Reflections

Hunter leaned against the hoe, wiping the sweat from his brow with one hand as he checked the position of the sun, seeing how much time there was left in the day. It had been six months since he had reawoken. He had spent a few days getting reacquainted with being alive, so to speak - he had been desperately hungry and thirsty, and while his body had not decomposed or shrunk, it was certainly without fuel. Whether he had been fully turned to stone or simply trapped within it was still unclear, but the stone had regardless preserved him in the exact state he had been in when he had entered it. That being: exhausted, empty, and alone.

The people of this new town of Havenwood were kind enough to take him under their wings, to give him work to do to keep him busy during the day, and he did his best not to disappoint them. His twisted, pitch black arm was powerful, he found, and useful for working the land. It had scared many people for a long time - himself included - but there wasn't much anyone could do about it. It had assuredly been some kind of magic that had replaced his arm, and without any magic left in the world, there was no way of reverting the damage done.

He still wasn't sure what to make of that. In his own time, magic had been an abundantly available resource, and Hunter himself had been a magical knight, skilled in both swordplay and offensive magic. He had been bred to fight, and he had fought well. There were few things he remembered with any clarity, but he could picture quite vividly the forces of monsters that he had faced. He and his small army had fought valiantly against them as they marched on the human strongholds, and they had cut the invaders down decidedly.

But these were times of peace, that he and his beloved Sage had so long dreamed of.

Hunter's heart ached with yearning whenever his thoughts fell on Sage. She had always been a good friend of his, but it was when they had travelled together in the war that he had fallen for her. And miraculously, when she had fallen for him.

But all of those events had happened centuries prior to the days of Hunter working on the farmlands of Havenwood. He still wasn't sure what role he now had to play in life, but he knew that reflecting on the past would only bring more pain to his heart. And when he did, as it did now, shivers ran down his spine, and the hairs of his skin stood on the ends of goosebumps, as if a cold presence was washing over him.

As if someone - or something - was watching him.