Chapter 2 - Freaking Wolves

I should probably explain why me going deeper into the forest was an extremely bad idea.

The areas outside of Onryx, and civilization in general, is collectively termed as the Wildlands. Aside from the standard wolves, bears and the occasional angry badger, there is a greater threat that calls the Wildlands its home, MajiMonsters. The MajiMonsters are,well, monsters created by some people called the maji hundreds of years ago. They're living objects, they're animals infused with aether, they're the aether given form. To sum up, walking natural disasters. Worst of all, humans like me cannot hurt them and I don't mean in a moral sense either. The maji somehow made it so that their monsters were completely invincible to human weapons; animals not so much but that's a whole other thing.

If you're wondering why the MajiMonsters haven't killed me or wipe out my town is because of the circle of menhirs, giant upright stones with runes carved into them, surrounding it. Every form of human civilization in the Wildlands are protected from the MajiMonsters in a variety of ways. I'm not sure how it works in other towns, but the town's menhirs act like an invisible fence that keeps out the monsters. Either way, the fact that I was walking further away from the menhirs than usual made me a bit nervous.

Due to this being my first time going out so far, I made sure to mark the trees every few feet to make a beeline back to the menhirs just in case of MajiMonsters. I must have marked a dozen or so trees until I finally found the honeybee hive I was looking for, the only problem now was that it was about 10 ft above the ground. I clicked my tongue in annoyance, the trees at the usual spot had hives low enough I could just reach out and grab some. Then again, that might be why the bears ate them.

Climbing a tree to grab honeycombs without tools would have been foolish, luckily I had my hunting knife, my spiked winter boots and some ropes in my backpack. (If you're ever in the wild for camping or hiking, remember that rope is your best friend). I tied a rope to my lucky charm and threw it over a branch as close to the hive as possible then proceeded to remove the charm and tie the now dangling rope around the trunk of the tree. I managed to make myself a harness out of a second rope, some metal rings I found in my backpack and my backpack. I hooked myself up to my new rope contraption and used a combination of shoes and knife to climb the tree, thankfully with no issues...at least not yet.

I managed to get to the hive,using the branches as an additional foothold, and carefully used my knife to remove some parts of the hive and add it to my pack. I was about to just rappel myself off the tree unto the ground and go, until I heard the snow crunching beneath me. I stopped rappelling immediately and slowly turned my head towards the ground, to see a pack of dire wolves sniffing around the tree. I was so focused on gathering the bee hives that I didn't stop to think about listening for possible threats approaching me. On the upside I was up the tree and dire wolves can't climb, on the downside they ended up smelling my presence and have proceeded to circle the tree and have tried to bite at me to bring me down.

For all intents and purposes, I was now stuck. I definitely couldn't rappel down unless I wanted to get mauled by wolves and if I tried to climb upward they might notice the rope moving and attack it and cut me down. So I was basically stuck there, dangling for dear life as I hoped that dire wolves would eventually get bored and leave me alone to go hunt rabbits, deer or something; anything but me!