28th of Fall, 514 AV
Compared to the blood red keerdash groves of his home lands, the trees here were exotic, and their number vast. Standing atop a yellowing hillock just south of the Aquillar Hot Springs, Gideon’s eyes tidily gathered bits of useful information about the valley beneath him to the west, where grasslands faded and an autumnal treeline began. He would have to be alert if he wished to survive the endeavor, no chance for rest until the job was done. Even getting back would pose its own challenge, but the options available to him were scant at best.
His decision to scout the forest had been motivated by need rather than curiosity, his tenacity in navigating a remote terrain something he had long considered but never acted upon. Confident in his ability, Gideon felt that if he could survive long treks into the desert where resources were bleakly finite, then entering a region where they flourished would cushion the difficulty in survival on some level.
He was no fool, though. The dangers of one land did not implicate the existence of them in another. Gideon understood that once he stepped foot beneath the canopy of these wild lands, he was entering a hostile territory where the enemy eclipsed each of his senses. The dangers of the sands were obvious to him, but only because he had lived there the majority of his life. It was this understanding that had originally prompted a hesitancy in traveling at first.
But now that he found the coin in his pocket slowly dwindling, and his stomach begging for something more sustainable than scraps, Gideon knew there was little option but to brave the new lands. Biting his lip and calculating the best route for potential reward, the tall grasses leading towards the forest eventually gave the first hints to his destined path. Off to his left and leading towards the shelter of the canopy, a thin line had been trampled through the brush, a parting in the scraggled hair of the lands by a fine comb.
An addled melange of emotion flooded his concentration as he stepped down from the hill towards the trees that day, the sky a cloudless blue with the temperature carrying enough bite to burn the nose. Appreciative of the chance to abscond from the chaos of the city, being alone in a land utterly unknown to him scuffed the tetherings of his nerves. He followed the trail of trampled grass with back bent and arrow knocked, the land eventually giving way to a more sparse texture of earth where dirt and shrub reined.
Here the trail was much more difficult to pick through, gaze slicing across the earth in search of signs for intent and direction. The prints he found in softer patches of soil indicated that there was more than one, mashed together in a pattern he had not yet encountered before. The...footprints, he guessed, were round with two points leading at the front, carved in towards one another to a point that reached almost halfway into the circle itself.
Furrowing his brow, a colorful imagination amassed a strange blob of scales and shadow, attributing what he knew of the sands with the transition in terrain. Confusion was a natural consequence, but his quarry seemed small enough to pose a reasonable risk worth taking. Looking beyond into the forest, Gideon’s lips pursed for a moment before continuing on.
It took but one step to initiate his first mistake, the crackling of twigs and dead leaves alarming his ears as his boot pressed down into the soft earth. Wrenching a sharp breath, each muscle tensed as the bowstring was drawn a few inches in preparation for a quick break in movement, pupils dilating to absorb each critical detail of the grove before him. Frozen still in the passages of time, it was not until three chimes had passed that Gideon relaxed.
Rising from bent knee and arched back, Gideon immediately gravitated a dispirited glare to studying the ground beneath him, his face twisting in quiet indignation. Incoherent grumbles followed quickly thereafter, fingers loosening the tension of the bow as he guided the free hand through tangles of ink black hair. The impracticality of traversing the landscape in relative silence was now known to him, and it was not sitting well.
It still did not detract from the pressing need to find food, both for profit and for sustenance however. So, huddling back to the earth, Gideon refined the pressure of his steps to the point where the crackling of dead flora was less invasive to his surroundings. It became a task of finding footfalls where the soil was most prevalent, and where the gangled roots of trees sprouted up from the ground. Still, no matter how hard he tried, the disturbance he caused was enough to alert any prey wise to the potential predator.
