Ellie couldn’t tell if she should feel glad that she was no longer alone in the dense forest, or be terrified of her new companion. On one hand, Chevias was so strong that if any bandits tried to ambush them, she was sure he’d be able to beat them down with the same strength that allowed him to drag a five hundred or so pound bear corpse like it was nothing. On the other hand, she had no way of knowing if he would decide to turn that strength on her during the trip.

They walked in silence for awhile, and after about a half hour Ellie’s adrenaline and anxiety had died down enough for her to notice that Chevias was being careful not to outpace her with his much longer legs. He could’ve easily left her the dust. She didn’t know if this made her feel uneasy or not. He was walking a few feet in front of her, so she stared at his back. He had, for some reason, wrapped his tail around his waist and tucked it under a white sash he wore-probably with the specific purpose of hiding his tail, she supposed. She had a feeling he’d done it to try and ease her fear.

‘Perhaps I should try talking to him,’ she thought. She figured that if she questioned him, and if at any point he sounded suspicious, she would sneak away during the night and pray she didn’t run into anything else unpleasant during her journey home.

“Umm…”

Chevias looked over his shoulder at her, “Hm?”

Ellie fumbled for a question. She mentally kicked herself for not coming up with anything beforehand. “Umm…ah…are you…a witch?”

‘A stupid question,’ she chastised herself. ‘Of course he’s a witch! Never heard of an elf or an orc with a tail, have you? And he’s certainly no goblin or dwarf either.’

Despite that, Chevias slowed down until he and Ellie were walking side by side. “Yeah, I am.”

“Oh! Well, ah, I’ve never seen a witch before, so I wasn’t sure. Sometimes elves and orcs will come through Flatrend, and one time a dwarf came to sell some fancy little pocket watches, so I knew what those looked like. And one time a band of goblins tried to attack the village, but the adults fought them off. They locked up all us kids in the town hall, so I didn’t really get to see any of them though. But I’ve heard they’re black or purple and little like a toddler, and that they’re tails are short and bald like a sheared rabbit, not like yours at all,” Ellie babbled, wringing her hands nervously.

‘Stupid, stupid!’ Her mind yelled at her, ‘Get a hold of yourself! Quit rambling like a nitwit and ask him something else!’

“Why are you going to Flatrend?” Ellie almost had to clamp her mouth with her hand to keep herself from prattling on.

Chevias had taken a step away from her due to her panicked behavior. “Actually I’m going through it. I’ve got a lot of stops on the way, but I’m heading to the capital.”

“To Northwind? What’re you going there for?”

He sighed, sounding a touch exasperated. “If only I knew. I just go where my boss tells me to go and pick up what she wants me to.”

“You don’t seem to like it very much.”

“Would you? It’s a never ending cycle of ‘go here, go there, do this and that, and make it snappy!’” He said that bit in a high pitched, mocking voice. Ellie got the distinct impression he disliked his boss. “And I pretty much never know why I’m going somewhere until I’m almost there! My current job? She told me about it two days ago! I’ve told her it’d be easier to prepare for trips if I knew exactly where I was going, and you know what she told me? ‘A mule never knows where it’s going until its lead there either. You’re the mule here, so shut up and do your job!’” He huffed angrily.

Ellie was a bit surprised at how talkative he was being. All she could think to say was, “That sounds hard….”

He sighed, “Can’t quit though. This is what I’m best at.”

“Why doesn’t your boss go and get these things herself if she needs them so bad?”

He guffawed, “Her? Please, she’s a bureaucrat. She wouldn’t last a day doing my job.”

Ellie wasn’t entirely sure what a bureaucrat was, but it gave her the impression that Chevias’ boss was frail and weak, which made her wonder how the boss got the nerve to be rude to someone who considered ripping out grizzly teeth to be par for the course. “Is your job that dangerous?”

“Well, no one would volunteer for it. As it turns out, not many people want to be thrown around the entire country and into certain death on a weekly basis until they’re seventy. ”

This sparked Ellie’s interest. One of the children of Flatrend’s favorite pastimes was to gather around and listen to the stories of any traveler who would take the time to tell them. She had heard all kinds of stories and never once got bored of them. “Really? All around the country? You’ve been everywhere in Noelvah?”

He smiled at her, “Yup, just about everywhere. I even had to go to Wehsan once.”

