Ellie woke that morning to the sound of a bird calling directly above her. She stared at the ring of early morning sky for awhile, disoriented. Then yesterday’s events began to replay and slowly sank back into her, and her stomach felt heavier as she recalled that she was still a ways from home.

She turned her head and glanced over to her right to spot her new companion, Chevias. He was still asleep, his back to her and his tail lying twisted in the dirt like a huge snake. The tail twitched occasionally and Ellie was once again amazed and slightly alarmed at how bizarrely quite Chevias was. Thanks to her father and older brothers, she had been under the impression that all men’s snoring sounded like wild animal growls or saws going thorough wood. But Chevias’ snore was so quiet and soft that it was almost indistinguishable from the rustling of the leaves in the trees above her. She was half convinced he wasn’t actually sleeping, but his lack of response when she softly called his name proved he was.

Ellie got the distinct feeling that walking over to him and shaking him awake would result in her being smacked across the clearing , so instead she sat up and tossed a rock near him. It clacked loudly on another rock near his head, and the witch bolted upright with a startled and sleepy mumble. He came to his senses with amazing speed, considering Ellie had spent about five minutes groggily staring at the sky, and looked over at her.

“Oh right…morning.”

“Good morning….”

Chevias yawned loudly and started stretching, reminding Ellie of the old cats in Flatrend. Ellie tried to get up and was met with a sharp pain in her back and aches in her legs. Chevias noticed her rubbing at her back, “Stiff back? Sleeping on the ground’ll do that. Try twisting and popping it, like this.” He demonstrated and Ellie copied him, flinching in horror as her back made a series of loud popping sounds. However, it did help the pain, and Ellie was able to stand up and look around.

The fire pit in the middle was now just ashes, the smell of smoke still hanging in the air. She looked down at herself and found that the bright yellow of her dress was getting dull with dirt. ‘Just as well,’ she supposed, ‘it was annoyingly bright anyway.’

Chevias was nice enough to let Ellie have some of the water from his waterskin, though it was made of some hard metal and he called it a canteen. She shared some of her bread and cheese the old woman had given her for breakfast, and the two made their way back to the main road to continue their trip.

This walk was much like the yesterdays, though there was less terrified silence on Ellie’s part. They talked for most of the way, but this time Ellie found that Chevias was less willing to talk about himself, to her annoyance and frustration. Ellie was extremely curious about witches, but whenever Ellie asked him a question about him or witches, he would either flip it around to ask about her or smoothly change the subject.

“So, what’s your family like?”

“Oh, what you’d expect. What about yours?”

The chat had been going on in this fashion for a while and at this point, Ellie was quite annoyed with his suddenly suspicious behavior. She put her hands on her hips and huffed, “Alright, why are you acting strange? You were so chatty yesterday, and now you’re dodging my questions!”

He looked a little caught off guard by Ellie’s directness, “What? I’m not dodging.”

“Yes you are!”

He sighed and paused for a moment, thinking about something, before replying. “Ok, look Ellie. The fact of the matter is, part of my job includes keeping my mouth closed about it. Apparently, the higher ups aren’t comfortable with people knowing a lot about witches, so they tell us that the most important part is to keep quiet and not cause any scenes. An annoyingly big part of our training is keeping up conversations while being what they call ‘diplomatic’.” He put that last word in air quotes.

“What they really mean is that they don’t want non-witches in witch business, so they train us to shut our yaps about it.”

Ellie was incredulous about this, “But what about that big story yesterday?”

“I’m allowed to tell people what I’m doing, not why I’m doing it. Plus, you were jumping at shadows yesterday. Let’s just say there’s a big, long list of subjects that are a no-no, ok?”

“Talking about your family is a no-no?”

He raised an eyebrow at her, but stayed silent.

“Right, no-no. Well then, can you just tell me if you’re not allowed to talk about a subject instead of jumping over it? This is all sounding really suspicious.”

He sighed again, sounding exasperated, “Yeah, I know it does. I’ve told my boss a big part of why people don’t like witches is how shady we’re told to act. But she just-” he cut himself off.

“…No-no?”

“Yup, yeah, that was a no-no. Say, why don’t you tell me about your family now, before I start running my mouth again?”

