Chapter Five: A Side Mission Day 5

When I woke up, I was the only one inside the tent. I arose to find my armor missing. Panicking, I started to search the room frantically, but could not find my armor. Deciding that I could just wear my robes until I found my armor would be okay. When I exited the tent I found Novaradi sitting on a stump shining my armor.
"Novaradi! You gave me a heart attack, I thought my armor was gone forever," I told him.
"Nope, I had it. I thought that I should make up for my prank yesterday – it was kinda mean," he said.
"You didn't have to." I mumbled. "Hey, where's Amakos?"
"Oh, he just went off to relieve himself. He was helping me put away the camp but, then he had to you know 'go'."
As soon as he said that, Amakos returned.
"Hey, sleeping beauty is awake," Amakos teased.
"Cute," I responded, chuckling. "Hey, what time is it?"
"Almost noon."
"Shouldn't we have left a quite a while ago?"
"Commander is giving us a day off."
"Thank Lord Dagon, my feet were about to die."
Both of them laughed at my weird comment. I wonder what I am going to do today? Maybe I'll go hunt or maybe I'll join the others when they spar – I know for sure that they are going to spar at some point today. Maybe I will go for a swim. So many possibilities. I think I can probably do all of them.
I think that I'll start off today with a nice walk. It's been quite a while before I have been able to take a nice, relaxing stroll. I wonder if Amakos or Novaradi would like to join me. Maybe I'll ask them.
"Hey, would either of you like to join me on a stroll through the woods?" I asked the pair.
Amakos told me that he would, but he had some other things to do. Novaradi was all up for it though. The three of us put away the dishes and other items that we had out during breakfast and lunch away. After the mess was removed, Novaradi and I set out on our journey.
We left at approximately two that afternoon. We found a long winding trail through the forest, it appeared to have had very little to no travelers in a long time. We were walking for quite a while, being in an intense debate about weapons or magic being more effective. Being distracted by our debate, we didn't notice that we had walked off of the trail and were now headed deep into the woods. Shoot! Was what both of us were thinking when we finally realized where exactly we were.
"Uh, Valen... where are we?" Asked Novaradi with a nervous tone in his voice.
I stopped and looked around, "I have no idea" Then I turned back towards the way we came. "Maybe we should turn back?"
"Maybe we should..." Then we started to walk in the direction we came in. We walked for hours and still hadn't reached the camp.
"Just how far did we actually go?" I asked Novaradi.
"We couldn't have gone too far, could we?"
We both stopped and took a look around. There were no signs of civilization anywhere: No roads, no footprints, not even an abandoned campsite. We both sighed in unison in despair.
Suddenly I had an idea. "Hey! Maybe I can climb one of these trees here and try to find the rest."
"That's a great idea, but how will you get to the top of the tree? All of the strong branches are out of our reach."
"Maybe you can give me a slight boost?"
"Yeah, okay sure."

Once atop the tree, I could see for miles and miles. And there were miles and miles of trees. I sighed again. "I can't see anything but trees!" I called down to Novaradi. "No... wait... I see smoke! Smoke means fire! Maybe that's our army?"
"You found smoke? How far away is it?" Asked Novaradi.
"About 6 miles to the north-east."
"SIX!? That'll take forever to reach."
"Well," I said as I climbed back down, "We best get walking then."

We were walking for nearly an hour and a half and the entire time I had the persistent feeling of being followed, but every time I looked, nothing seemed to be there. I so hate the forest. And to make matters worse, every now and again, I had to climb one of the stupid trees to make sure we were still headed in the correct direction. The course of the day went the same, checking from the tree tops, occasional stops when one of us tripped over the many roots and twigs and who knows what else. Finally at some point in the afternoon, we just gave up and decided, even though we hated to, we decided to camp there for the night. Novaradi noticed a piece of over hanging rock that we could camp out in, and we both set to work making a suitable spot to stay. Novaradi made himself busy by gathering long twigs and sticks to make a makeshift hut out of the rock. I went and hunted and killed a deer for our supper. We both went out together and grabbed a bit of firewood.
Our evening was even more boring. Both of us, we were too tired and scared to really talk in full, intelligent conversations. Novaradi fell asleep before I did. I was awake for about two hours after him. But while I was awake, this funny little creature came strolling up to me. It was orange and had a white chest and belly. It looked sort of like one of the wolves, only smaller and not as fierce looking. He just came waltzing on up to me and sat on my lap. And the funniest thing was, when I tried to shoo him off he just licked my hand and nuzzled closer. What a funny little cute mortal thing. I dozed off with this cute thing on my lap.