“Well, to make a very long and boring amount of sifting through sand alone on a beach short, I finally found what I was looking for. Wanna guess where I found it?”

“Stuck in your shoe?”

He laughed, “No, good guess though. I found it at night, while I was cooking up some fish for dinner. I was cleaning the fish and slicing it open, and out of its stomach falls something shiny. I pick it up, and it’s the exact thing I’m looking for! A rock about this big,” he pinched his fingers to demonstrate again, “a kind of pale blue, and a little glossy. Almost like a pearl, but see through.”

“I scattered birds for miles with how loud I yelled. I could finally go back to Noelvah! The problem was, I’d have to find a ride, and I was out of money. So that same night I headed back into the big port town I landed in, and who do I see? None other than Mitch, the cabin boy! He sees me, rushes over, and drags me behind a building. ‘Chevias,’ he says, ‘what are you doing here? When I hear you’d managed to slip away from the cap’n, I could hardly believe my ears!’ I said, ‘Well, I found what I was looking for, so now I’m looking for a boat back to Noelvah.’”

“He looked real nervous and says, ‘then you’d better not let any of the crew see you loitering about.’ I asked him why they were still in port anyway. He told me that since the crew had acquired an impressive of money by attacking a ship of dignitaries on their last voyage, they were still hanging around and squandering it. And that if any of them saw me, they’d get the crew together and hunt me down. Suffice to say, I made the captain pretty angry when I escaped. Mitch told me that even five weeks later he’d go on drunken rants about how he’d cut my tail off and make oxtail soup with it if he ever got his hands on me again.” The image was somehow comical to Ellie, and she couldn’t help but giggle a bit. She wasn’t sure if it was the image of a stumbling drunk pirate or the fact that Chevias’ tail did look like a very long cow’s tail.

“Then I asked Mitch why he hadn’t run away yet if he’d been shanghaied. He said, ‘I’d leave if I could, but my family is in Noelvah and the captain’s careful to only give me enough money for some food. I can’t get a ride back!’ So I grab him and say, ‘Tell you what Mitch; you help me acquire a ride back, and you can come along.’”

“He asks me, ‘But how do we do that?’ ‘Easy,’ I tell him. So I tell him we’ll just steal the pirate’s ship.”

“You did what?!”

“That was about his reaction. So I ask him what the pirates did at night down here. He tells me that all but five of them leave at night for taverns, while those five stay behind to guard the ship. ‘Perfect!’ I said. ‘Tomorrow night, you stay behind when the pirates leave; don’t worry, I don’t think they’ll notice you. When all but the one is gone, you lean over the rail and give me the signal, then I’ll hop aboard, beat the guard, and we’ll be home free.”

“He said it was a good plan except that he didn’t know how to sail. At least not enough to get us over the sea alone. So I tell him I’ll have that problem taken care of by tomorrow night and we part ways. I skulked around town until I found the kind of place I was looking for. A seedy looking bar full of would-be pirates.”

“What makes them would be pirates?”

“They’re mostly just regular thugs that either couldn’t get a hold of enough money to buy a ship of their own, or had a ship and lost it. Anyways, so I ask the bartender if anyone here would be interested in high jacking a pirate ship. I’m not entirely sure how, cause I was talking pretty low, but everyone in the joint managed to hear that, and I was surrounded before I could blink.”

“They asked me what I was on about, so I told them I was stranded here and needed to go back to Noelvah as soon as possible, and needed someone or someones who could sail a ship. I told them I didn’t have any money, but they could keep the boat afterwards. So one of them comes up to me-an older guy with a peg leg-and he introduces himself as Randy. He said he used to be a captain of a ship until it got wrecked during a storm, and that he’d never been able to get another, but he’d kill to sail again. So he shoos the other patrons away-I guess he was respected in that circle, cause they didn’t argue-and he asks me what the plan is. So I tell him and he agrees to it. He also said I can stay the night with him in his cabin. I decided I would spend the time better by gathering up some supplies and such, and asked him it gather up anyone who’d be willing to help.”

