The First Rule is to Survive

The weak, gray light of dawn filtering into the hollow woke her. Her body was stiff, every muscle aching from cold and tension. For a blissful second, she was nowhere, her mind blank. Then memory crashed down, and the hollow of the tree, the smell of decay, it all came back. It wasn’t a dream.

She groaned, uncurling herself, and stretched her stiff limbs. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she noticed something she’d been too panicked to see last night. Pushed deep into the far end of the hollow, partly obscured by leaf litter and moss, was a shape.

She leaned closer, her breath catching.

It was a skeleton.

The bones were picked clean, old and brittle. It was still clad in the tattered, rotten remnants of dark, travel-stained robes. A few pathetic belongings were scattered around it: a rusted knife, a cracked leather pouch, and what looked like the crumbling remains of a book.

Someone else had sought shelter here. Someone else had failed to survive.

A fresh wave of terror washed over her, cold and sharp. This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t an adventure. This was a deadly, unforgiving world where people died alone in hollow trees.

She stared at the empty sockets of the skull, a profound sense of despair settling in her gut. No power. No guidance. No idea what to do. Just her, her malfunctioning brain, and a world that very clearly wanted her dead.

Why was it me? The thought returned, more desperate this time. Of all the people on Earth, why was the one person completely unequipped for survival chosen for this? The unfairness of it was a physical pain in her chest.

And that’s when she saw it. Clutched in the skeleton’s bony fingers, as if its final act had been to write a last, desperate message, was a small, yellowed piece of parchment.

The despair that had frozen her began to thaw, replaced by a pragmatic, survivalist dread. The skeleton wasn't just a grim warning; it was a resource. Her modern sensibilities recoiled at the thought of robbing the dead, but the biting chill on her skin and the shredded state of her pajamas argued a more primitive, immediate logic. The dead didn't need warmth. She did.

With a muttered, "Sorry. Thank you. I'm so, so sorry," she began the macabre task. She carefully, reverently, pried the yellowed parchment from the skeleton's grasp. The paper was brittle, the script upon it a series of elegant, looping characters she had never seen before. They resembled something between Arabic calligraphy and Celtic knot work, beautiful and utterly incomprehensible. Frustration bubbled up. A clue, and it was useless.

Scattered alongside the text were diagrams. Simple line drawings of a human form. In the abdomen, the chest, and the head, the artist had drawn small, stylized suns, each with a different number of rays. Arrows connected them, flowing upward. It looked like some kind of metaphysical anatomy chart. Great, she thought, a self-help guide for channeling my chakra. Useless.

She turned her attention to the robes. They were coarse-spun wool, stained and riddled with holes, but many of the holes were clean, precise punctures. Stab wounds. This person hadn't just lain down and died; they’d been killed. The discovery sent a fresh shiver down her spine. She shook the garments out vigorously, half-expecting a swarm of beetles or centipedes to pour forth, but found only dust and dried leaves. The cloak, though threadbare, was large and heavy. It would serve.

Stripping off the tatters of her pajama top, she pulled the adventurer’s tunic over her head. It smelled of old sweat, earth, and something faintly herbal. It was too broad in the shoulders and hung on her frame like a sack, but it was coverage. She belted it tightly with a strip of leather from the pouch. The trousers were a lost cause, rotted away at the legs, but the cloak was the prize. She wrapped it around herself, pulling the hood up, and for the first time since arriving, she felt a sliver of something other than sheer terror: a semblance of protection.

She gathered the deceased's meager possessions: the rusted knife, its edge dull but its point still sharp, the cracked but still functional waterskin, and the crumbling book, which fell apart in her hands, leaving behind only a few illegible pages stuck together with age. She tucked the parchment into the leather pouch and hung it from her belt. Armed and as armored as she was going to get, she crawled out of the hollow tree, the skeleton’s final lesson etched into her mind: Stay alive.

Her goal was simple: find high ground, spot civilization. Hope. The knife felt alien and heavy in her hand. She picked a direction that seemed to slope slightly upward and started walking.

The forest was not the peaceful, dappled woodland of Earth. It was a gauntlet of absurd, deadly predators. Her first lesson came within the hour. A rustle in the ferns. She froze, heart hammering. Out hopped what looked like a fluffy, white rabbit. Relief washed over her for a split second—until it turned. Its eyes were jet black, and centered on its forehead was a sharp, bony horn, stained dark at the tip. It sniffed the air, its nose twitching, and fixed its empty gaze on her. Then it charged.

