It's been three months since you've landed on this continent, yet the crossing of the windless waters still comes to mind even deep inside the continent's interior. With the crunch of gravel stuck under your boot, you step up the tangled roots onto a boulder slick with verdant moss, scaling it with careful steps, over the apex, and above the undergrowth's canopy. Strung around a stone wedged in a narrow crevice hangs a cache of supplies you've left the week before. Crouching low, your arms reach into the narrow crevice and work the knot, untying it and retrieving the cache. You discard the letter attached to it. The letter was there in case others find the cache, and it only asked for their courtesy when using the things you left behind.
But now, this place is too close to the relic you found, an old home hidden with magic. The entrance is tucked into the foot of an ivy hill. At first, by some magic, it kept you from discovering it, anywhere else and it would have gone unnoticed, but since there was an inexplicably blank spot on your map next to the cache you put, it left a sour feeling on your hard work. You hated it. It made you doubt your eyes, methods, and so you spent a week retracing your steps in circles. Each approach became an experiment. Every branch, every root, tested, prodded, mapped with trial and error, until, finally, you got through, and soon after you discovered the entrance of an old home with relics inside.
The mystery of this continent is why your thoughts return to those windless waters even now. The wondrous sight of the endless night sky above, reflected below on still waters, as if you sailed through the stars and nebulae itself to another dimension. Curiosity urges you to quickly pack your things and return to those relics you discovered. The cache slings over your shoulder and you descend disgracefully with a few steps off balance. Ultimately, it's a sharp fall, and a heavy thud below. Idiot. You gather yourself, brushing the dewy moss off your clothes in spite before walking it off.
You face the hateful barrier once more but first bury the remains of a firepit that served you well these past few days. With everything sorted on the outside of the barrier, you proceed until the frontal bone of your cranium starts resonating. Two days ago, after having charged against the barrier for a few days by then, you discovered eight wards placed within it, all camouflaged into the natural undergrowth and forest. Two knotted roots, a shrub, a split rock, and four trees are all imbued with magic that spreads out from them. You trained yourself to hear their humming resonances in your skull. It'll harmlessly cloud your thoughts and confuse your limbs if you don't resist, but you won't get close to the entrance at all either.
You adjust your mental state, not fully resisting the influence of the eight wards but just enough to break their stability. The resistance is like ripples in a pond, the eight intersecting fields of magic become chaotic and variable, unstable. You'll know when the headache suddenly spikes or something scratches your bone that you should retreat, but when it randomly dissipates, inactive for just a brief second, you jump forward. With luck, patience and mental fortitude, you grasp every opportunity to leap across, once, twice and thrice, until the pressure dissipates and never returns. One hour had elapsed in that manner.
Ivy squash under your boots in the entryway and you toss the cache beside your other things over some corner. There's camping equipment, chainmail, greaves and gauntlets, a pair of spare boots and a few changes of clothes in a relic laundry basket you scavenged. You sit heavily on the chair pulled from beneath a table, the relics creaking beneath your weight and fingers massaging the fatigue out of your brows as all of it, the fatigue built over the last few days, starts catching up to your body. A deep and guttural sigh escapes your lips. Fuck. That hateful barrier keeps ruining your week, and it's all because you wanted to be thorough, both at the start when completing your map, and now when you're making sure no one takes your opportunity away from you.
The room around you is small and arranged like a scholar's dorm. The kitchen connects to the study. A nook with a narrow shelf of books. Written on those books is a script you don't recognise yet find beautiful. An empty countertop except for the dry aged chops from an animal you didn't know the name of. Beside it, empty pots and baskets on the floor. There are cutlery, plates, cups and utensils for a single person or two inside the drawers and cupboards. One for the owner and perhaps the occasional guest you guess. Then there is also a washroom, bedroom, pantry in the back and a small workshop with miscellaneous equipment for extracting natural products from raw materials. Pigment, minerals, liquids, ingots and other such substances are stored on many rows of shelving.
It takes a week to transform the old home to a livable residence, though most things remain unperturbed. You spend your time studying books in the nook, identifying components of the language they are written in, finding out its words and phrases, and theorising its grammar. Beautiful. You remark, though the entire language still alludes your comprehension, you can't help but admire a text in your journal that's copied from a book on the study's desk. The text is a description of a maiden's appearance, and her beauty is not only described in metaphor, but also by the script's lettering as well. It's an artistic piece itself. You think that soon enough, you'll be able to set out and find these fair folk people yourself. It makes you wonder, where had all of them disappeared to?