Ian woke with his neck screaming and his back feeling like someone had taken a hammer to his spine. The oak's bark had left deep impressions across his shoulders, and his legs were numb from being tucked against his chest all night. Gray light filtered through the shelter's opening—dawn, probably, though the thick cloud cover made it hard to tell. His threadbare mattress on the apartment floor—the one he'd cursed every morning for its lumps and springs—now seemed like a distant luxury.
He crawled out, joints popping with each movement, and stood in the clearing with the pole still gripped in one hand. His mouth tasted like something had died in it, and his stomach was already complaining about the berry diet. But he was alive. That counted for something.
The pole sat in his palm, warm and familiar. Yesterday it had transformed itself into tools he'd needed—blade, hook, mallet. All based on what he'd been thinking about, what task he'd been trying to accomplish. Which meant it responded to intent. To need.
"Alright," he muttered, his voice rough from sleep. "Let's see what else you can do." No time like the present after all.
He focused on the concept of digging. Imagined turning soil, breaking through roots, creating a depression in the ground. The pole shifted immediately, the metal flowing like mercury until he held something that resembled a narrow spade. The blade was sharp-edged and angled, perfect for cutting through packed earth.
Ian stared at it. The transformation had been instant, seamless, like the pole had simply been waiting for the request. He knelt and drove the blade into the ground near the shelter. It sliced through the soil with no resistance, turning up rich, dark earth that smelled of decay and minerals.
He pulled it free and thought about something different. A hammer. The pole reformed, one end flattening and widening into a striking surface while the handle shortened for better leverage. He tested it against a nearby stone, and the impact sent a satisfying crack echoing through the clearing.
The possibilities spiraled through his mind. He thought about cutting and the pole became an axe. Thought about precision work and it formed into something like a chisel. Each transformation was fluid, instantaneous, responding to his mental image of what he needed.
But there were limits. When he tried to imagine it becoming a gun, nothing happened. The pole remained stubbornly in its previous form, not even attempting the transformation. The pole refused to become anything with complex mechanisms—no chainsaw with its whirring teeth, no drill with its spinning bit, nothing that would normally run on batteries or gasoline. The pole only became hand tools—things powered by muscle and leverage, not mechanisms.
Ian sat back on his heels, the pole returned to its original form. This thing was incredible, but it wasn't magic in the sense of creating something from nothing. It transformed into tools he could use, gave him knowledge he needed, but it seemed to do the work for him, requiring only his direction. It wasn't just a tool—it was practically a replacement for his own labor.
Which brought him back to the larger problem: he had no idea how long he'd be stuck here.
The thought settled in his stomach like lead. Yesterday had been about immediate survival—food, water, shelter for the night. But what if this wasn't temporary? What if he was here for weeks? Months? The shelter he'd built was adequate for a night or two, but it wouldn't hold up to serious weather. And fall was definitely in the air, that crisp edge to the morning that suggested summer was ending. Which meant winter was coming.
Ian looked around the clearing with new eyes. This spot was good—central, near water, with open ground for building. The convergence of forest types suggested he was at some kind of transition zone, which might mean access to diverse resources. The river provided water and potentially fish. The berry bushes were food, and the pole had shown him which ones were safe.
But winter. He'd freeze to death in a lean-to when the temperature dropped. And the river might ice over, cutting off his water supply. He needed something permanent. Something that could handle whatever this world threw at him.
A base. Not just a shelter, but an actual structure. Walls that would hold heat. A roof that wouldn't collapse under snow. Storage for food. A fire pit that wouldn't burn the place down.
The scale of it made his head hurt. He'd never built anything like that. Didn't know the first thing about construction beyond what he'd seen on home improvement shows he'd half-watched while falling asleep. But the pole had taught him how to make a shelter yesterday, had given him knowledge he shouldn't possess. Could it do the same for something larger?
Ian stood, his legs protesting the movement. First things first—he needed to understand what resources he had available. The clearing was maybe fifty feet across at its widest point, ringed by mixed forest. The river was close enough to access easily but far enough that flooding probably wasn't a concern. The ground was relatively level, though there were a few spots where the earth dipped or rose.
He walked the perimeter, the pole in hand, examining the trees. Some were massive—the oak he'd built the shelter against, several others that had to be centuries old. Others were younger, thinner, the kind that might be suitable for lumber if he could figure out how to fell them and process them.
His mind was already working through problems he had no idea how to solve. How did you turn a tree into boards? How did you join them together into walls? What about a foundation—did he need one? How did you make a roof that didn't leak?
The pole grew warm in his hand. Ian looked down at it, then around the clearing. "Can you show me?" he asked the empty air. "How to build something permanent?"