So Ellie talked about her family for a long while. She talked about Wormwood farm’s history, about the dragon scale roof, and about town. She found that talking about her life was a far more productive course of conversation than Chevias’. It seemed every time she ventured to ask about his personal life, he had to shut her down for it being against the rules.

Ellie couldn’t fathom why his ‘higher ups’ were against him talking about his parents or school, or even about where he lives on the occasions he’s not traveling. She didn’t know how they would know if he did talk about them, but when she voiced this question, he just shook his head again. It was quite frustrating, so instead of trying to pry information out of him, she buried her curiosity and tried to focus on chatting about the other kids in town and how big a deal the adult made of the school teacher’s alleged affair with the butcher.

“I’m actually not really sure what an ‘affair’ is, but it must be something really terrible for the adults to almost kick them out of town over it. Do know what it is Chevias?”

He had seemed to be amused by the small town gossip, but Ellie was surprised by how loud he laughed at that question. His laugh was sharp and barking, and surprisingly shrill compared to his normal voice. He quickly reigned himself in and chuckled, “That’s something for your parents to tell you, not me. So, did they get kicked out?”

As a matter a fact, they hadn’t. Ellie hadn’t been there to hear it, but apparently there had been a big commotion in the square one afternoon while she was helping her brothers fix the henhouse roof. After that incident, the townspeople stopped pestering the teacher as much and instead focused on the teenage son of a merchant who lived in town. She relayed this to Chevias.

“Why’d they do that?”

Ellie shrugged, “I kept hearing different stories. Harriet Row told me that he made a mess of the statue in the middle of town, but Eddy Warthren said he’d harassed a lady and had a fight with her husband. Then Sarah Trout said he’d set off some kind of explosion, Trevor Grove said he won a duel to the death in the square, and Patrick Morton said that he’d let a bunch of wild cat’s loose on a fish merchant! By the time I heard about it, there were a thousand different stories!”

“You couldn’t just ask someone who was there?”

Ellie threw up her hands, “You think I didn’t try that? Every time I asked someone who supposedly saw it, they’d just brush me off and say ‘never mind all that’!”

Ellie was surprised she could talk about her town so much. She had always been under the impression that Flatrend was a boring place where not much of note happened. But every time she thought she’d exhausted a thread of conversation, she remembered another funny or odd thing that happened. She had also been worried that Chevias would quickly get bored of the silly nonsense and stop paying attention to it, but she found that either he was genuinely interested in the goings on of a small town, or he was just an excellent listener. Anyone else she knew would’ve tuned out long ago.

As she recounted the tale of when a horde of the town’s troublemaking kids had plucked a bunch her family’s chickens so they could tar and feather the statue in town square, Chevias stopped walking abruptly and interrupted.

“Hey, we’re almost there.”

She stopped next to him, “Almost where? I don’t see the town.”

Indeed, it had been several hours, but they were still far from town. Chevias pointed over to the right side of the road, “This is the turn off for where I’m going. It’s a bit of a detour, but there’s a way to get to Tyman from there to.” He paused a bit, “This way might even be safer than the main road.”

He started heading for the edge of the forest before looking back at her, “Last chance to change your mind. Are you coming or not?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

Ellie dashed after him and followed him off the road. Unlike the path to the clearing, which had been completely hidden aside from the scratches of Witch-Speak on the trees, this path was marked by nothing more than a thin deer trail. Ellie had a bit of trouble pushing through the thick brush, but Chevias seemed to know the path down to each step to take.

“So where are we going?”

“To a small, unnamed lake. It shouldn’t be far. I was told it was about a ten minute walk from the road.”

“You were told? You mean you’ve never been there before?!”

“No, not to this place specifically. Don’t worry, I know where I’m going. I don’t get lost.”

His confidence made Ellie want to believe him, but she wasn’t entirely certain anyone could keep they’re bearings in the forest like this. If it wasn’t for the barely-there deer trail, she wouldn’t have known if they were going straight or in circles.

After a few minutes of walking deeper into the forest, doubt started to creep up from the recesses of her mind. The darkness of the foliage and the stiff air were causing her mind to swing back to the anxiety that had been waiting to resurface. ‘Idiot,’ a voice told her, ‘you’re an idiot! You should’ve waved goodbye to him back on the road and made your merry way to Tyman. But nooo, you decided to put your faith in a witch! You let one of the most notoriously untrustworthy creatures in all of creation lead you off the road and to Thia knows where!’

