The glekks came forward with supplies that I dearly needed.

Among the trash piles of shiny rocks, gems, and dead fish that they showered me with, supplies from more modern civilization also emerged from their huts. Broken guns, weapons, clothing, compass-clocks—all sorts of bits and baubles, taken from stolen cargo. I even recognized one—a wooden crate, wrapped in canvas cloth. From the caravan I’d defended from them a week ago.

It seemed some supplies ended up lost after I lost control of my songs.

Annoying that these glekks were the ones to claim it, though.

Thankfully, it seemed luck took a U-turn and found me a second time. I looted what I could use from their offerings. As for the rest of the trash, I threw them to C’thaami, who happily chewed up anything I gave it. Over the next hour, I looted a fresh set of clothes from the looted supplies they shoved my way, alongside a magitech rifle that seemed useable still.

Now, I had no idea how to use one, so I kept it slung over my back as I fitted myself into the new clothes. I dressed myself in the standard three layers—a traveling tunic, a leather vest, and a cloak. A collection of waterlogged belts finished up the standard wretched merchant’s look. They were better than the ripped-up scraps I wore, but their shoddiness still pissed me off. They were soggy, damaged, and even covered in algae in some places.

My appearance had essentially evolved from a woodland barbarian to that of a wandering vagabond. I shuddered at the thought of the smell these clothes had.

Good thing my senses were muted.

I laced up the thick, leather boots that kept my feet covered from the muck. Some idiot had gnawed on the boots, but the damage wasn’t extensive. Wearing clothes so terrible was a big contrast to what I wore in the past—just over two months ago.

It was a little jarring, having to move from such a comfortable state of living to essentially being in abject poverty.

“Hey, guy,” I said, turning to the glekk king that was wrapped up in C’thaami’s tentacles. “Why don’t your people use this stuff? Some of these guns are still useable.”

“Can’t,” he replied. “Gun bad. Glekk not allowed to use.”

“Now allowed? What do you mean?”

He only shook his head, and I raised an eyebrow. A cultural taboo of some sort? Or were they just too stupid to figure out how to use them? Either way, I was asking more because of a whim than any actual desire to know. I shrugged him off and went back to rifling through their supplies as terrified glekks watched around us. I dug under the cloth covers and paused.

My eyes widened at an unexpected discovery inside one of the looted boxes.

“Oh! A tri-point compass!” I said, surprised as I pulled out a compass with three needles from a box. The little points shone with tiny, runic inscriptions. “I thought these were still under development. Didn’t think they were already out for public use. Let’s see these markers…”

I fiddled around with the device for a bit.

Then, on the side, I found a button that displayed what I wanted to see. With a flick, three lines of text manifested over the compass, each one matching the color of one of the needles.

DAISCE. FELZAN. SALVENN.

Seeing the names of the three, I sighed in relief. The compass had pre-set waypoints—most likely to the cities the previous owner had traveled to. And of the three that were displayed, I recognized the name of two cities. Felzan, the Luminant City and Salvenn, the City of Hanging Towers. Both were famous enough for me to have heard of them, even despite my disinterest in Caereith’s geography.

The arrow to Felzan pointed north, with the inscription of 74.75-HR written beneath it. I frowned—HR stood for ‘horizon,’ a measure of distance in Caereith that counted distance by the number of horizons that one needed to cross. Something to do with distance in small increments was distorted by the realm’s constant spatial anomalies. I’d experienced it myself, traveling over the surface of the lake. I would spend days traveling to a horizon, but the ground seemed to stretch or shorten at random. Sometimes, it would take me a day to travel a mile, and what felt like minutes to travel ten times that amount. But regardless of how long I traveled, it always took me exactly seventy-three kilometers to reach the point I saw on the horizon days before.

Cursing mutters under my breath, I did the math. Converting HR to general distance meant somewhere around the distance of five thousand kilometers of travel. Closer to six thousand than not; a colossal amount. And if my limited knowledge of Caereith’s massive, confusing geography was anything to go by? That meant my home was around four thousand kilometers away from where I was, give or take a thousand and a few hundreds. Given the spatial distortions that messed with travel time, it could potentially take me years to reach home on foot.

An airship would be the easiest way, but would I even be able to hitch a ride on one?

I clicked my tongue.