The green light erupted with an intensity that made him squint. It washed across the clearing, highlighting specific trees, specific sections of ground. But this time it didn't just show him immediate steps—it layered information into his head in a cascade that made his vision blur.
Foundation placement. Post and beam construction. Notching techniques for joining logs. Roof pitch calculations. The knowledge flooded in, not as words but as understanding, as if he'd always known these things and was just remembering them.
Ian's breath came short as the images crystallized. Not just abstract concepts but specific techniques—how to select trees of the right diameter, how to fell them safely, how to strip bark and notch ends so they'd lock together. The foundation would be simple, stones from the river set in a level base to keep the lowest logs off the damp ground. The walls would stack, each log settling into the one below it, the notches doing most of the structural work.
The light faded. Ian stood in the clearing with his head spinning and his hands shaking slightly around the pole. The knowledge sat in his skull like it belonged there, complete and accessible. He knew how to build this. Actually knew it, in a way that felt more real than anything he'd learned from books or videos.
"Okay." The word came out steadier than he felt. "Okay. I can do this."
He started with the trees. The pole had highlighted specific ones during its light show—pines at the clearing's edge, straight-trunked and uniform in diameter. Ian approached the first one, maybe eight inches across, and thought about felling it. The pole shifted in his grip, becoming an axe with a broad blade that caught the morning light.
The first swing bit deep into the wood, chips flying. The second went deeper. By the fifth swing, Ian realized he wasn't getting tired. His arms should be burning by now, his shoulders screaming, but the pole seemed to be doing most of the work. The blade moved through the pine like the tree wanted to fall, each impact perfectly placed, perfectly angled. The weight of the axe felt negligible in his hands.
The pine came down with a crack that echoed across the clearing, falling exactly where he'd intended it to fall. Ian stared at the felled tree, then at the pole-turned-axe in his hands. That had taken maybe two minutes. Two minutes to drop a tree that should have required twenty minutes of hard labor.
He moved to the next pine. Then the next. The pole made the work effortless in a way that should have been impossible. Each tree fell with minimal effort, the blade cutting through wood like it was softened butter. By the time the sun had climbed above the tree line, he had six pines down and delimbed, their trunks lying parallel across the clearing like pale fingers.
The pole shifted forms as he needed it—axe for felling, smaller blade for stripping branches, a draw knife for removing bark. Each transformation was instant, intuitive. Ian's hands moved with confidence he shouldn't possess, guided by the knowledge the pole had given him. The bark peeled away in long strips, revealing the pale wood underneath, still wet with sap that made his hands sticky.
He approached the first log, wondering how he'd ever move it to the foundation site. The pole hummed in his hand, then extended into a long staff. When he pressed one end beneath the log, it seemed to take on the weight itself, lifting as he guided rather than pushed. His muscles tensed for strain that never came. The pole did the work, making each two-hundred-pound trunk feel almost weightless as he positioned them one by one where the foundation would rise.
He took a break and ate more berries, his hands trembling slightly despite the pole's assistance. The sweet-tart juice burst across his tongue, momentarily distracting him from the impossible progress he'd made. Six trees felled and stripped in hours. Knowledge that had simply appeared in his mind like it had always been there. Ian stared at the neat row of logs and tried to process what was happening to him. He miss paying friends in beer to do this for him.
He quickly swatted those thoughts away. He didn't want to think about what would happen to the few people he talked to regularly when they found him gone, especially his parents… Nope not thinking about that. He popped another handful of berries into his mouth and wiped the purple stain across his jeans as he got back to work. The pole that rested across his knees was soon back into his hands. Work sucked but he needed something to do.
The foundation came next. Ian waded into the river, the cold water shocking against his legs, and selected stones from the riverbed. Flat ones, thick enough to provide stable support. The pole became a pry bar when he needed to extract larger rocks wedged between boulders. It became a hammer when he needed to break a stone into a more useful shape.
He set the stones in a rectangle, roughly twelve feet by sixteen feet—large enough for a single room that would serve as whatever he needed. The pole had shown him how to level them, how to check that each corner was square. His movements were precise, economical, like he'd done this a hundred times before.
More trees fell. The pile of stripped logs grew. Ian worked through the morning and into the afternoon, barely noticing the passage of time. His stomach complained occasionally, but the hunger was distant, manageable. He paused again once to drink from the river and eat a handful of berries from the bush, then returned to work.
The first logs went down on the stone foundation, the largest and straightest ones forming the base. Ian used the pole—transformed into a scribe—to mark where the notches would go. Then it became a saw, cutting precise grooves at each end. Then a chisel, cleaning out the wood between the cuts until the notches were perfect semicircles that would lock with the log above.
