AT FIRST ELI thought he was dreaming. The roots slithered around his arms, the comfortability of the bare ground, and the green mist bending in around him all seemed... too much. They couldn't possibly be real, so when his eyes begged to be closed, he obeyed and sunk back, falling into...
Only one of his eyes had opened.
Eli flew up. The roots tore at his skin and a scream got caught in his throat. He ignored the red, stinging skin and drops of blood forming. The roots resembled stone. Not quite, but certainly closer to stone than wood, yet the tree behind him was a regular tree. Well, regular for being the Kador dimension, where most things had been infected by the poisonous air and turned turquoise or green.
Thankfully, Eli still had his brown skin and red blood. He reached up to his unopened eye. The root, stone, whatever it was, covered the side of his face too. He traced it all the way from his cheek, down to his shoulder, to his arm.
When he licked his lips, he realised they were quivering. He stood, all alone, in a dim world, one far away from home. And he couldn't remember where he came from.
Eli had been told that if he ever got lost, he needed to stay where he was, and someone would come and find him. He'd had to forget that rule once he started dimension travelling. The first thing he'd learnt was to always remember where the portal home stood. If he couldn't remember; walk. Walk, walk, and walk more until he found it.
So he picked up his satchel and walked.
The second thing he'd learnt was that dimensions could throw off a human's needs—specifically, their internal clock. That meant that a traveler like Eli had to know his inner clock well, and Eli thought he had. Until he woke up and didn't know whether he'd slept for a minute or three months, that was.
He felt no hunger, which could've been a sign it hadn't been that long. But, again, the dimension messed with his needs. Meanwhile, his body didn't adapt to the dimension's time.
Three days without water and he'd die.
It couldn't have been longer than three days.
Right?
Or did Eli wake up and drink every three days?
With his hazy vision and blurred thoughts, memory loss seemed more than plausible. Not to mention that he couldn't remember when he fell asleep.
He opened the satchel and found an empty water bottle and his journal. The bottle didn't tell him much—he couldn't remember if he drank it before he fell asleep.
He skimmed through his journal as he walked. His previous knowledge of the Kador dimension told him there were no predators. In fact, no life at all, except for the trees, and the magic, thus, safe to not pay attention to the surro—
Magic.
Had Eli fallen asleep because of magic? Could magical slumbers take away human's needs for food and water?
The Church of Aveluty despised magic above anything else. According to the tales, one of the three sisters used magic to kill the two others. Then, she ruled the kingdom as a tyrant, dooming the kingdom to ruins with her magic.
Those ruins built Montauris—Eli's home country, the country he'd rule when his father died—and Eli refused to repeat those mistakes. He calculated every action carefully. All of them had to be selfless, something that benefited his people.
No magic was selfless.
Except for, maybe...
Eli pushed the thought away. He'd find the portal. Yes, the Kador dimension was infamous for being the second largest known, only slightly smaller than Eli's home dimension, earth.