“All the way to Wehsan!” Ellie’s fear was beginning to wane in favor of curiosity. Of all the travelers that had passed through Flatrend, only one that she could remember-the dwarf selling pocket watches, to be exact-had ever been away from the country of Noelvah.

“Yeah, and I had to get there on a tuna boat of all things! Well, it was a tuna boat until we were high jacked-”

“High jacked?!”

“-by pirates.” Chevias looked like he was going to stop talking about it there, but the excitement and delight on Ellie’s face urged him on. And so he launched into the full story.

“You see, I was down at Mirkland-that’s a big port city- taking a break from the last trip at an inn. Then in comes Errol-that’s the messenger who brings me letters from the boss- and Eroll says ‘This one’s a doozy Chev, I can’t believe they’re making you do this.’ So I open the letter and it tells me that they want me to find some special rock that can only be found on the coast of Wehsan!”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Apparently it’s a kind of gem, and there must be something special about the water in Wehsan, because this gem only shows up there. Anyway, the letter had some money in it, and told me to use that to bribe a boat to take me with them. I should mention that it didn’t include fare for the way back!”

“So I say to Errol, ‘They want me to brave the Murky Ocean so that I can spend possibly months sifting through sand for a rock?!’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘they want you to do it in three.’ Three months?! It takes over half a month just get there, and another to get back! I said just as much to Errol, and he tells me that Erisla-call her a coworker-managed to get from the coast to the heart of the rainforest and bring back the bulb of a giant angler in just three months! The trip alone was almost three months; it should’ve taken her a year to find a fish that rare!”

“Then Errol tells me that if I can’t get this done in time, Erisla’s going to take my title as the best in the business. So next thing I know, he’s shoved me to the pier and I have to convince a bunch of folk who’ve never seen a witch in their lives that I’m not gonna try to eat them.” Ellie could sympathize with that. She had wondered the same thing herself when she saw Chevias’ saw-like teeth.

“It took me two days to get something set up, but I managed to get a ride on a tuna boat-S.S Misery, ain’t that fitting? I had to spend about three weeks on a tiny boat with ten other men who looked at me like I was something from the bottom of the ocean.” Ellie had never seen something from the bottom of the ocean; she had never even seen the ocean. But she could imagine what that felt like.

“Then one of the crew shouts ‘Hey, there’s a ship o’er there!’ And I look up just as the captain yells, ‘That ain’t just a ship ya moron! That’s a bloody pirate ship!’ So the crew starts arguing over whether we should try to get away or not. And the captain says ‘Ya see this boat? Ya think it can outrun that? Course it can’t! Just let ‘em take the fish. If we’re compliant, they might let us go instead of running swords through us.”

Ellie chirped up, “So they just LET the pirates on board?”

“Well, they let them catch us. The S.S Misery was too small for the pirates to climb aboard, so they marched us onto their boat. Then the pirate captain started pacing in front of us, making some obnoxious speech about how appreciative he was about our cooperation and all that, until he gets to me. He stops in the middle of his speech and says, ‘This one alright? He’s pale as a fish.’ Then the guy standing next to me squeaks out ‘This guy’s a witch!’”

“’A witch?’ the captain said, ‘you mean the kind said to live up in the mountains? Thought they didn’t actually exist.’ Then the guy looks me over, ‘So what’s so witchy about you? Ya look like a human to me.’ And then guy next to me shoves his elbow into my ribs and mutters, ‘Go on man, show the nice captain with the sword your tail.’

“So I pull out my tail and the whole pirate crew starts swearing up a blue storm. Then one of ‘em grabs my tail and yells, ‘Let’s take this one with us! Someone’ll buy a witch!’”

Ellie gasped, “They wanted to sell you?! What did you do?”

“I told him to f…” he looked over at Ellie and cleared his throat, “…to let go of my tail. Then the captain says ‘That’s a mighty fine idea! Toss ‘im in the brig, grab everythin’ on the boat an’ let the others go then.’ So I said, ‘If you’re going to Wehsan, then sure, count me in! Better than being crammed on a boat that’ll probably sink before it gets to port.’”

“You just LET them take you?!”