He lifted the second log into place. It was awkward, heavy, requiring him to lever it up with the pole and then roll it into position. But when it settled into the notches, the fit was perfect. Solid. The two logs locked together like they'd been made for each other.
Ian stepped back, breathing hard despite the pole's assistance. Two logs. The beginning of a wall. It looked impossibly crude, impossibly simple, but also undeniably real. He'd done that. Built that. The foundation of something permanent.
The afternoon wore on. More logs went up, each one notched and fitted with the same precision. The walls began to take shape, rising in increments that felt both painfully slow and impossibly fast. Slow because each log required careful measurement, precise cutting, deliberate placement. Fast because the pole made every step easier than it should be, and the knowledge in his head eliminated any guesswork.
By the time the sun started its descent toward the horizon, Ian had four walls rising waist-high. The structure was visible now, undeniable—the outline of a cabin taking form in the clearing. The logs were rough, still showing axe marks and the occasional gouge where his cuts hadn't been perfect, but they were solid. Real.
He stood inside the half-built walls, the pole resting against his shoulder, and looked up at the sky visible above him. His body ached in ways he was only starting to notice—his hands were blistered despite the pole doing most of the work, his back protested every movement, and his legs trembled with exhaustion.
He looked at the tool, then back to the half-built walls. The logs stacked against each other, notched and fitted, forming the skeleton of something that resembled shelter.
How long was this supposed to take? The question drifted through his exhausted mind. He'd seen those documentaries—the ones that played on cable at three in the morning when he couldn't sleep. Frontier families spending months on a single cabin. Teams of men working for weeks just to get walls up. And he'd done this—this much—in a single day.
The pole hummed warm against his palm. He stared at it, at the spiral etchings that caught the fading light, and his stomach twisted with something that wasn't quite fear but wasn't comfort either. What the hell had he pulled out of that river? Why had it been there, wedged between rocks in the middle of nowhere? Had someone lost it? Left it? Or had it been waiting, somehow, for someone stupid enough to wade in and grab it?
The thoughts made his head hurt worse than it already did. He set the pole down carefully against the nearest wall and rubbed his face with hands that smelled of pine sap and river water and sweat.
Tomorrow. He'd think about the pole's origins tomorrow. Right now his body was screaming for rest, and the shelter—his crude lean-to—was still standing at the clearing's edge. The cabin wouldn't have a roof for days yet. Maybe longer.
But tomorrow he needed to deal with the water situation. The realization hit him with sudden clarity. He'd been drinking straight from the river since he'd woken up here, cupping his hands and hoping for the best. Rolling the fucking dice on whether some parasite would turn his guts inside out. That had been fine for a day, maybe two, but he couldn't keep doing it. Not long term. Not if he was actually building something permanent here.
He needed to boil water. Which meant he needed something to hold it while it boiled. A pot. A container. Something that wouldn't catch fire or leak or poison him with whatever materials went into it.
Ian looked at the pole again. Could it become a pot? The thought felt absurd even as he considered it. The pole transformed into tools—solid things, hand-powered things. But a container? That seemed different. More complex. And even if it could, he couldn't exactly use it as a pot if he needed it as an axe or a saw.
No, he needed to make something separate. Pottery, maybe? He'd seen videos of people making clay pots, coiling and firing them. There had to be clay somewhere near the river. But that would take time, and knowledge he didn't have, and—
His thoughts were getting fuzzy around the edges. The exhaustion was catching up, making everything feel distant and dreamlike. The berry juice on his fingers had dried sticky.
He grabbed the pole and trudged back to the lean-to as the last light bled from the sky. The shelter looked pathetic compared to the rising cabin walls, but it would keep the dew off him for one more night. Tomorrow he'd figure out the water problem. Tomorrow he'd add more logs to the walls. Tomorrow he'd start thinking about a roof, about a door, about all the hundred other things a structure needed to be livable.
Tomorrow. If whatever had made those sounds in the forest last night didn't find him first.
Ian crawled into the lean-to and pulled his knees to his chest, the pole clutched against his ribs. His body ached in places he didn't know could ache. But the cabin walls were real. Four courses high, solid and fitted, sitting on their stone foundation like they belonged there.
He'd built that. With help from a magic pole he didn't understand, sure, but his hands had done the work. His sweat had fallen on those logs.
The forest settled into its night sounds around him. Insects. Small rustlings. The distant murmur of the river. Nothing melodic. Nothing hunting.
Not yet, anyway.
His eyes fell closed despite his intention to stay alert. The pole's warmth against his chest was the last thing he registered before sleep dragged him under—that and the nagging thought that he'd need to find clay tomorrow, or copper, or something that could hold water over a fire without killing him in the process.
The water problem followed him down into uneasy dreams.