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As he wandered lost and alone through the forest, he began to hear noises that shouldn't be coming from the trees, but were.
At first he thought it was the creaking of the boughs in the wind. A sudden gale would explain why a lot of the tree limbs looked as though they were lunging towards him with deliberate, malicious intent, like the clawed, bony arms of some kind of evil woodland spirit. Just as the ravenous faces he kept seeing in the tree trunks could just be the kind of patterns the twisted bark grew into in this unknown world, the sharp jagged fangs just damage from lightning strikes, the fact that he occasionally saw the trees themselves move out of the corner of his eye, just a product of his shredded nerves, having woken up from a whirlwind fever of dreams that felt real, that called his name.
A princess ran desperately through a castle in the dead of night, pursued by a gigantic demon that towered over the entire palace. With a sweep of its clawed, leathery hands, it shattered the window and grabbed the Princess, monstrously fast. Then it opened its mouth in a ground-shaking bellow. At the same time, bolts of crackling magical energy shot from its eyes, launched at the trapped, struggling woman. There was a blinding light, consuming the entire scene. Something made a shimmering noise, then three small, winged women emerged inside spheres of force, floating in the white void. Before he could ask any questions, the scene shifted again and...
He was awake, definitely, and he was cold, his limbs aching, spread-eagled on the forest floor with a splitting migraine. Disgusting squelching filled his ears and he saw... shapes... made of slime, flocking towards him like vultures to a dying man. Springing to his feet by reflex, he reached for the sword at his belt and found it missing. He still had his leather armour on but he must have dropped his weapon at some point during the chaos. He grabbed a sturdy branch and smacked one of the slime-creatures with it, driving the end of the stick into it with a satisfying noise like the tearing of flesh. The monster hissed and recoiled, giving him chance to run.
It didn't take him long to realise he'd ran into even bigger trouble. He was completely lost now, not that he had a hope of navigating such an alien world anyway. The trees crowded all around him were blocking out most of the sunlight, their shadows growing ever more eerie and alive.
In a world that he had been magically transported to by a dream and/or fairies, a realm that had already produced slime-monsters and proven that it worked by other laws of nature to his own, he'd assumed that the trees couldn't really hurt him. Upon reflection, he didn't know why he had been so foolish.
Ducking under a whipping branch, he darted forwards, through the trees that looked furthest away from each other (although they had definitely moved closer since last time he looked), hoping that he was too small and fast a target for the huge shambling, growling, slavering tree-things. Jaws snapped at him as he sprang and rolled. Burning, sharp pain down his side told him that the thing had managed to hit him at least once but he forced himself forwards into a limping run, now using his makeshift club as a walking stick. He heard other snarling voices answering the call of his pursuer but he didn't stop to find out how many other of the trees had followed the scent of prey. He only relaxed slightly when he saw sunlight, an end to the forest.
He heard a few of the trees still following him when he emerged into a moorland filled with heather. From a few other noises filtering into his ears, along with the pounding rhythm of his own heartbeat and blood flow, he also reckoned a few of the slimes had returned to see what the fuss was about. He hoped to any deity that might watch over this strange realm, that the two types of monsters fought each other on sight.
He continued running, following the sound of running water. A few of the trees had now stopped pursuing him, presumably uninterested in one single prey animal that was now quite far outside their territory. The river came into view, fast-flowing but not too lethal. A stone bridge had been built over it - his first evidence of human (or at least intelligent) habitation in this place. It looked too narrow for a tree-monster to cross, maybe even a slime. Neither of them looked like particularly good swimmers. He flung himself across the bridge in one staggering leap, then let himself collapse to the ground again.
