Chevias relented to that reasoning and started telling Ellie an interesting story about the time he was sent to the southeastern coast of Noelvah to gather some old books. Though the objective itself was rather boring, Chevias had met quite a few fun characters on this trip. He had traveled with a circus for awhile, camped with a band of orcs who were apparently on a quest to avenge the destruction of their small village at the hands of a band of thieves, and was saddled with a pregnant medium who asked him to escort her to Ovanhagen.

“Between you and me, I’m pretty sure that lady had a few bats in the belfry, but she was nice enough.”

“Why did she want to go to Ovanhagen?”

“She claimed her family wanted her to see a doctor there for the baby, but I doubt it. If that were true she’d have at least had a horse, right?” He shrugged, “Not that I care much. Even if she didn’t want to say them, she had her reasons,” he glanced back at Afina, “just like everyone else.”

“What about the orcs? Did they get their revenge?”

“I wouldn’t know. I only camped with them the one night since we were going opposite ways. They were probably fine though. Apparently the band that attacked their village was mostly humans. I doubt they’d stand a chance against seventeen full grown orcs on a war path.”

The conversation stayed like that the rest of the day. The three made pretty good progress that day, according to Chevias, as he lead them a bit off the road to a small camp site. While Chevias was off hunting rabbits and the two ladies were gathering some firewood, Afina was silent. When Ellie tried to coax her into a conversation, Afina interrupted, “Do you seriously trust him?”

Ellie blinked and paused for a moment, “Well, I don’t have much of a reason not to. If he wanted to hurt me-”

“He’d have done it already. I know, it’s just that….” Afina reached up and picked gently at the two gold loops on her right ear with a grim look on her face.

“Just that what?”

“…Ellie, what did you know about witches before you met him?”

“That they existed.” This was the complete truth. Even on the few occasions that Ellie had heard about witches prior to this whole ‘vanishing and reappearing miles away’ debacle, it was in hushed tones and whispers. Until she was ten she had thought they weren’t real, like the stories her mom used to tell her about a giant crow that carried away bad children. It wasn’t until then that her teachers started mentioning them in class, though they never really explained what witches were.

“Listen Ellie, there’s a good reason no one wants to talk about witches. They’re a blight, a scourge, a plauge.”

Ellie had only understood the last word, “What?”

“They’re evil Ellie. Wicked by nature.”

“Evil? That’s nonsense, Chevias is-”

“A witch. That means that he can’t help but be evil. The sooner you can get away from him, the better.”

“That doesn’t make sense. He’s really nice!”

“Just because someone acts nice doesn’t mean they are nice. Bad people pretend to be good so that they can catch innocents off guard.” Afina poked a stick at her pile, “He probably hasn’t done anything because he doesn’t think it’d be worth the-”

“Worth the what?” Afina and Ellie’s heads whipped around to see Chevias standing at the edge of the clearing, two rabbits with their throats already cut in hand and a scowl on his face.

He stalked over and tossed the rabbits down, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go spouting off your superstitious idiocy. You’re gonna scare her.”

Afina glowered, “How long were you just standing there and listening? You sure move like a snake for someone who’s worthy of trust.”

“I could hear you from a few meters away. And you sure are rude for someone with no other options.”

Ellie could only sit in discomfort and confusion as the two went back and forth, occasionally flinging a thinly veiled insult or two. She had absolutely no idea why they disliked each other so much, but it was reminiscent of the cold disdain she’d seen some of the older residents in Flatrend treat city folk. After a bit she tuned out their squabble and tried to remember how this got started. And the more she thought about it, the more she would have to say that Afina was in the wrong. Chevias was even nice enough to let her come with them, so she couldn’t fathom why the elf was so hostile to him.

Although the biting remarks stopped, the disquiet lasted all through dinner being made and eaten. Afina muttered to Ellie that she was going to sleep and walked off to as far away from Chevias and as close to the road as she could get before settling down.

After awhile, they could hear Afina’s less than soft snores and the tension lifted a bit. Chevias ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “Sorry about that.”

“Why would she say something like that? That was so rude!”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, “She’s a Yundashist.”

Ellie had heard the term, but didn’t know what it meant. When she told Chevias so, he sighed again, “It means she practices Yundash. People in Flatrend have a god they pray to, right?”

“Well, there’s Thia’s church. And there’s a little shrine on the back of the welcome sign for safe travels, but I don’t know what its god is called.”

“Well, Yundash is something like that. They also think there are a bunch of different gods with different domains, but the biggest difference is that they think that all of the gods have a fixed moral compass.”

“Meaning?”

He waved his hands, “It means they think that all gods are good, bad, or neutral. And that if a god is good, all the things it resides over are good, like trees and crops. If they’re neutral, their subjects can choose whether they’re good or evil. That seems to pertain to only humans, elves and orcs.”

“So the bad gods….”

He nodded, “Yeah. They think that bad gods have bad subjects and that the only way to stop the evil is to purge the world of that evil, thereby killing the god. They usually think of things like disasters, pestilence and disease as being inherently evil.”

Ellie glanced over at Afina, “So she thinks that witches….” She shook her head, “That doesn’t make sense.”

He tapped his temple, grimacing, “It does if it’s been drilled into your head since birth.” He leaned down to stoke the dying fire a bit, “Those gold rings on her ear? Yundashists pierce their babies’ ears when they turn five. So she’s been living her whole life being told that those outdated beliefs are the only real truth.”

“…I don’t get it. How could she believe that?”

“Well, does Thia make sense to you?”

Ellie thought for a while. She had never really stopped to think very hard about Thia. Although she had grown up and lived all her life under her law, Thia was less the name of a person and more of an abstract concept to her. It was some cosmic rule that granted good crops and healthy chickens to farmers who followed The Code. And in Ellie’s opinion, The Code was a bit silly. There were rules about how you shouldn’t kill or steal-which she thought shouldn’t need to be rules, they should be common sense-but there were also rules about what to eat and when, what to wear in a church, and that anyone who ‘drinks from the forbidden cup shall face Thia’s wrath’, whatever that meant.

“…No, I suppose that doesn’t really make much sense to me either.”

“Huh. Then you’re pretty smart for a farm girl.” Chevias took out his canteen and took a swig.

Ellie frowned, “Then what do you think?”

“…I don’t know. Honestly, I’m too busy with life to worry about gods and the afterlife. One thing I do know,” he jerked his thumb to the still slumbering elf, “is that I’d rather there be nothing after than the kind of system they believe in.”

A yawn escaped before Ellie could press him further. He mirrored the yawn and smiled a little, “Alright, go to sleep. We’ve got a long day of walking ahead of us.”

So Ellie did just that. And perhaps there was something about sleeping on the ground that bothered her head, but she was plagued once again by dreams that night. She saw giant, slimy things that looked like slugs slithering in the dark and pop pop poping as they went, parchment covered with blurry black scrawl, and grasshoppers chirping with blue light glaring off their carapaces.