It wasn't a hop. It was a low, sleek sprint, the horn aimed at her shin. A shriek lodged in Kaliyah’s throat. The same paralyzing fear from the clearing seized her. But this time, the pressure built and released in a smaller, more focused burst. The wave of terror shot out.

The horned rabbit skidded to a halt mere feet from her, its body locking up. It didn't die like the shadow-steed; it just… froze, its limbs rigid, its black eyes wide with a small animal’s absolute panic. It was paralyzed.

Kaliyah stared, her own fear now mixed with a dawning, horrifying understanding. She had done this. The scream she’d choked on in the clearing… it had an effect. An external effect.

Her survival instinct, sharper than her curiosity, took over. The creature was a threat. The knife was in her hand. Before she could think, before the morality of it could register, she lunged forward and drove the rusty blade into the rabbit’s side. It was a clumsy, brutal motion. The creature spasmed and then went still. She stood over it, panting, blood dripping from the knife, her hands shaking violently. She had just killed something. The exhilaration of surviving warred with a deep, sickening guilt. She’d never so much as swatted a fly with intent before.

She gutted the rabbit with trembling, inefficient hands, remembering a documentary she’d half-watched years ago. She wrapped the meat in a large leaf, a precious package of food. It was a victory, however grim.

That evening, her second lesson began. She found a small, relatively clear area and, using a method involving the knife and a piece of dry wood she’d seen on a survival show, she managed to create a pathetic smolder that eventually became a tiny, precious fire. The smell of roasting rabbit meat was the most intoxicating aroma of her life. Her mouth watered. As soon a piece was blackened on the outside, she snatched it from the stick and shoved it into her mouth.

Pain. Sharp and immediate. She gasped, spitting the scalding meat onto the ground, tears springing to her eyes. She’d burned her tongue, the roof of her mouth. The victory meal was ashes, both literally and figuratively. She could barely taste the few chunks she managed to force down after letting them cool, her mouth throbbing.

The sizzling smell of her cooking, however, had attracted attention. A low grunting came from the bushes. A boar, its hide covered in long, sharp quills, emerged. It didn't charge. It stopped, shuddered violently, and launched a volley of its quills like arrows from a bow. They thudded into the trees around her. One grazed her arm, drawing a thin line of blood. Before she could even process this new insanity, the boar turned and fled into the undergrowth.

A moment later, a shadow blotted out the twin moons. Something enormous and fast dove from the sky. It was a horrifying fusion of a dodo and a hawk—a plump, flightless body with a massive, hooked beak and powerful, muscular legs. It moved with blinding speed, snatching the fleeing boar in its beak. There was a single, horrific squeal that was cut short, and then the bird was gone, crashing through the trees with its prize. Kaliyah sat frozen by her meager fire, her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest. The forest’s food chain was a waking nightmare.

The next few days were a blur of hunger, thirst, and terror. She became an observer, learning by watching the things that tried to eat each other. She saw a six-legged deer cautiously eat a cluster of blue-spotted mushrooms. When it didn't collapse, she scurried over later and harvested the few it had left behind. She found a stream and, after watching a fox-like creature drink from it, did the same, filling her waterskin. She was constantly distracted, her focus shattered by every snap of a twig, every strange bird call. Her progress toward high ground was agonizingly slow, a meandering, fear-driven path. The ADD that had made her unable to focus on spreadsheets now made it impossible to maintain a straight line through a death forest. She’d get a bearing, then see a strange plant and wander off to investigate, only to be chased by something horned or quilled.

On the third day, her mouth still sore, her stomach a hollow ache, she found it. A hill, steeper and rockier than the surrounding land. And at its base, a dark opening: a cave. Shelter that wasn't a dead man’s tomb. Cautiously, knife extended, she peered inside. It was shallow, maybe three meters deep, and empty save for some old bones and dry leaves. It was perfect.

That night, she risked another fire deep within the cave’s mouth, hidden from view. She cooked the last of the rabbit meat, this time waiting with an agony of patience for it to cool. She ate it slowly, savoring each bland, stringy mouthful. It was the best meal she had ever tasted. The warmth spread through her, a tiny kernel of accomplishment in the vast, cold emptiness of her situation.

Wrapped in the dead adventurer’s cloak, her stomach no longer screaming, she felt a flicker of something she hadn’t felt since arriving: a fragile, tenuous hope. She had shelter. She had found food and water. She had, against all odds, survived three days.

The terrifying power she seemed to wield was still a mystery, a frightening glitch in reality she didn’t understand. But as she drifted into an exhausted sleep, the cave walls feeling like a fortress, she thought that maybe, just maybe, her broken brain and its new, terrifying glitch were the only reasons she was still alive.