Reincarnated to the Past 1 (Patreon)

Welcome to Reincarnated to the Past, a new fiction that I hope will entertain you all between my fanfiction stories. 

-VB-

Hello, my name is Alan.

Hello, my name was Alan.

I lived well.

I lived … I just lived.

I died like a hero.

I died like a whimp.

I jumped in to save a baby.

I jumped in because of my own trauma pushing me to compensate.

I didn’t die easy but it was worth it.

I didn’t die easy because I bled out while half of the onlookers were too fucking busy taking pictures with their phones while one quarter were panicking at the sight of blood and the last quarter barely knew what to do even as they did it. Kudos to that German African guy for trying to stem the bleeding, even if it was from a wound that basically had my entire chest cavity exposed and it was barely worth it. 

… It hurt a lot.

It hurt more than anything I experienced, including septic shock coupled with second degree burns. I have the experience to say that, and I say that dying after getting hit by Truck-Kun sucked a lot.

I kind of expected to find myself in purgatory or outside the Gates of Heaven.

Because I didn’t do anything evil but no one can say that I was good. I was kind but I was neither good nor bad. I just was.

But I opened my eyes eventually.

But I didn’t find myself anywhere supernatural or in the afterlife. I just opened my eyes after a long period of time - uncertain as to how long - and stared up at a bunch of baby toys hanging from the ceiling.

I reincarnated.

Oh God, I reincarnated as a baby.

I’m going to live!

I have to go through potty training! And puberty! Actually, my puberty was kind of silent so that’s not bad… Oh God, I have to get involved in relationships. NEW relationships!

I am in …!

In the middle of a forest.

Huh?

Oh, this must be like those fantasy stories about the main character was moved to another world? They got some help before they got to start their adventure… Would I get help?

Why would anyone help me, a random nobody?

-VB-

“Okay, so let me recap. The deal is that whenever I give myself a new superpower…” I said. 

“Someone else on the planet gets a superpower, completely random but within the ‘power level’ of the one you give yourself.”

As the precedent showed, there was indeed someone who was here to give me instructions. This someone was the featureless humanoid sitting across from me. He called himself “Transporter” because it was the name that fit him and his job the best. 

“But I can’t give myself anything unrelated to any of the powers I already have, and the powers that I can give to myself are limited to what I do, not what I need or want.”

“Yup!”

“And on top of that, all powers are weak and I have to combine certain powers to increase their usefulness and strength… while everyone who gets powers because I get a power start out stronger than me. I also can only give myself one power per year.”

“Yes. You have a good memory.”

“And I am in Pre-Roman Republic times.”

“Yup!”

“How … far in the timeline am I?”

I was on Earth. But I was back in time, and it wasn’t anywhere close to modernity. I feared the answer but I needed to know.

“Roughly speaking, you are … in 10th century B.C.”

My head felt faint at the answer. My knees trembled just a bit and I felt my face blanch at the information. 

I opened my lips and mouth to speak at the incredulity of the response and the reality of my new life. 

“Why…?” I asked hoarsely. 

It was here that the being in front of me finally smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a big, teeth-filled, and menacing grin of a cat that caught the canary. 

“Because I can. So many unprepared mortals die, and their struggles fuel my entertainment.” I gulped, feeling constrained and claustrophobic despite the fact that I was outside in a field of low grass under a sunny blue sky with a grove of trees around me. “Quite literally. I sometimes sell viewership to bored immortals.”

“... And what happens now?” I asked it after a while

“I leave you here and watch you struggle.”

It disappeared after that.

I sighed before flopping onto my back. Less than an hour later, I stood back up because I was hungry.

Oh god, I didn’t know how to find food! I looked around. There were grass as far as my eyes can see, and the trees were bare of any fruit. I didn’t see any food, so I needed to get higher. It would give me a better view of what was around me at least, right? I strained my eyes to see anything in the distance.

… a river.

There was a river. Maybe I could find some food there? At least, I would have water. 

After I climbed down the tree and began to walk towards the river, I began to think about what I was going to do.

I was in ancient times, not Roman ancient but Iron Age ancient, which was even further back than the Roman times. Hell, Alexander the Great wouldn’t be born for another seven hundred years!

The goddamn Achaemenid Empire that fought the Greek city-states wouldn’t exist for another five hundred! Fucking legitimately, David the Bible just became king. That’s how fucking back I was!