‘Chevias has been nothing but nice and helpful,’ Ellie argued with the voice. ‘Yes he’s a little suspicious, but if he’s not allowed to talk about things, then I should respect that. Besides, he didn’t force me to follow him! I had every opportunity to go on without him!’

‘Then why didn’t you?!’

Ellie wrestled with her doubt for a long time, not even noticing that she was making a very troubled face that Chevias could clearly see. He didn’t try to snap her out of it though. If anything, he found the fact that everything she thought showed on her face rather funny.

So he didn’t bother her fight with her inner turmoil until they finally reached the lake. He had to reach out and grab her shoulder to keep her from walking right into it.

“Ah!” The feeling of his hand brought her back to reality quickly.

“Watch out. It’s a steep drop down.”

So it was. Ellie looked around at the strange lake. If you could call it a lake, that is. It was almost perfectly round, and about ten feet in diameter. The water in it was a murky green from algae and lily pads, and the bottom of it was completely obscured so you couldn’t tell how deep it was. It had less of a bank than a steep drop into the dark water. It had no sign of a creek or stream running through it. It looked more like a man-made pond than something you’d find in the middle of a forest. “Chevias, you said we were going to a lake. This doesn’t look like a lake.”

He scratched his head, a little puzzled, “Yeah, it does. Errol told me it was a lake, so I thought it’d be bigger.” He started digging through his bag and mumbled, “Though I suppose it is a lake for someone his size.”

“What?”

“Anyways, this is defiantly it. Look here.” He walked over to and crouched beside a rock that was sitting besides the pond. Ellie joined him to see that the rock had some now familiar looking scratches. Below the scratches and taking up the majority of the rock was peculiar handprint with only four digits; the thumb and three fingers.

“What’s this?”

“The entrance.”

Chevias finally pulled what he’d been looking for out of his bag. It was a slim book with a silvery, metallic-looking cover. Ellie looked at it with wide eyes. “What’s that?”

He smiled, “This is a grimoire. Can’t tell you more than that though. Sorry.”

Ellie pouted as he opened the book to reveal…blank pages. The pages of the book were a little odd, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was about them that was strange. She raised her brow, “It’s blank.”

“Yup.”

Chevias ran his finger down the center of the book and, to Ellie’s shock and amazement, the book lit up with bright green lettering. She gasped as the green light crisscrossed into Witch-Speak across the pages. Then, as she watched, Chevias gave the book a command. He only said one word, and she would bet it was in Witch-Speak because she’d never heard anything like it.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t tell.”

She huffed, “So you can do whatever this is right in front of my face, but you can’t tell me what it is?”

“Yeah, that’s how it works.”

“That’s stupid. These are stupid rules.”

“They are, but I still have to follow them. Now pipe down.”

She didn’t know what it was he told the book to do, but the characters on the book pages flashed and changed, settling into a single line of letters. Chevias tapped those letters with his finger and then the pages once again filled up with Witch-Speak. Chevias gave another command and the letters flashed and changed once more. This time he took the time to read what was on the page instead of poking at it.

“Ok…ok, simple enough. Easy.”

He reached over to the stone and placed his hand over the print, pressing his pinky and ring finger together so they’d fit into the groove made for one. After settling it into the indent, he glanced back over at Ellie, “Stand back, ok?”

She obeyed and hopped away from him as he looked back at the book and read aloud from it. He rattled off a string of Witch-Speak that sent a chill up Ellie’s spine. From the snippets he’d said, she could gather that Witch-Speak was a language mostly comprised of hard constantan sounds and lots of ‘sh’ noises. It wasn’t a pretty sounding language, like Runic or Hedeshoi. It was slithering and clicking, harsh and sharp, like the lettering that matched it.

As the last syllable left Chevias’ tongue, the scratching above the hand print started to glow the same green as the grimoire, and the ground trembled a bit as the sound of rushing water filled Ellie’s ears. She looked back at the pond to see that the murky water was draining from the pond at a startling rate, disappearing within a few minutes.