Chapter 139: A Long Way from Anywhere
Simon didn’t have paper to document his journey. Instead, he used a stick to document his time. As near as he could tell, he was going to the south-west. Every day that he made good progress got a big notch, and every day that he made slow progress got a small one as he tried to go as straight a line as possible. He made thin lines through the days when he had to cross rivers but gave up just before he started a system to try to estimate grade and elevation. It simply wasn’t worth it.
After all, he didn’t need to know the best way over these mountains. This wasn’t a route he expected to take often. He just had to find the closest place he was familiar with and call it a day. Once that was done, he would be out of reasons to procrastinate, and he could get back to more important things.
It took three days to reach the ridge of the mountain in a low place, and as much as he wanted to try summiting it, he was forced to acknowledge that he simply wasn’t in the right shape for it right now. Simon mentally added that to his bucket list as he made his way down the other side.
On the way down, he found a boulder that afforded him a view of the next valley. Though he still had a long way to go through the pine trees and almost certainly a few more cold nights in his bedroll, he could see a river, and beyond it, he could see the thin brown line of a road, which instantly became his new goal.
Simon didn’t sleep well in the nights that followed because he heard the distant screech of what he thought was an owlbear somewhere in the woods. The cries were enough to make him worry, but the thing never actually found him. Instead, he reached the river with nothing but a growing hunger and spent half a day casting into the water a very primitive fishing pole to solve that problem despite his aversion to fish.
He wanted to cross it, but the thing was raging, and he’d have to go somewhere up or down river to find a better spot to ford it. While he sat there catching fat trout that he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to eat, he saw a man with a pair of horses leading a wagon down the muddy road.
Simon would have loved to ask the man for directions, but given the noise of the river between them, that was impossible. Instead, Simon merely waved while the man looked at him strangely.
“Probably not a lot of random fishermen just hanging out in fantasy land,” he nodded.
That afternoon, Simon ate well, and despite the flashbacks that the smoky fish gave him to the beach at Ionar, he enjoyed the white, flaky flesh and reluctantly took seafood off of his ‘never eat again’ list. Then he moved far from the smells of food before making camp for the night in case the owlbear showed up.