Oh god, I now live in an era where wars, looting, raiding, and destruction was the norm, not the exception. 

As I reached the river, I realized that it was far bigger and calmer than what I expected it to be. There were no mounds (whatever those things were called at either side of the river) so prominent in modern architecture

What did I know about gathering food from rivers? Not much. I knew how to fish, but I used modern fishing rods to do that. I could also catch fish with nets, however inexperienced I was, but I didn’t have a net either. 

My stomach growled lightly, and I felt the pressure of an empty stomach start to exert its creeping takeover of my senses.

I needed food. 

I looked down at the river. 

Was it even safe to drink this water?

“Fuck. Oh wait,” I muttered, realizing only a second after I uttered a cuss that I knew how to filter water too. Knowing a lot of little trivia was great. I just needed a lot of stuff, but I didn’t have any tool to get stuff with. “I guess I know what my first power is going to be.” I paused. “How do I give myself power? Catchphrase? Command? … Dance?”

I sat down, seeing as I didn’t have anything better to do. I closed my eyes and just … let the world flow through me or something.

To my surprise, I saw it. The moment I closed my eyes, I saw a single bead of light floating where there should be none in the pitch black darkness. I poked at it, an action that was done mentally and not physically and yet I felt an almost physical push against myself when I poked it. It did not react.

So I thought about needing a tool and poked at it again. Again, nothing happened.

Then I slapped myself as I remembered the Being’s words.

I had to do, not want or need. 

… So what got me a power related to tools and did I have to do? Actually, stop stop stop. Did I even want my first power to be related to tools? I knew that it was supposed to be “weak,” but weak by whose definition? 

My stomach growled again. 

I needed to find food, but did I honestly know how to really find food? Fishing and net throwing were all -.

Ping.

Oh god.

I closed my eyes again, only for my jaw to drop as I felt for the purpose and mechanism of a power using a verification process that I didn’t even know how to do a second ago.

My jaw dropped, however, because I got a power.

A power called “Perfect Memory Recall.”

… Did it mean?

I looked not into my power but into my own memories. I saw them clearly, far more clearly than I did with my own eyes. I remembered sitting in front of my office desk, watching a Youtube video.

A youtube video about how to trap fish with plant fiber baskets.

Excitedly, I recalled how to make those baskets, and sure enough, I saw a video about it once. And then I recalled a video about how to find the best plants for such basket weaving. 

I laughed and cried as I hurriedly gathered the plants around me, choosing the toughest and flattest of them. I weaved with my fingers, ignoring the cuts I got from my soft fingers running themselves along the rough fibers and even some thorns. By the dusk though, I had it. A simple fish trap.

Hungry as I was, the sheer joy of being able to do this was exhilarating. I waded into the river with a rock and mud made up of ground up worms and dirt and set up the trap. Once I was done, I walked back out.

Breathing heavily from wading in the river, I quickly looked around. I needed to start a fire if I didn’t want to shiver throughout the night. 

Memories of fire-making videos and actual camp experiences came to me. I got to work. I gathered dry sticks, found a flint, a rock, and I chipped away until I got a small fire going. 

I spent the first day hungry but I was warm. I was thankful enough for that. It wasn’t long after I finished the fire that I fell asleep. 

‘Hopefully, the big log will keep it going for a long time…’ I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep. 

It wasn’t long before I woke up from the chill of dawn. The first thing I did after I woke up was to check the fish trap.

And there were three big fishes in there! Three sturgeons, in fact. I quickly took the entire trap out of the river, pointing the entry point up towards the sky and dumped the fish onto the land next to the fire. It took me no more than a second to decide to eat one and somehow preserve the other two. 

But I had no knife.

… But I had a lot of rocks.

I recalled how to make stone tools, again a video.

It took me three hours to make a small stone blade, which I used to gut the fish. From there, it was a small matter of putting sticks through a fish and just cooking it. To make sure I didn’t fuck this up because I didn’t have experience with this, I recalled another video. Holy shit, I saw a lot of useless(then) videos. 

I spent the rest of the day working on small things like that. 

A day turned into a week. A week into a month. A month into a season. 

Leaves began to turn yellow and then brown. It was at this point that I realized where I wasn’t: definitely not the tropics or near the equator. I began to fear whether or not winter might come, so I ended up doing something I never did.

