Timothy woke to the blaze of a bright morning sky in a world still deeply unfamiliar to him.
What roused him wasn't the dawn's warmth, but a sharp pinching pain on his skin and the unpleasant feeling of hard objects striking his body.
His eyes snapped open.
Even before he fully registered his surroundings, another projectile whizzed into the edge of his vision and smacked him square on the forehead, stinging sharply.
Timothy turned his gaze toward the source, which was, predictably, the direction of the settlement.
There, he saw a group of four-armed creatures casually hefting enormous rocks in all four of their limbs.
They crushed these boulders down into fist-sized chunks and started pelting him with the fragments.
"Bastards," Timothy muttered as he forced himself upright.
Stones and dust cascaded off his body in a gritty shower, the sheer amount of debris telling him this had clearly been going on for some time before he'd even stirred.
