Niall grabbed his cloak and followed Gwen outside. She started to talk as they walked into the woods. “So, we’re going to do this in two parts. The first is about what you do to survive if you find yourself lost in the forest. That’s the easy bit, but it’s also what is going to keep you alive when things go wrong. The second part is going to take longer. It is about how to never get lost again.”

A few minutes after they entered the woods, Niall heard a loud rustle in the bushes. He stopped and looked in the direction of the noise. Noises in the woods had rarely led to good things in his, limited, experience. While the moons were providing some light, not a lot filtered through the leaves. Niall could not see anything besides the dark outline of the bushes.

Gwen had moved ahead by a few paces and now she stopped and turned back. “What’s the hold up?”

“I thought I heard something.”

Even as Niall spoke the rustle came again and the head of a fox popped up looking out towards Gwen. Niall relaxed. “Never mind. Just a fox.”

At the sound of Niall's voice, the fox turned towards him and, as its eyes met his, Niall felt a feeling of tranquility spread over him. The fox turned away and headed out of the bushes towards Gwen. As it did so, the feeling gradually faded, then dissipated entirely.

Niall looked on in shock as the fox emerged fully into the clearing. Folded neatly along its flanks, the fox had wings made of the same multi-coloured feathers Gwen had in her hair. Any lingering doubts Niall had about the two being connected disappeared as the fox nudged up against Gwen’s hand.

Gwen knelt next to it and scratched it behind its ears. “Simone, meet Niall, I’m going to be helping him out for a while.”

The fox turned to him and that feeling of calm spread across him once more. The fox looked back at Gwen. Gwen laughed and nodded. With no further ado the fox spread its wings and soared into the air above the treetops. Niall watched it until it disappeared.

He looked at Gwen. “Sorry, what was that?”

“I told you, she’s Simone.”

“But what creature is it? That’s no fox.”

Gwen looked at him like he was an idiot. “It? She’s not an ‘it’ or in fact a creature. She’s Simone. Now stop messing around. I spoke to Devon. You’ve a huge amount to learn, so let’s get on with it.”

Over the course of a week Gwen took Niall out into the woods every night. Niall learnt how to build shelters, light fires, and find water. It took a few days but Niall soon picked up the Shelter, Firestarter and Water Sense Skills. Over the next two weeks he levelled them up.

The last skill he attained was his Water Sense skill and that was enough for Niall to gain a Woodsman class. With a prompt from Pobble he opened his testimony and looked at it with anticipation.

TESTIMONY: Niall Vendra

ABILITIES

Strength: 16

Endurance: 17

Agility: 7

Will: 11

Perception: 7

CLASSES:

Junior Smallholder 3

Apprentice Blacksmith 3

Acolyte Healer 2

Woodsman 1: + 1 Endurance, + 1 Agility, +1 Perception. You have the ability to survive in the woods.

- Firestarter 2

- Shelter 2

- Water Sense 2

- Foraging 4

UNALLOCATED SKILLS:

- Flow 4

- Meditation 2

- Steelmind 12

- Telepathy 1

Niall frowned. “Pobble? Why did I only get three additional ability points? I got four every other time.”

“Niall wants everything to follow simple rules. That is because Niall is simple. It is not a formula. As a general rule though, the Classes Niall gets fewer Attribute points for are the Classes that it is easiest to level up. It is true within Classes as well. It takes substantially more effort, or risk, to get to the higher levels of any Class. When Niall manages it, he will get more Attribute points.”

Niall looked at his Testimony more closely. Then he expanded his Smallholder Class to look at the Skills within it. He looked at it quizzically for a moment.

“Pobble, am I going mad or has my Foraging Skill shifted over from Smallholder to Woodsman?”

“That is normal, oh-so-innocent Niall. Many Skills can sit within multiple Classes. In these cases, those Skills will move to the Class that is most actively progressing. Niall should not forget that what he is seeing is just a way for him to understand what is happening with his Spirit. Niall’s brain could not cope with multidimensional representations of all of the interactions take place between his Classes, Skill, Attributes and Spirit. This is the best Pobble can do with Niall’s limited intellect.”

“Gosh.”

“Quite.”

Now Niall had his Woodsman Class, Gwen pushed him harder. She insisted he practise all of his new skills until he could do them flawlessly. Niall had the impression she taught him in the same way she would train an animal. Annoyingly, it worked. Within another few weeks of nightly lessons his Woodsman class reached level 5.

In bed, when he returned home that night, Niall pulled up and admired his Testimony.

“You’re got to admit Pobble, with the speed that I’m picking up these levels, I’ve got a natural talent for this.”

“Does Niall think that this is all down to his own efforts?”

“Well, who else?”

“Niall does not realise how skilled Gwen is does he? It is the same with Devon. Niall is being taught by experts. The only reason that he can do in weeks what takes other people months, or even years, is because of his teachers.”

“Oh.”

“Niall’s innocence and enthusiasm is touching.”

As a bonus, healing the new small types of hurts he received while out in the woods pushed his Acolyte Healer class up to five. It helped that Gwen insisted on him healing himself as they moved. Niall’s complaints about how hard it was fell on deaf ears.