I started laying traps for beasts, because I needed their fur. In the following weeks, I caught a lot of rabbits, a boar, and a deer. I skinned them all, dried their meat for preservation, and then had their hides tanned. I tried my hand at making honest to god clothes, but without needles or strings, my attempts weren’t that great. In the end, I just opted to sew them all together into two giant blankets, one for a robe of sorts and the other for bedding. 

It wasn’t long before I saw snow. 

And then a lot of snow. 

If I hadn’t turned most of those meat into jerky, I might have died by starvation because fishing wasn’t easy nor plentiful as it was in the summer).

Then it was spring. 

Finally, it was summer again.

-VB-

It was a year and a month since the Being dropped me off twelve thousand years in the past. Despite the hardship of living out in the wild, I have been doing well for myself. Thanks to my Perfect Memory Recall, I dedicated myself to learning every scrap of knowledge I had into practicality. Some might call it a conversion of intelligence into wisdom. 

I burned myself with fire, but over time, I smelted iron from iron ores, limestone pieces, and charcoal, which sounded easy but was not; I went through the smelting process at least five different times after I failed thrice in making a bloomery and, even then, I only managed to make enough water quenched iron for a single hammerhead and a blade only half a meter (1.5 feet-ish?) long. 

I intended to spend the summer building a proper shelter (because I just spent the winter in hastily made wooden shelter built into the ground for insulation). I wanted something better. Maybe like a stone hut or a roundhouse. 

… It was going to be a lot of work, though. First, I had to lay down the foundation. I did this by taking a bunch of mud, heavy ass stones, and making the closest thing to a raised hardened mud foundation as I could. This alone took me a month to finish after spring rains ended. 

Second, I had to gather enough mud and wood, not sticks but actual timber/log. I had to arrange them, and then stabilize them, using mud as kind of a slow-hardened glue. 

Third, I had to harvest a shit ton of water reeds and straws, dry them out, and wait.

Fourth, the roundhouse’s conical frame needed to be built. I think I fell at least three times.

Fifth, I placed the dried thatching materials on the frame. I made sure to make a hole in the frame at the very top of the conical frame. I intended to have a campfire inside the roundhouse, and needed a hole to let the smoke escape; I did not wish to die by carbon dioxide poisoning, after all.

And thus, after three months of construction, I made a roundhouse with an interior area of fifteen square meters. 

… I took a long time.

I also tried to make a gun, a prototype musket, but I failed miserably. Not only did I not have a good source of sulfur near me, but I also lacked saltpeter, which I could only make using animal excrement. I was not into touching that. Instead, I made a crossbow and a bunch of bolts, though. Practiced it a lot, too. I wasn’t too great at it but I’d say I would at least get a passing grade. 

And then I met people.

-VB-

It was in the middle of the summer when I was harvesting fish from my trap that I heard a slowly growing sound from the east. Not wanting to be caught off guard, I quickly ran back to my roundhouse, dumped the fish on the newly constructed butchering wooden table, and then took up my iron shortsword and my crossbow with its quiver. 

I quickly made my way to the river again but stayed hidden behind the water reeds by the river bank. 

The sound grew closer and grew closer, and then he heard them clearly. It was the sound of falling, fighting, and fleeing; one group was chasing another group, the latter of which sounded like it was composed mostly with … women and children. All of them were wearing low quality linen or leather. Most of the warriors chasing the fleeing women and children (with 

Then I saw them. They appeared in a gap in the tall reeds on the other side of the river. I knew that the width of this river was around a hundred meters, which was well within my crossbow’s range…

But did I want to get involved? Yes, I just fucking watched someone get cut down, but was it my problem?

I winced as someone else got struck with a crude bronze-tipped spear.

And then I saw one of the chasers cornering a kid.

I gritted my teeth as I brought up my crossbow and took aim as the would-be-child-killer’s hand rose up with a sword in hand. 

Hopefully, I was attacking some kind of raiders, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to let kids die. 

Just as the man’s arm reached the peak of his sword lifting, I fired. My bolt flew with a thwang, and at the same time, I gained a new power. I could feel it burning into my eyes as I watched the warrior take the bolt to the back, right into his heart, and he collapsed with spouting blood.

Enhanced Accuracy, that was my new power.