“The captain was about as surprised as you are, and he got real suspicious. He made some of his crew pat me down to make sure I wasn’t carrying any warrants; he thought I might’ve been hired by the kingdoms to arrest him. Of course he didn’t find anything. So they threw me down in the brig and only came down to give me food and water.” He laughed a bit, “I think I gave most of the crew the creeps, so they only sent this poor guy they shanghaied down to bring me meals. His name was Mitch, and after a few days he realized that I’m not going to maim him through the bars and we start chatting a lot.”

“So he asks me why I was went along with the being taken prisoner, and I say, ‘You saw the boat I was on. On this boat, I get fed something other than fish, my own space, and still get to go where I was heading. This is a win-win for me.’ Then he says, ‘Ok, but what are you going to do when we get to shore? The captain’s gonna have you taken to the nearest auction as soon as we’re at port.’”

“I told him I would just escape, but I don’t think he believed me. Anyways, after a while we finally get to Weshan and the captain comes down with a couple of his biggest guys and has them haul me out of the cell. They drag me off the ship and try to go through some back alley-no doubt where some slave auction is held, and before we’re even in the alley some guy sees my tail, runs up, and starts asking about me. Then the guy and the captain start poking and prodding me, looking at my teeth like I’m a horse. So I tell them to…” he glanced over at Ellie again, “…well, something not very nice. Then the captain takes a swing at me and I dodge, and he slugs his first mate right in jaw!”

“The guy loses his grip on me and I’m gone before they can blink. So I stop by a shop, restock some supplies, and start roaming over the coast looking for the rock I need.” He pinched his pointer and thumb together to make a very small circle, “These rocks don’t get much bigger than this! I ended wading around shallows, shifting through sand, and camping on the beach for five weeks! I wasn’t even done and I never wanted to see the ocean again.”

“Um, can I ask you something?” Ellie interrupted.

“Yeah, what?”

“What’s the ocean like in Weshan? For that matter, what’s the sea like around Noelvah?”

“Well, they’re very different. See, because the ocean around Noelvah’s got the Great River and The Bog feeding into it, the water’s really murky and brown around most of the inhabited coast. The sands on the shore are brown, they’re covered in seaweed-that’s a very slimy underwater plant that’s usually dark brown around here-and there’s usually washed up jellyfish just lying around.”

“What’s a jellyfish?”

“Basically a fish that’s nothing but a glob of goo with tentacles hanging off it that sting. Things still sting even when their dead, so you have to watch your step. Anyway, it’s all in all the some of the ugliest scenery you’ll ever see. But the shore in Weshan, at least the part I spent time in, were much prettier. The water was blue and you see the bottom, and it was much cleaner than beaches here. And the animals were more interesting to. Do you know what a turtle is?”

Ellie nodded, “Yes, sometimes I find ones in creeks.”

“Well, the turtles you see are little, right? And they have webbed feet? Now imagine a turtle as big as you are, with flat, oar-like flippers that stay in the water all the time! I saw a bunch of those over in Weshan. Apparently they normally live in warmer waters, but were there for the summer.”

The image of a huge turtle that glides around in water like a bird was quite fantastic to Ellie, and she said as much. “Really?! That’s amazing! What other things did you see?”

And so Chevias started off naming and describing the kinds of plants and animals that he’d seen to Ellie. Most of them were kinds of fish and other aquatic things, like a squishy thing with eight legs called an octopus, but he also told her about other animals, like the kinds of dog breeds he saw there that Ellie had never heard of. When the original settlers of Noelvah came from Weshan, they only brought a few breeds of dogs with them. He also told her that Weshan had giant cats! One was a tame kind that was as big as a large dog, and the rest were wild. Chevias seemed to like cats, as he told Ellie about how friendly the domesticated ones were and how they would just lay down and let you rub their stomachs, but Ellie wasn’t entirely convinced that a cat big enough to pull a loaded cart could be that friendly. She’d seen the cats in Flatrend, and those some very mean animals.

Ellie rather wished she had her diary with her, so she could write down all the things Chevias was telling her about so she wouldn’t forget any details when she told the other kids at home about them. As much as she couldn’t wait to go home, Chevias’ stories were interesting enough to her to keep the dim throbbing in her head, and her aching feet, and her worries about her mysterious circumstances and what waited for her at home at bay. Ellie was finding that she was very glad she had run into him now.

After he had run out of animals and plants interesting enough to occupy her curiosity, he continued with the story.