another. A step became a crawl, then a staggering walk, but soon he began to travel away from the falls, towards ground not ruined by the flames that had burned through him. As soon as his foot broke through the burned crust of the ground and into the rich mud below, he sunk his roots in deep as they would go. Pulling in from the ground, the sunlight speeding up the process, he began to turn the tide on the pouring energy, forcing it back into the ground, spreading his roots deeper and wider each second to dump it quicker. He was dimly aware by the way that by the way the sunlight came and went that days had passed since he’d begun, but he couldn’t spare it any other thought.

Then finally, as quickly as it had come, the energy stopped. Like a puppet with its strings cut Marcus collapsed, held up only by his feet buried in the ground. His vision burning, he could see the system trying to tell him countless things, but right now he didn’t care about any of them. Before he passed out, he thought of only two things.

Firstly that was alive, and still had a chance to see his family again. The second, was that now that it’s finished, that it had run through him and turned his soul inside out there was more to it. In the midst of the searing torrent of power, had been a message.

NOT ALONE