Not as happy as I should be with the new power, I quickly reloaded my crossbow as the chasers screamed and shouted in confusion. Then I lifted my crossbow back up less than thirty seconds later and took aim again at another exposed warrior. My body and eyes set themselves even without work on my part to the next target I had in my sight. Less than a second after aiming, I fired and immediately went back to reloading while watching the warriors on the other side of the river still looking for their attacker. I watched even as I reloaded as my second bolt slammed into another warrior, this time into his gut, and he went down screaming bloody murder.

Thank God that my side of the water reeds were really tall and densely packed.

I finished reloading my third bolt and fired.

My target?

The guy who just spotted me.

He shouted something but it was cut off when my bolt slammed into his throat. Unfortunately for me, the other warriors saw the direction of the bolt and looked towards where I was.

I gulped and quickly reloaded. 

One of the warriors had a bow and he fired off an arrow. I flinched as I saw the arrow fly in a parabolic arc but dunk into the river ten meters away from me. 

I aimed at the bowman who was now ducking, predicted for his dodge, and fired. The bolt flew with a whistle and thunk. The bowman went down with a bolt through his chest. The other warriors began to shout, but I understood none of it. I understood their gestures, though; they wanted to kill me, and gesturing to their friends to assault me across the river. I saw them approach the river and there were a whole two dozen of them!

I gulped and reached down for another bolt from the quiver, grabbed it, and reloaded. I looked back up and saw that there were four men trying to cross the river. They had a shield up. When and where did they get shields?! I squinted my eyes. Those shields looked like wooden shields. That wasn’t great…

… Oh, that guy’s not shielded.

Thwang.

“GURK!” 

He just flopped and stayed still, bleeding out. 

That was already four men I’ve killed. 

My hands shook as I reloaded the crossbow - the closest raider was now halfway into the river - and took aim again. For a brief moment where I aimed and shot, my hands remained still, perhaps an effect of my new power.

Thwang.

Another down.

I reloaded. Fired. Reloaded. Fired. Reloaded-.

The first of them touched my side of the river.

I shot his left knee out. 

Reloaded. 

Aimed at the second guy touching the shore. Fired. I winced when my bolt found its way through its crotch. 

“S-Sorry,” I muttered.

Reloaded. Two of them were on land now, ready to charge me with their shields up. I aimed for the guy on the left and shot, firing the bolt with a final thwang, and watched as my latest target went down with a bolt through his neck. The other guy charged. 

I dropped my crossbow and drew my iron shortsword. With my trembling legs, I waited as he rushed into the water reeds and when he was blinded for a split second as he dove into the reeds, I ducked low and struck. To my surprise, precision and accuracy applied to striking with swords as well, and I watched in brief horrified fascination as my iron shortsword cut through his leather clothes, and muscle of his side. When he went down screaming, I drew my sword back and struck the spine of his exposed neck. 

Just like that, this fight was over. 

I looked up and saw the remaining warriors, a dozen of them, start going back to the other side of the river instead of pushing towards mine. I hesitated and then finally decided against shooting them, especially when they tried in vain to run.

I let out a sigh of relief and just collapsed on the spot right next to the dead raider. 

“Well, that just happened,” I muttered before quickly scooting away from the dead body. “F-Fuck!” And then I remembered that there were people on the other side of the river that I had saved. Couldn’t leave a job half-finished, right? Quickly as I could, I brought out a raft that was nearby and hidden amongst the water reeds and pushed it out into the water. The calm river didn’t pull my raft away immediately on top of the rope I had tied to the raft and a deep peg on land, and soon, I unhooked the rope from the peg and used a crude paddle to push the raft out. 

I heard people screaming and sobbing on the other side as I landed my raft and tied it to a tree by the river bank. Walking off of the raft and then through the reeds, I came upon a gruesome sight. There were at least three dozen people dead, most of them women and children. Some had their stomach cut open, others with a slash across their back, and some looked crushed under a hammer. It didn’t take me long to find the hammer in question, wielded by one of the raiders I killed. 

I stepped out of the water reeds, and the refugees spotted me immediately. I stopped when they saw me, and raised my hands up. Then I slowly made my way over to one of the cooling corpses of the raiders and pulled out my crossbow bolt without being too squeamish about pulling a bolt out a dead body. 