“So I spent the rest of the night and the next day getting barrels of fresh water and food, and met up with Randy and the five or so guys he rounded up the next night. I wish the rest of the story was more exciting, but things surprisingly went according to plan. Mitch gave the signal, we stormed the ship and kicked the guards off, then the new crew hauled up the provisions and we were off. Then it was a blessedly uneventful voyage back.”

“That’s rather anti-climatic.”

“I’m noticing a lot of my stories tend to be.” Chevias looked up at the sky, “In any case, it’s starting to get dark.”

Ellie’s gaze shot to the sky and was surprised to see that he was right. The sun had already sunk below the treetops and sunset couldn’t be more than two hours away. “Ah, you’re right! Are we near the campsite you mentioned?”

“Yeah, it should be nearby. Keep an eye on the trees next to the road. There should be some markings about here,” he indicated the proper height with his hand, “that marks the path to it.”

They found it about ten minutes later. The marks that Chevias mentioned proved to be no more than a series of scratches that were gouged deep enough into the bark to be permanent.

Ellie crossed her arms and raised her brow “Those are the markings? I completely missed them. They look like someone used this tree as a sparring partner.”

Chevias ran his hand over the scratches, “This is them alright. It’s Witch-Speak.” He turned to look at Ellie, “Although someone who’s never seen it before would mistake it for random scratches. Come on, the sight’s this way.”

He walked past the tree and into the woods. Ellie followed, starting to get nervous again. They were leaving the road and going into the forest. If the sight was far from the road and Chevias were to decide to leave her, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way back to the road. To her relief, the sight was hardly a stone’s throw from the road. Despite its close proximity, it was surrounded by dense foliage and she wouldn’t be surprised if even the merchants that traveled this path on a regular basis didn’t know it existed.

The sight itself was a small, circular clearing with some odd little stones lined up around the perimeter. As she got closer, she could see that these stones had markings similar to the ones on the trees. “Hey, what are these stones for?” Ellie had been imagining that they were some kind of protection, like the prayers for a safe journey that were etched into the back of Flatrend’s welcome sign. Chevias glanced down at them, “They’re basically a compass, so we don’t get turned around while we sleep. Some of them have directions on them,” he pointed to the one Ellie was standing next to, “that one says ‘Main Road’.”

“Oh,” was all Ellie could muster up in response to that. She was a bit impressed by the practicality, but more impressed that Chevias could read the worn scratches so easily. Then again, she supposed it was no more impressive than anyone else reading their native language. Still, she couldn’t really fathom how he was able to discern words from the chicken scratch.

Chevias looked at the fire pit in the center of the clearing, “Well, no one’s been here in a while. Ellie, do you know how to build a fire?”

Her head snapped up, “Huh? Oh, well…not really.”

“Ok then, you just…gather up firewood, ok? Just walk around and pick up any dry wood you find. Pluck any leaves off to, got it? And don’t wander too far from the clearing.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find dinner. There’s a huge rabbit burrow not far from here. I’ll be back in a bit.” And with that, he vanished into the woods.

Ellie couldn’t help but wonder how he intended to catch a rabbit with his bare hands. Ellie had never hunted before, but she was pretty sure you needed to make a trap to catch them. ‘Oh well,’ she thought, ‘he seemed confident. He’s probably done this before.’

Ellie ventured into the woods to complete her task. Luckily, there was lots of wood lying around, and she didn’t have to go too far from the camp to get it. She wasn’t sure how much wood a fire would need, so she made multiple trips, gathering as much as she could carry and bringing it back to the camp. After awhile, she realized she had made quite a sizable pile of fallen branches.

‘I figure this should be enough….’ She sat down beside the pile and started pulling leaves off of the branches, setting the stripped wood in on her other side. For awhile, she was absorbed in the task, but as time drew on and her pile grew smaller, she started to realize that it was getting quite hard to see. The light was fading faster and faster, and Chevias still wasn’t back yet.

She forced herself not to worry about it by focusing on the task at hand, but when she had finished the pile, she no longer had anything to distract her nerves. She kneaded the hem of her dress over and over as she listened to the sounds of the forest; frogs croaking, cicadas buzzing, and the occasional hoot of an owl in the distance. She sat in silence and stewed in her anxiety as dusk turned into night. The stars came out overhead, but although they were bright, it wasn’t enough to see well by.