That Fae asshole really went all out with screwing me over. Taking my Name was one thing, but carrying me to the other side of the realm? That was just needlessly cruel. At the same time, however, it made me shudder at just how powerful that man was. I still remembered when he took me to the lake—over that colossal distance. It had taken only seconds for him to do it. Somehow, he’d sung a song that made us travel faster than wind and even sound.

Just how vast was the gap between me and him? Just how much mastery over the songs did someone need to be able to do things like that? I could only imagine the calamities that the Fae could bring if they were angered for real.

It seemed all those fairy tales I’d dismissed as a child had some credibility after all.

No matter. It wasn’t like I planned on picking a fight with the bastard, anyway. As far as I was concerned, he’d held up his end of the deal, and I’d paid my price. We were done. At this point, I just never wanted to see him again. I shook my head and turned back to looting the supplies.

I stashed the tri-point compass into my new backpack and paused as I felt the marsh shift. I turned and the water to my left bubbled. I paused, frowning. Turning to it. What—

“Kill!” the glekk king screamed. My eyes widened.

The water exploded out and I saw movement. A spray of muck. A spear-tip lunging out from the shallow, piercing straight for my neck. Too fast for me to react. I stared as it began to cut into my throat. As death closed in.

And I watched it stop. Just short of anything vital.

My eyes slowly traveled down, to where a stone spear had stopped in front of my jugular. I felt heat under my jaw. A small gash, dripping with my black blood. The blood traveled down the length of the spear; down its stone blade, its wooden haft, and onto the webbed hands of the glekk that had jumped out of the water to kill me.

But it wasn’t my blood that filled the water, no. A purple stain spread through the shallow instead. Glekk blood. I stared at its owner, and the dying glekk warrior stared back with a look of surprise on its face.

A black tentacle had impaled it through the chest.

C’thaami pulled the tentacle back and the glekk blurred through the air. Back towards it. Its mouth opened and chomped down with a wet, splintering crunch. The glekk died before it could even scream. Its spear fell into the water with a plop.

Huh.

I felt myself take a step back. My hand came to my neck and came away black with blood. My blood. Monotone colors, like the rest of me.

I was bleeding, I dumbly realized. I’d forgotten that my neck could do that; that such a vital point in my anatomy could sustain damage and bleed. I looked up, stunned, and the ringing in my ears felt deafening to me. As if my hearing, too, was being taken away. I stared around. The glekk were frozen in place, faces pale as winter. The glekk king was deathly silent in C’thaami’s tentacles. I watched the horror slither down from the platform and over to me, looking at the wound with worry.

A stray tentacle touched my neck and soaked up the blood.

“Rowan hurt,” it said, its mimicry of my voice worried. The creature seemed to shake with an anger that was only overshadowed by the confusing worry it felt for me. “Rowan bleeding.”

I nodded, “Yeah.”

“Rowan… die?”

I released the breath I’d been holding.

“No. Not to this.”

The wound was too shallow to kill. But it was almost there. All it would have taken was another lucky inch. Another few centimeters forward, until it pierced through my throat and cut open my carotid artery.

I looked down and let out a shaky laugh. My legs were trembling. I took a step back and sat on the edge of the crate I’d been looking through.

That was close, huh?

It was more surprising than anything, how close I’d come to death. I couldn’t really bring myself to believe it. My eyes watched the black smeared across my hand, glistening under the sun.

I was wrong to think that the glekk could be reasoned with. That they wouldn’t try to pull anything after a good show of force—even after they knew that without their raiding party in the village, it would be unwise to attack. No, these things weren’t smart enough for that. They were greedy, bloodthirsty things. Ones that would sell me out to a Hag and try to kill me without a second thought.

‘There are no useless animals. Only pests.’ That was what mother used to say.

“C’thaami,” I said, and it turned its eyes to me.

I let out a slow breath and looked up at the glekks. No more risks. Not when I was trying to get home and see Father again. I nodded towards my eldritch companion and looked back down towards the shallow water below.

You can eat, I wanted to say. But I only shook my head. I didn’t have the stomach for that kind of massacre. As angry as I was, I didn’t want to see the water dyed purple with disgusting blood and viscera either. No. Right now, all I wanted was to leave. To get Venti back, return to the road, and get this nightmare over with. So I shouldered my backpack, fastened my cloak, and turned.

“Drop the glekk, C’thaami. Let’s go.”

“Okay.”

Surprisingly, it obeyed without any protest. C’thaami dropped the creatures’ leader and crawled back up to me, collecting itself as a compressed mass of blackness and eyes that sat over my shoulders. I walked up to the glekk that had tried to kill me twice already. The same, ugly little sack of shit that I’d crossed paths with repeatedly.