“So… I don’t think any of you speak English,” I said out loud. I sighed when they looked at me quizzically for the first time, losing a bit of the fear. “Who am I kidding? English is a medieval western European language. I don’t even know where I am.” I certainly stood out from among them too. I looked different with my brown hair compared to their black hairs. All of us shared a pale complexion common in western and eastern Europe, but I just didn’t know where I was. 

Besides, it was 12,000 years before my time. I had absolutely no clue. 

Seeing as they saw that I was the one who saved them, they quickly lost their fear but none of their sorrow. Many women held their dead children while sobbing and children grasped and cried for their moms. At least, they were saying something close to “ma” and “mama.” That’s one word that was almost universal, even in 12,000 BC, huh?

I pulled out the last of the bolts after ten minutes… and then I looted the bodies of their weapons and whatever other useful things they had. At the very least, I could smelt them later and hammer them out to make myself an armor (if I want armor). 

I tossed the bloodied bolts into the quiver, feeling queasy even as I did so. I took a deep breath and then turned to the refugees and, in particular, the one tear-stricken woman staring at me both resolutely and unkindly. 

“Don’t look at me like that, lady. I just … killed because I had to. Wasn’t going to let a kid die in front of my eyes,” I said, even though I knew that they didn’t understand me. But then I gestured with my thumb after that. “We can’t stay here.” I grabbed one of the corpses and then slung it over my shoulder like a potato bag. Then I made my way back to the river and tossed it in. 

I repeated this slow process for all of the dead raiders, but the dead woman and children… I didn’t want them to be fish food. They didn’t ask to be killed, unlike the raiders. I did have a shovel, though… 

I made my way back across the river, by swimming this time, and then came back with a shovel. Huffing and gasping despite surviving the past year being in the wilderness having hardened and improved my body, I got to work on making a grave for each of the innocent dead.

All ten of them.

This was going to take forever. 

-VB-

When I was done, it was dusk. Tired and worn, I made my way to the raft and found the women and children there, seemingly waiting for me.

For a second, I thought about chasing them away…. But that felt wrong. At the same time, they looked like they were begging me to let them stay with me with those eyes. 

Sighing, I walked on top of the raft and gestured for them to get on. There was plenty of room for them; I originally made the raft to move heavy rocks in large quantities, after all.

They got on, and I rowed us to my side of the river. Some of the women got off when I did and helped me drag the raft inland. I tied the raft’s rope to a nearby tree trunk. With that done, I gestured for them to follow me. 

We traveled through the water reeds and the tall grass. We walked around a small hill, and came upon my home. When the group hesitated to move forward, I gestured for them to keep going, they did. 

There were four women of varying ages - with the oldest probably in her late 40’s and the youngest in her mid teens - and a farmer’s dozen of children. All of them looked stick-thin and more than a few of them had bruised or burned wrists, necks, and ankles.

Slaves or prisoners of war? 

I shuddered to think about it. 

Knowing that this was going to hurt me a lot, I walked into my roundhouse, dropped off my weapons, and then collected half a dozen wooden bowls. I walked back out, pushing the thick, hinged door with my back and walked out. There was a stone table out here, one I used mostly for my crafting, but it was clean now. I set the bowls down and walked back in, ignoring the wary looks of the children and the women. I walked back out with my jar of jerkies. I reached in, and dropped a handful of irregularly cubic jerky meat into each of the bowls and stepped away. I gestured for them to eat. 

The children had no hesitation in the face of food. They jumped in even when their mothers -probably- shouted at them with what I assumed was ‘stop.’ But they didn’t. They grabbed the meat and began to shove it into their mouths. Seeing as it wasn’t enough for the adults, I sighed as I went back inside, prepared another two bowls of jerkies, and came back out. I walked up to the women and slowly thrust the bowls forward. 

The eldest of them took the bowls and bowed, saying something in their language. I nodded in return before walking back into the roundhouse, picked up my bolts, and came back out. I almost felt some of them watch me as I headed to the river to wash the bolts. 

-VB-

When I came back, the mood was solemn but at least the children and the women seemed to not be starving anymore. They saw me when I stepped on a dry stick and broke it with a sharp crack. At first, they were alarmed and looked ready to flee but then they saw that it was me and relaxed.

I walked up to the women and knelt crouched down. 

… I couldn’t let them stay here. The raiders were sure to come and try to kill me since this was the area their friends died. Hell, they might be on their way back right now to find these people. 