Panic and fear started to swell up again. Where was Chevias? He said it wouldn’t take long. What if something had happened? What if he decided she was annoying and just left her here? What if this was all some kind of elaborate trap? Ellie’s eyes started to burn as her imagination started running wild. ‘That would be just my luck, wouldn’t it? After the day I’ve had, getting abandoned in the forest is just the icing on the cake, isn’t it?’

She forced herself to breath evenly. ‘I have to calm down. It doesn’t matter if he left me here. I know where the road is. I can get to Tyman myself if I have to. After that, I just need to find someone to give me a ride home.’ She cast her gaze to the small patch of sky above her. The sight of the stars calmed her down a bit, but they brought on a wave of sadness. ‘I want to go home. I’m already sick of traveling. Once I’m home, I’ll never have to travel again for as long as I live.” The idea of living the rest of her life in one place seemed awfully appealing to her as she sat alone in the woods.

Her thoughts swirled and bounced from negative and fearful to hopeful and reasonable in such a manner for quite awhile. At the very least she was glad it was summer; despite the bug bites, at least she wouldn’t freeze to death in the night.

“Hey-“

“AAHHH!”

Ellie shrieked and fell backwards, looking at the edge of the clearing wildly. Even with his eerily pale skin, Chevias was barely visible in the starlight. He took a step back in alarm.

“You! You scared me half to death!”

“Sorry, I-”

“I didn’t hear you coming at all! Next time you’re approaching someone at night, try to make a little noise, would you?!”

Ellie couldn’t stop the trembling in her hands, so she crossed her arms tightly. She hoped the trembling had stayed out of her voice. Judging by Chevias’ expression, it hadn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “That took longer than I thought it would.” He walked closer to the center and set down what he’d been carrying-two small and lean dead rabbits. From the way their heads flopped around limply, she guessed Chevias had broken their necks. Despite the fact that he’d killed them in a very clean way, she could see that his hands were glistening with what looked like fresh blood.

“What happened to you?”

“There was a band of goblins camping right outside of the rabbit burrow.” Chevias clicked his tongue in distaste, “They’d been there for awhile, from the looks of it. So I…” he paused to glance down at his hands, “…drove them out. After that, it took a long time for some rabbits to come out of their dens.”

“In any case,” he continued, looking at her pile of firewood, “you kept yourself busy. Good job, this is more than enough.” He bent down to the fire pit and got to work. A few minutes later, they had a decent fire going. Ellie was relieved by the warm glow it casted over the clearing.

Chevias reached over to grab the rabbits, then nervously looked at her, “…You might not wanna watch this.” Part of Ellie wanted to say that she was perfectly used to cleaning animals. She’d even done it to a few of the farm’s chickens herself. Instead, she spun around to look at the forest without saying a word. As curious as she could be, she got the distinct feeling that Chevias was about to do something scary. As in, kill a bear with no weapons kind of scary. She gulped as the wet sound of blood hitting soil started. She hadn’t heard anything like a blade leave a sheath.

‘You need to travel with him for another day at least, a week at most. I’d rather be able to do that without being completely terrified of him.’ Even so, Ellie was very confused about how he was managing to skin the rabbit’s like that. But she forced herself to keep her eyes on the trees even as she heard some snapping sounds like sticks being broken.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, the smell of roasting rabbit filled the air. “…Alright, you can turn around now.”

Ellie followed the command, facing Chevias and the fire again. He was sitting a few feet to her right and was wiping the blood off his hands with that old rag again. An icy chill shook her. Chevias had started cleaning the rabbits on the other side of the fire. She didn’t see any guts or even the skins around, so he had managed to get up and discard them in the brush, then walk right next to her and take the sticks from her pile to make the spit, then made the spit. All without her hearing one footstep.

She had been busy panicking and talking on the road, but now that she thought about it, Chevias had an impossibly quite step.

“So,” Chevias began, catching Ellie off guard, “I’ve got a little stop to make just outside of Tyman. It won’t take long and it’s on the way. You can come if you want, or you go on by yourself, it’s up to you.”

“By myself?”

He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t really make out. “…Ellie, how’d you end up all the way out here, if you don’t mind telling me? You don’t know how to make a fire and your clothes aren’t exactly fit for roughing it.”