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Here and there

A man landed face first on the dusty road with a thud and resigned sigh. He stood up, dusted his robe, placed his fallen pointy hat on his head and scanned his surroundings. To his pleasant surprise he spotted a brook was babbling alongside the path and quickly hopped down to the brook.

"All in all, not the worst place to end up," he thought to himself as he sipped the cold and fresh water. A gentler way to wake up would have been preferable, but his situation didn't permit him such luxuries.

His thirst sated, he turned his focus onto the ring in his hand and tried to pry it off his finger. To his dismay, the ring stubbornly refused to budge. He gave it a few more attempts until he concluded that nothing had changed. Brute force would be of no use to remove the ring, for the ring was a magical artifact of considerable potency.

It wasn't that long since he'd found said ring. An adventurer had walked in town and sold a number of little bits and bops he'd found on his travels and the ring had been amongst that pile. The man, a town wizard, had felt the magical aura of that little ring and it seemed the ring alone was worth all the gold spent.

The magic of the ring seemed elusive, however. He'd tried various methods of identifying what spells might have been cast on it but to no avail. Eventually he'd made the rash decision to put it on to see if its powers would show themselves. And they sure did, for the mage was suddenly transported into the middle of an unknown meadow. The wizard was ecstatic to have found such a powerful artifact.

That feeling didn't last for long though. Firstly, the wizard realized he had no idea where he was and thus had had no control over the ring's teleportative powers. The second thing was that couldn't take the ring off no matter how hard he tried. So, every few moments he'd blink into a new place entirely, being lead by the mystical powers of the ring in his finger.

Unable to escape his predicament, he settled into an uneasy routine of trying to make the best of the situation wherever he happened to find himself. Sometimes he'd find himself on the top of a snowy mountain, nearly tumbling into his death on its slippery slopes, occasionally in a damp swamp far away from civilization. Once he even managed to get lucky and appeared in the middle of a busy market. He had managed to cry out but was long gone before anybody managed to get over their initial surprise, let alone help him in some way.

"It feels as if I'm stuck, although the scenery changes," the wizard figured to himself as the dusty road changed into a wide open wheat field. He never stayed put long enough to get much more than a quick glimpse and a hasty scramble for anything edible or drinkable, which severely limited his ability to plan any way out of his predicament. The ring was not coming off, that was certain. Perhaps a more radical approach could work?

And just then he found himself in an atypically familiar location. He was in his tower, right where he had left off! Thinking quickly he leaped towards a knife on the nearby table and swung it at full force right at his finger, which he had set on the edge of the table. The severed finger bounced off the table along with the ring, which made a clink as it landed on the floor.

He'd paid the price for his ticket home, but in the end it was probably worth it. He'd need to be more careful with mysterious trinkets in the future.