I grabbed a nearby stick and scratched a one into the soft dirt. I drew a crescent moon. I looked up to see the eldest of them look at my drawings and nod in acknowledgement. 

With that done, I grabbed my crossbow bolts and crossbow, which the children eyed with curiosity. 

-VB-

I didn’t sleep during the night. I kept an eye out, clutching my crossbow in my hands and felt safe by the weight of the iron shortsword hanging from my belt. 

“I killed people today, mum, dad,” I said to no one. “Couldn’t watch them kill a kid.”

It happened before, watching a kid die, that was. It was a car accident, but I had ample enough time, speed, and reflex to jump in. I hadn’t back then. I had this time.

I let out a shaky sigh. “I think I did the right thing. The kids and women all look like slaves or prisoner of war or something. I know exactly how they’ll end up if they were caught.

If they were caught, that was. 

It was clear to me on the other side of the river that the raiders, or whoever they were, intended to kill them. There was no hesitation in the first strike nor the second. 

They were there to kill the refugees.

I could think of multiple reasons right now as to why warriors would go after refugees to kill in this day and age. Succession crisis, ethnic cleansing, outright conquest, or even family feuds. The level of violence exceeded anything my modern sensibilities were used to.

So far, I had been fighting nature for the sake of survival.

Could I fight people?

I closed my eyes for a moment. 

“I don’t want to fight…”

-VB-

It’s been a week since I killed the raiders and saved the refugees. It’s been six days since I have last seen them, heading southeas-tward. One of them had suggested that there was a city there, but I didn’t know where I was. If I had a map of a rough coastline or even mountains, then I might be able to know, but I had neither.

I also realized a rather fatal disadvantage I had in this new old place: I was illiterate on top of being a non-native speaker. I couldn’t understand what the raiders were saying, and I couldn’t understand what the refugees were saying, and both of them were distinct languages. The only fact that soothed me was the fact that the language spoken by the women in one of their few attempted communications had sounded unfamiliar. 

I doubted that I anywhere near where Rome would be founded, though, simply because of the lack of mountains and the lack of the famous Italian hills that I could see. 

By the same logic, I wasn’t on the Iberian Peninsula, Anatolian heartland, Germany, or Peloponnese Peninsula. 

A place of many rivers and plains, not a lot of forests, and place where humans come and go but not settle down in large numbers at.

I could be in one of these few places: Northern Italy, Wallachian Plains, or Plains of France. It didn’t rain here hard enough nor the summer chill enough to be Eastern Europe, any of the Great Northern Plains, England, and it certainly wasn’t Scandinavia. 

Regardless of where I was, there were other people nearby.

And they were violent.

I felt a shiver run down my spine. 

Speaking of violent people, I made myself an enemy of one. I didn’t know their numbers, I didn’t know the cause of the conflict, I didn’t know their origin, I didn’t know their language, I didn’t know their area of operation, I didn’t know their culture, I didn’t know their warfare strategies and tactics, I didn’t know their international/regional influence…

But I did know that they used mostly bronze for their weapons. Out of thirteen pieces of looted equipment, twelve had been bronze and two had been iron. 

I was in 1,000 BC-ish, which meant that Iron Age had started more or less in Europe. Iron tools, weapons included, was starting to become proliferated, but it wasn’t anywhere close to allowing current armies to be fully equipped with the stuff. 

At least, I hoped so.

This meant that iron had to be traded for most people. It was in the proliferation stage still, and I wasn’t close to the Mediterranean, where this proliferation was the strongest. My Perfect Memory Recall didn’t show me any memories of iron age ferrous metallurgy map because I hadn’t looked up that kind of stuff, but I read that the Mediterranean, the heartland of European history for so much of the ancient world, was where it started. 

Trade. 

It had to happen. Tribes are in general incapable of producing large quantities of iron. They could produce them, yes, but it was a slow process with slow quantities per production run. Centralized industrial power was what empowered nations, and tribes weren’t centralized for anything.

…

I scratched my head roughly before growling out in frustration. 

I had to risk going out to find them. Without information, I was a sitting duck. 

I let out a sigh of breath. Of fear. Of terror. Of uncertainty.

Two days afterwards, I torched my own roundhouse and broke all evidence of metallurgy. 

Then I headed west, following the still clear trails left by bleeding men and hooves.