“I screwed up your raid, so you sold me out to the Hag,” I said, meeting its eyes. “Today, I robbed your village and you tried to get me killed again. I’d say we’re even, more or less. But if this happens a third time, it will be the last. Do you understand?”

He saw the look in my eyes and nodded. I nodded back.

And then I punched it in the face.

I felt a part of its face crack under my fist as it splashed into the water. The glekk king crawled out and back to the altar, its people watching the purple blood dribble out from the broken teeth in its fish’s mouth. I wiped the blood dripping from my throat, smearing it black against my skin. I spat into the water.

“I’m going to punch you a second time if I ever see you again, by the way. And harder. Just warning you ahead of time.”

I strode past him and out of the village, equipped with my new gear. I waved a hand behind me.

“See you, asshole.”

Walking through the swamp after that was a quiet affair. I didn’t really know what to think or do, so I just focused on what was ahead of me. The colossal tree in the distance. The Hag’s home. By now, a week had already passed since Venti was taken, and I wasn’t even sure if she was alive anymore. Had the Hag eaten her? Had she escaped on her own? I didn’t know. The thought made my steps feel a little heavier than they should. Like there was a thick layer of mud caking the bottom of my boots, sticking to the ground and weighing me down.

“Rowan sad,” C’thaami said, its gurgling voice coming from behind me. It seemed down as well. I turned my head slightly and shook my head, giving the eldritch monstrosity a small smile.

“Not sad,” I said. “Just worried.”

“Worried? Like sad?”

“Kind of like sad.”

I supposed C’thaami wasn’t entirely wrong about my emotional state. But if I had to choose a word for it, it would be anxious. And nervous. And homesick. And yes, sad.

After all, home was thousands of miles away. My oldest friend, second only to the Singing Tree, was missing. Taken by something that I thought to be a story made up to scare children into behaving. I hadn’t spoken to another person in months. My state of living was miserable, and despite never feeling exhaustion physically, the empty miles of travel weighed on my mind like a ball and chain. Always present, always dragging at my feet.

I sighed, and I felt C’thaami shift behind me. A tentacle rose up from its mass and began patting the top of my head. I put a hand on it and raised an eyebrow, “I thought you promised not to eat my hair.”

“Not eating,” it said, wriggling a ‘no’ with its mass. “Petting.”

“…Are you trying to comfort me?”

“Yes. Like good owner do.”

I smiled wryly at that, “You know, I thought you were the pet between us two.”

C’thaami seemed confused. “But C’thaami the one who take care of Rowan.”

“Well, you aren’t wrong there. But I don’t think pet works for either of us anymore.”

“Rowan not pet?”

“No,” I said, considering things for a moment. I glanced back at the monster’s many eyes, all of them pointed at me, blinking without an ounce of ill-intent. I smiled, “How about the two of us become friends instead?”

C’thaami paused, “Friends?”

“Mm. Friends.”

“Good word.”

I laughed, and it came out easier now. More naturally. C’thaami continued rubbing my head and I didn’t stop it. I reached behind me and gave it a friendly pat, touching it willingly for the first time. I smiled, “You know, for a scary alien thing, you’re surprisingly nice.”

“Thank!” it said, and I felt it wriggle over my shoulders, worbling at my praise. “Rowan feel better now?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks, Aami.”

“Aami?”

“Er… It’s a nickname—friends usually give them to each other. Your name’s a bit of a mouthful to say all the time, so…”

Aami’s eyes narrowed in confusion, “Mouthful? For eat?”

“No, not eat. It means something else in this case. We call that an expression. It’s—” I paused, sensing the creature’s mounting confusion. I smiled and shook my head, “You know what? Let’s get to those later. For now, let me teach you more words while we walk.”

“Ooh! More sound-things! Teach!”

I nodded.

“Alright. Let’s start with some cool words. Like cool. Or—ah! Taxation is nice, too. Let’s go with that one. It means…”

I talked, explaining, and Aami listened. And that was all it took. Just like that, the journey became just a little less lonely and a little more colorful. A little less bleak. Venti was still missing, yes. And I was still far from home, and unable to talk to people, and uncertain, and lost, and more than a little afraid.

But at least now I had another friend. Even if it kind of scared the rot out of me sometimes.

Who knew shoggoths could be such pleasant company?