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Chapter 2 - The Phoenix Warrior arrives part 2

Rin went out with difficulty. She felt weak and her stomach area felt numb, she clearly had eaten something with poison and these were the after effects. But the moment she saw what lay out of the small hut, she became speechless.

The hut lay beside a small frozen brook, surrounded by a forest that was just coming awake with the weak sun rays of a winter morning. There was snow everywhere, the white scenery only broken by the brownish tree trunks and the blue sky.

-This is not Kansas anymore, definitely-Rin thought- Maybe not even Earth...

She would need to wait for answers. The ghosts had been very insistent that she was in danger and needed to hide. She had 3 things to do, build a shelter, set the hut in fire and also to set the gem in her forehead but she was given no hint of which one she should do first, it was up to her to decide that.

Her survival training said to build the shelter first. After all, she needed to see what was useful from the hut before setting it all on fire. The gem thing would be last as she did not know what would happen when she did that.

She decided to take shelter on higher ground nearby the hut and the brook. The woods seemed to go on and on and the place where the hut was located barely qualified as a small clearing. From the entrance of the hut and with all the snow around, no trail was visible which made Rin curious as to why exactly this family had stayed in this forgotten place.

First, she passed revision to her own body and its belongings. She was clad in gray rags, barely suitable for the cold weather and she only had a small pouch with her that contained a set of leather gloves, inkling and a small medallion, engraved with signs that she could not read at all. Her head was bandaged tightly with some gray cloth and none of her hair was visible. She kept it that way because her red hair would be too visible from afar.

Then she searched the hut and found it quite lacking. This was no humble abode, it lacked all the trimmings that she knew people, even those in prehistoric times, had in their houses. Apart from the blankets covering the bed, and as small pot by the little fireplace, only the bowls and chopsticks told of human belongings. There were also just some sort of tubercules on a bag, no herbs or food supplies to speak of cooking or medicine. These people had only the rags in their bodies and seemed to have been abandoned.

With no other choice, she took out the blankets, most of the straw in the bed and the bag with the tubercules and carried them to the place where she would build the shelter, taking great care to not leave signs that could point to her new location wich was upper in the snowy hill. Since the snow was abundant and the weather seemed to keep cold despite the sun rays, she went for a small snow nest between 2 rocks that ran parallel to the slope so it would be easier to build even in her weakened state. She started first by clearing the snow until she found the bare ground and using the straw as the base. Since she only had branches and wooden pieces from the hut, she put the branches as roof and used a small plank of wood as a tool to shovel snow over and beside the rocks until she covered everything and only a small entrance remained. With how weak she was, it took over 3 hours to finish the task that could have taken her no more than 10 minutes if only she had her usual strenght.

On the last trip to the hut, she searched the dead bodies because she had to take care of them as best as she could and found that each carried pouchs that she decided to carefully look over afterwards. Rin put them side by side right before the fireplace and took a little time to close their eyes and cover their faces. With how cold it was, their skin started to look ashen and both the gems in their foreheads also were colored a dull gray shade. She did not know what the right death rites were but she did as best her intuition told her.

Rin started the fire needed to burn the hut by the fireplace, and used some straw from the bed to make it become big enough that it reached the hut roof. As she saw it catching fire too, she got out of the hut and started to make her way into the shelter while using a fallen branch to erase the signs she left behind. The weather that had been sunny in the early morning, started to become darker and it was clear that a storm might hit soon because the wind picked up speed and with it, the small hut blazed faster and more strongly. She meant to hide in her shelter to recover some strenght and to avoid the smell of burnt bodies that would surely soon permeate everything, but she looked back to the burning hut one last time before entering the shelter and from the distance, saw the family of 3 standing in front of the hut entrance, each of them dressed up in luxurious clothes and jewelry, so completely unlike the rags they had been using before. They were waving goodbye. Rin blinked and they were gone, but she heard a faint whisper in the wind with their voices.

-Thank you Rin-