"Nobody knows everything, we know this to be true! Everything is ugh difficult, except what's in front of you." Far from the road and no longer focused on concealing my presence, they'd see me when I got to the city entrance either way, I let myself sing to distract myself from the pain of hiking uphill as my calves cried out in pain. Just ten or 15 more miles, I weakly reassured myself. Well, that plus two of elevation and all the added suffering of dragging this fucking sled. I swear to god, by the end of this thing I'll be either dead or the world's best human sled dog. It's a miracle I haven't torn something yet.
I lost track of time for a while, just focusing on the movement and on not collapsing, and before long I reached the main road again, having zigged and zagged across my more direct route another time. I almost followed it this time too but nope. I'd rather two days of hell than another week of hunger. As I was halfway across it, though, I saw a pony pulling a cart. Stopping my hoarse rendition of the insulting relyricization of Mrs. Robinson that made up the song's ending, I gave them a closer look and saw that it was just the one pony, without wings or a horn and with a cart loaded down with large heavy cloth bags. I most associated them with things like grain but with how bumpy some of them were there was a decent chance they were filled with something like potatoes. My hand twitched towards the spearthrower hooked through my beltloop as a thought crossed my mind but I quickly clamped my other hand around it. I wasn't that sort of pony. I wasn't that hungry or tired yet. As they got closer and I saw how large and strong the old looking pony looked, perhaps even befitting of the title of horse, I weakly told myself that my strong moral compass was the only reason I held back and continued off into the forest, giving the old pony a wave.
It wasn't like me. That wasn't a serious thought. It was just a little spur of the moment impulse. Like how when you're sitting at the edge of a cliff you can't help but think of falling or pushing the person next to you. As I walked these thoughts echoed through my mind but they still sat like bile in the back of my throat. They were excuses. The mild justifications of a weak man. If I was going to make it in this world, if I was going to become a part of instead of a horror monster, I would have to do better.
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By the time I was too sore to continue I was pretty clearly within a day's travel of the extremely tall, opulent spire I had been using to keep my bearings. I still set my trap up before turning in for the day but, although my stomach grumbled and my muscles ached, I might at least be able to steal something the next day. I might even be able to sell my clothes and buy some new ones with some left over if the synthetic fibers of my sweatpants, possibly unknown to a world so poorly industrialized, were seen as valuable. Not sure how you'd get them on a pony though. Something to think about.
A more pressing, and related, issue is communication. It had been an obstacle from the start but with plenty of time to think I could really focus on it. So far I knew a handful of nouns, a simple greeting, and how to say "don't". That was an okay basis but I'd need to do better to actually live as part of society so that gave me my first concrete language goals. I made a mental list of phrases to learn as soon as possible, either through observation or, once I get to that point, asking.
"What is that?"
"How much does that cost?"
Numbers
And a half dozen other less important things. If I had these than not only would I be more able to survive, I'd also be able to learn the language a lot faster. Especially with the first one. I also needed to focus on pronunciation since, in a lot of people's minds, that's the difference between a soft-spoken or possibly brain-damaged native speaker and a foreigner. My look would admittedly skew me towards the latter but they've got three kinds of ponies and some gryphons. They've probably got minotaurs or talking apes or something to compare me to. Being seen as, on some level, native or nativized it a bit of a double-edged word though. Yeah you've got a better shot at respect but I'm willing to bet there'll be a lot more assumptions that I know how things work. That seems like it'll be an easier problem to manage though.
That second one brought me to a much more important issue though. I can only sell my clothes once and they might not want them. That means I need some way to make money more consistently. So far I think I have one main advantage over the ponies I can use towards that end. Fingers. I don't know how ponies hold things but they can't fit everywhere, being bigger than my wrists, and they're not especially flexible. That means I need some kind of work that takes full advantage of my dexterity. Some kind of craft would work best as a start. As I looked over at my sled and saw my knife and spearthrower I realized that, thankfully, I already had a craft in mind. I'd gotten pretty good at functional whittling through my earlier project so now I just had to hone my skills in a more decorative direction.