Overall, under Gwen’s tutelage – and once Pobble had pointed it out, Niall realised quite how good a teacher Gwen was – these weeks were the most productive period Niall had experienced in Gwilliant. The rapid increase in his attributes meant he could see physical changes week to week.

From only being able to walk in the woods Niall found he was able to occasionally run. The increase in his Endurance, Agility, and Perception allowed him to move rapidly through the woods for longer periods of time without running into trees and branches or tripping on a root. Similarly, his increased Strength and Agility meant climbing trees was something he could do without worrying. A far cry from the scrabble to get up the tree that first time.

As a final test Gwen took Niall deep into the woods one afternoon and left him there with only the clothes he stood up in. Just before she left, she took out a full waterskin and tipped it over him.

Niall gasped with the shock of the cold water in the late autumn chill. “What did you do that for?”

“If you can’t survive when you’re cold and wet then you’re not ready. See you tomorrow.”

Niall wrung out his wet clothes and got to work building a fire. His teeth were chattering with the cold and it took him several attempts to get it started but he soon had a blaze going to dry both himself and his clothes. Once he was warm and dry he put out the fire and started to scout his surroundings.

It took some searching after he followed the slope downhill but, eventually, he found a pond that was fed by a stream. He slaked his thirst and looked for a place to build a shelter nearby. A clearing with a chestnut tree proved perfect.

An hour of hard work and he had somewhere to sleep, even to the point of being able to build a low wooden platform so he would not have to sleep directly on the forest floor. He lit another fire and put on some chestnuts to roast. As the sun disappeared he felt a sense of satisfaction. It was not perfect but he would make it through the night.

He woke the next morning to the sound of the dawn chorus and smell of frying wild garlic. He rolled over in the cloak he had wrapped around himself and looked out of his shelter to see Gwen cheerfully seasoning some eggs scrambling in a pan. As he watched, she pulled a couple of bread rolls out of her backpack and loaded a healthy portion of eggs inside to make a sandwich. He looked on with disbelief as she even produced a small ceramic pot with tomato sauce inside.

With a sigh of satisfaction, she sat on a log and started to eat.

Niall crawled out of his shelter and stood up. “What’s going on?”

Gwen finished chewing her mouthful. “Breakfast. What do you think it is?”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome. Seeing as though you’ve shown that you won’t die immediately if you’re left alone in the woods now, I thought we would celebrate with breakfast. Once we’re done, we get to move on to some more fun stuff.”

As good as her word, after they had finished their breakfast, and cleared the campsite, Gwen moved on to teach Niall how to navigate in the woods. Again, Gwen was comprehensive. Niall learnt how to navigate using the sun and the stars, how to understand the prevailing winds, to read the lichen on the trees and the contours of the land. Those and a dozen other tricks were drilled into him. Within a couple of days, he had picked up a Navigation skill and his Woodsman Class continued to level up.

All of the direct training of Niall’s skills were accompanied by long walks deep into the forest or into the countryside. Often, those would include an overnight stay and his ability to build shelters, find food and make fires improved further as he became increasingly familiar with the countryside anywhere within a day’s walk of Raintor.

Simone would sometimes join them while they were out. There was no pattern to her visits. There would be a week when she was there every day, then others when Niall would not see her for a month. The only constant was that she would only appear when Niall and Gwen were alone. On the occasions they came across other people, she would disappear well before they crossed paths.

Despite all of his gains, Niall’s biggest development came the day Gwen taught him to level up his Water Sense Skill. It started as she sat him next to a pond in the wood.

“Right, we couldn’t try this until your Perception had got past ten, but now, you can learn how to find water even when there are none of the physical signs present.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“Just shut your eyes and reach out to the water with your Spirit.”

Niall looked at her. “Reach out? How?”

“What did your parent teach you when you were learning how to use your Spirit? This is basic stuff.”

Niall was about to retort that his parent’s had never even heard about Spirit, when Pobble’s voice sounded in his head.

“Naïve Niall needs nuanced nervousness. Pobble asked Niall how well he knew Devon in the past. Now Pobble asks the same question about Gwen. Does Niall trust her? Some answers just raise more questions.”

Niall thought fast. He had spent so long with Gwen that he had started to relax around her, but he did not have the same relationship with her that he did with Devon.

“They didn’t talk to me much about that sort of stuff," he said eventually. "We lived in a remote place and they were busy, so I had to work out a lot of it for myself.” His quasi-lies sounded weak even to himself but, fortunately, Gwen just carried on.

“Well, I can teach you. When you reach out with your Spirit to detect the water, the first stage is identical to when you heal someone else.”

“Yeah, but I can’t heal anyone else. I’ve only just hit level five in my Acolyte Healer class” Niall spoke with some bitterness, his sense of failure at not being able to heal Kiran was still sharp in his mind.

“Really? You can’t heal other people? In which case we need to fix that before anything else.”

With that Gwen pulled out her dagger and, with a swift slash of her blade, sliced open her forearm.