“You fixin’ to make a fire?” a voice rasped out from the darkened trunks of the trees along the path, startling Naekit so thoroughly that he dropped the sleeping bolt. There had to have been a rock under the layer of snow where the base of the bolt fell, because within barely a fraction of a second, a bolt of purple light erupted from the stone twig and arced into the air. The lightning cracked against a snow-covered tree branch, sending it up into the air and then careening back down towards the ground. It landed, smoldering side first into the snow, not at all too far from where a darkened figure sat.

Now somewhat visible by the ember-glow of the branch, Naekit could see two glistening eyes peering through a silhouette of a cloaked man sitting cross-legged in the snow. “Or are you just tryin’ to kill me!”

“I…” Naekit thought, for the splittest of seconds, that the voice came from the man who clothed and named him, but the voice belonging to this man did not have that rich warmth. “I’m sorry, I did not see you there. You startled me. I did not mean to-“

“What are you even doing here in this part of the Snowed, boy? Shouldn’t you be sleeping in a pile of children over at Keltac village?” Naekit had never heard of Keltac village.

“I have not met another child, sir. I did not know there were others like me.” Naekit’s heartbeat slowed to its regular pace, but he was still shaking.

“Thank the moon there’s no children like you!” The shadow of a man raised his voice from a bubbling rasp to a piercing shout. “Runnin’ round with sticks of stone thunder for heaven’s sake! Are you an idiot, boy?” The man sat up straight, and looked to rearrange his legs so he could stand up.

“Sir, I did not mean to, you startled me, I did not know you were there.” Naekit tried to keep his voice sturdy, like how the man who named him sounded, but despite all his effort, it trembled anyway. “I-it was an accident! I promise!”

The wind howled between the two. The man reclined against the trunk of the tree again.

“Oh whatever.” A hand emerged from the man-shaped shadow, and it unenthusiastically waved Naekit away. “Take your stone thunder away from me, I’m fixing for warmth, nothing else.”

Naekit quickly hurried away from the branch, whose embers had now cooled. The eyes of the silhouette of a man closed, and his shape returned to the blur of darkness.

Naekit had met with wanderers like the silhouetted man before, he may have even met the man when the daylight sun showed his face. But he hoped that he would never grow into a wanderer like that. A frightening thought crawled into Naekit’s head that maybe being a wanderer for too long makes someone irritable and cruel. He shook the thought out of his head. The man who clothed and named him said he had been wandering for a century, and he was quite pleasant. But Naekit was unable to shake off the feeling of urgency towards finding home.