Your eyes snap open and you scream for several long seconds. Slowly, slowly, it dawns on you that you aren't in pain, your arms, legs, tail ... everything is still attached to your body. You aren't being subjected to the sick rhyming couplet equivalent of being drawn and quartered. You aren't in the chamber beneath the hill in Bannagh Macht. Still, it takes you a long time for your breaths to slow from ragged gasps of panic to normal. Prompts pulse all along the sides of your vision and you numbly check each one -- except the combat log. That you leave minimized. The trauma is far, far too fresh in your mind to revisit even in dry text format.

Congratulations! You have reached level 1 in Thrown Weapons. You are now Unskilled in Thrown Weapons.
Congratulations! You have reached level 6 in Fire Magic.
Congratulations! Through your Cunning Linguist Trait, you have learned to speak and understand Northern Trade-tongue.

YOU HAVE DIED

As you are Chosen, ****'s door is not a one-way trip for you. Your soul has **** its way back into the Realms, but at a cost.
Each time you die, you will lose all progress towards the next level, as well as a random amount of progress in every known Skill, up to 1 full level (to a minimum of level 1.00). In addition, it takes time for your soul to re-form your body and return to your spawn point. When you respawn, only objects which were bound to your soul and on or very near your person will respawn with you. All other objects will remain with your corpse.

You realize after processing the **** notification that you are completely, totally naked. Not even your backpack is with you. You turn your head to look to either side of you. No box of holding, either. Everything you had in this world is now gone. You stare up at the gap in the canyon walls above, then realize with a start that it is almost, or maybe just after, noon. You've been dead for at least an entire night and morning! You have to get to the Starchaser village and let them know what you found!

You roll over and push yourself to your knees and feet. You stagger and fall right back down as your muscles spasm and cramp. The pain is intense and you curl up into the fetal position and wait for the cramps to fade. Your body remembers being torn apart even if you weren't conscious for it, and the subconscious functions of your brain freaked out when it got signals from pieces that it thought shouldn't be there any more. At least, that's what you are guessing happened. It's not like there's an awful lot of precedent in your experience for this.

Once the cramps fade, you get back up, much more slowly and gradually this time, testing each muscle one at a time. The cramps have left sharp lingering pain in your limbs, but you can't wait here for the strain in your muscles to heal, and you don't have the soothebalm leaf to cast Patch Wounds with, if that would even work. Slowly, unsteadily, you place one foot in front of the other and once more walk out of the canyon -- what had your prompt called it, Aidan's Arrival? Sounds pompous to even think that name. You remember which way the village lies in general terms, so you begin to hobble along. You don't know how far it is exactly, but you know it took you most of the night to be marched there from your resting place on top of the hill right in front of you. You're moving a lot slower now, but just maybe you can get there by sunup.