The pain in his side still burned. He looked down at his wound, gasping for breath and fighting off the urge to fall unconscious. There was no infection, nothing that suggested venom - it just needed patching up. He rifled around in his belt pouches and found, to his relief, that his emergency supplies were all still there, including a paste he'd made of healing herbs and some rags he could use as bandages. As he worked to bind the wound, cleaning it with the water that he would just have to trust was normal water or he would never be able to survive in this world, he wondered if it would be safe to try any of the plants. Some of them definitely looked like normal medicinal herbs. Others looked like ones he'd assume were poisonous if he encountered them under normal circumstances. If he could get to a settlement, he thought to himself, he'd be able to at least try and communicate with the inhabitants and find out what was and was not safe to do - assuming that the rules were even the same for humans as they were for... whatever lived here.
After a short rest, he continued along the now gentler hills, picking a few plants that definitely looked, felt and smelled like familiar healing herbs. There were no paths and the land didn't look farmed but he did see, after a while, a tall stone wall in the distance. Windowless and square, it didn't look as though it reached that far round, only enough to encircle a single large building or garden. He could hear more slimes, now, as well as a shrill rodent-like squeaking and chittering. As fast as he could without opening his wounds, he picked up the pace towards the closest thing he could find to civilisation.
After a short walk, interrupted by only a few slimes, he got his first proper look at the structure and realised what it was: a graveyard. Well, he thought, this tells me a few reassuring things: people exist, or at least existed, here, who probably had roughly the same proportions as me and were familiar in thought processes enough to bury and mourn their dead. The tombs looked very worn and overgrown with snarls of weeds and thorns. He recognised the shapes of the architecture as being very old, older than he'd actually expected to find in relatively good condition. The writing was mostly worn or illegible - the language was unfamiliar but at least had the same alphabet. He recognised the occasional name or engraving of an obscure goddess or powerful Fey queen - in general there were a lot of attempts to placate fairies. The religion was clearly different but also familiar at least in concept.
Of the gravestones he reached down and touched, a couple of them crumbled away, apparently in worse repair than they looked. Objects fell from the altars arranged below them for offerings to the dead, or sometimes he found things strewn in the tall grass. He was reluctant to touch them, mindful of the possibility of curses if he disturbed the dead, or more mundanely, that this could be a plague graveyard for all he knew. There were a few items he really needed to survive, though - not just a perfectly good shortsword someone had apparently dropped but he recognised healing potions, herbs and a scroll that he'd seen used in curse removal ceremonies at Church before. After some more deliberation, he picked up the sword, potions and scrolls, wiped them clean, then belted the sword to his side and put the rest in his pouches.
Then, as he approached a particularly large headstone, one that he supposed could have been the entrance to a larger crypt, the sculpture shattered. He heard a rumbling sound beneath his feet that prompted him to jump backwards just before the ground before him exploded. Soil, rock, foliage and slivers of things he didn't care to think about too much showered him. Clawing their way out of the craters left behind, like the roots of ghastly pale trees covered in faded rags, several gaunt figures climbed up, mostly skeletal with some rotting flesh hung from their frames, lurching awkwardly like puppets. One of them let out a sound somewhere in between a death rattle and a rabid bestial snarl, then they all sprang at him, slashing with foul bony talons. He swung his sword at it and managed to lop off one of its arms, which did not seem to hurt it or slow it down but made it unable to counter-attack for the brief few seconds he needed to press the attack and take off its other arm. He whirled around to evade the berserk slashes of the other ghouls, backing off and circling them in a dance of death.
Looking around him for openings, weak spots and a safe route to escape if the combat went south, he realised that there were more restless dead now, rising from holes where they had been buried.
He couldn't stay here, he realised. They were slow and clumsy but the zombies did not tire, ever, and could only be disabled by lopping off limbs. He didn't know how many were buried here exactly, how many were going to rise. The way he came in was reasonably clear, only three zombies lurking before it in wait. They had no semblance of an organised strategy, even as a pack of animals - they were just all going straight towards the only thing that was not a zombie. He was about to spring into a run, launching into a wild sweep of his sword to get the three zombies near the exit out of the way, then he saw something glint in the sunlight. Focusing his eyes on its shape - a silver crucifix on a thick chain - he felt something, or rather heard a loud, clear chime inside his skull, then felt a kind of roaring pressure in his hands. Divine magic, he knew; He was by no means a Paladin but he had a tiny amount of latent affinity for holy powers. There had probably been an attempt at a ritual to cleanse this cursed graveyard that had let its dead back out. For some reason, it had failed. He would have to go in the opposite direction to the exit but he felt that it would be a very good idea to pick up the holy symbol, especially if any more threats he would encounter in the future were undead or otherwise unholy in nature.
Changing direction so suddenly that he surprised several of the zombies, two of whom he cut down while they were stumbling around trying to react to the change, four of whom were still going the wrong way and having trouble turning themselves around. As many zombies were still clustered around the site of the large tombstone. Some arcane compulsion was keeping them at this site – implying that they been deliberately set there to guard the place at some point – and, though they recoiled from the cross on the floor, they did not want him to approach it either. He feinted an attack, then turned it into a lunge for the crucifix. Deftly kicking it upwards and catching it, he swung it on the chain and caught one of the zombies across the face with it. The ghoul howled and recoiled, black smoke pouring from a large gash opened up in its pallid flesh, the bone underneath also burning up. That was when he ran for the exit, swinging the holy icon around furiously to keep the zombies at bay.
Slamming shut the massive cemetery door – fortunately he’d only managed to open it a little in the first place – he ran far away from it in the opposite direction to the river and the cursed forest. Blessedly, nothing followed him from the graveyard – he wasn’t sure if their geas prevented them from leaving the grounds or if they just didn’t know how to get the door open. He climbed the top of the nearby hill, then stopped to wipe the slime from his blade. He’d run into yet another pack of the strange creatures after only a short while. They were everywhere, he realised. Was this place actually still occupied by humanity or had it fallen into ruin long ago, left for the monsters and the dead?
His head was spinning from the bizarreness of the world. He was starting to forget what his previous life had been like, before he ended up here. Had he really just woken up a few hours ago and magically ended up here? Had that thing he’d seen even been a dream? The fairies had definitely been talking to him, looking directly at him and desperately beckoning him. Come to think of it, he mused, they looked a lot like the depictions of fairies on the gravestones. The crucifix in his hand, now that he looked at it properly, was actually a winged figure perched on what looked a lot more like a Celtic cross.
HYDLIDE, the inscription on that largest headstone had read. He knew that name from somewhere, he realised. It was another name for the Realm of the Fey, a very ancient and obscure one. If this was Fairyland, that explained a lot. Not that the sudden revelation that Fairyland was definitely real and he was stuck there was any comfort to his poor ailing sanity.
Below him, at the foot of the hill, a few miles further onwards, he saw another large stone building with a high wall around it. This one looked a lot more like an actual house, probably a sizeable mansion. If anything around here was actually going to be occupied, he thought, it would be that house. If not, there would be shelter from the cold and the dark of the oncoming night, hopefully without anything inside that wanted to eat him. If he was very lucky, there might even be food. He couldn’t just eat herbs and drink medicinal potions. So far, he’d seen no wildlife that looked conceivably edible.
There was no way he could turn back. He couldn’t even remember exactly where he started and it was overrun by carnivorous mobile trees anyway. He only had the vaguest idea of how anything worked in this realm that may or may not be Fey. He could only keep going, find things that still looked familiar, that still made sense and were helpful and conducive to survival. If there was the conceivable possibility of food and shelter and maybe even normal people in that house, he had no reason not to head there.
Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding in his gut as he approached the manor and saw a flock of bats swarming around its baroque clock tower. A storm was rumbling in the distance, the wind picking up and a shadow drifting across the moon. In the distance – it could have been the wind, he supposed – he heard a crackling roar and saw arcane bolts of energy race across the sky that he swore he’d seen somewhere earlier, in a dream, maybe...