Emile had never been this far outside of Kentvale alone. In the stories she had read and listened to her father and others tell her, she was transported, all over Enfidia, and even beyond the borders of the continent. She knew stories of traveling the high seas, and stories that took her to the deepest depths of dark dungeons. Now she was a full day's walk from her home and she was beginning to wonder where she was going to rest for the night. None of the stories ever seemed to mention the boring bits that walking from place to place seemed to entail.

The little dragon seemed to reflect her moods. When they had first begun the journey, both had walked with a merry bounce in their step and their chins held high. Emile had caught sight of her reflection in the big mirror behind the bar, and she thought that she cut a striking figure in the chainmail hood. Her red hair had poked out all along the sides when she left, but she kept brushing it back off her face. The afternoon was hot and it didn’t take long for her sweat to trap her hair to her head and for the mail coif begin to irritate her.

She had stopped, and drank from a waterskin and eaten a piece of cheese. She’d offered some of the hard cheese to the dragon, but the dragon raised her nose and made her high chirping noise. “You don’t like cheese?” Emile had asked, realizing that the dragon had not eaten anything since she had come out of the egg. At least, not anything that Emile had seen. The green dragon chirped, and Emile gave her a long appraising look. She decided that she would need to figure out what to feed her before too much longer.

Emile took another pull of the waterskin, and decided the polite thing to do would be to ask, “So if you don’t like cheese, what do you like to eat?”

The little dragon pushed her head under Emile’s hand, and when their skin touched, Emile’s mind was awash with images. It was the back storage room adjacent to the kitchen in the inn. There was movement. A rustling sound and a squeak. She could smell it in the shadows, and hear its pulse. A breath of green fog under the rack, and it stopped moving. She could still hear its pulse, just faint and slow now. She pushed her head behind the shelf, and grabbed the rat in her teeth. Warm blood filled her mouth, and she crunched down harder. It took only two bites. She swallowed the rest of the rat without chewing, and felt much more satisfied for having eaten.

She was sitting in the grass again on the edge of the king’s road looking down at the little dragon. She said, “Well! Pa is going to be so upset when he hears the rats are back. I kept telling him we should get a kitty,” she scratched the green dragon’s neck, “but I guess we don’t need one now.”

Emile took the mail coif off of her head, and laid it inside the leather backpack. In addition to the items that she had taken from the war room, she had equipped herself with all of the things that she thought might come in handy on the road. Travel food, a few changes of clothing, a hatchet and a flint. A small waterproof package of sulfur matches, and a oilskin wrapped bundle of kindling. A wool blanket, a long length of rope and several smaller cords, and various other assorted sundries and tools. When she had tried the weight of the backpack in the inn it had not seemed so bad. She felt like she could walk with it easily even though it was heavy. She had been walking for almost five hours, and though she was going at a leisurely pace and taking frequent breaks, she was exhausted.

The map that she carried was the most amazing map she’d ever seen. Her father had shown her around the war room a few times over the years, but the room and its contents were not his. They were Emile’s, her birthright from her mother. The map had not been something she’d ever noticed before. It was beautiful. There had been a bronze plaque under the frame in which it hung, with details of where it came from and expression of puzzlement at the enigmatic nature of it. She was grateful for the map because without it she wouldn’t have known where she was.

The map always knew, and marked both her and the dragon with an arrow that changed depending on where she was facing. She had brought a compass too, but had not needed to even consider using it. The most useful thing about the map though, was that it could seemingly be any size, and show as much or as little detail as she wished. She needed only to hold it by two corners and stretch it, and the map grew to fill her hands. She had pointed to the University when she first tried it, and the map had drawn a route from the inn in Kentvale to the University in Two Lanes. Then, in the lower right corner of the map, below the key, words had appeared. It said, “Two Lanes is thirteen days from your location by foot following the king’s road south.”

She was incredibly excited that it was able to show her exactly how to get where she needed to go. At the same time she was terrified and disappointed to learn that it would take so long to walk there. She thought about this for a while in the inn, until she had decided that she would go to the capital first. From the capital, she could catch one of the fast moving ships, and she would be there in no time. Getting to the capital, she had decided, would be easy enough if she could find a group of merchants. She knew she would be able to ride in one of their wagons if she asked politely.

She was now less than another hour's walking to Ravina. Emile had never been to Ravina before. She had heard it talked about in town though, and the general consensus was that it was not a good place. It wasn’t that the people there were bad, they were just weak, according to the stories. In Kentvale, people were farmers or fishers, and they made most of what they owned. Her pa had told her that Ravina was once a beautiful city, that it had been built around a church and a trading outpost. He said that there was a fight over which god should be worshiped in the church, and since it was the trading outpost that kept the city fed the traders had won the fight. She wondered if there were still traders there.

Emile looked at the little dragon sitting next to her on the grass and asked, “What’s your name anyway?”

The dragon chirped and tilted its head to one side seemingly considering the question. It chirped excitedly and push its head into Emile’s lap. A flood of images cascaded through her mind again, only this time it was images she had only ever seen in books. She had field guides for almost everything back at the library in the inn, and so the when her mind flooded with images of crystalline rock structures she wondered where the little dragon could have possibly seen such things. The crystals themselves seemed to exist wholly on their own, they sat upon no backdrop and were attached to nothing. Just image after image of brilliant crystals flashing through Emile’s mind until finally she pushed the thoughts away and physically pushed the dragon’s head out of her lap.

Emile exclaimed, “Gypsum!”

The green dragon chirruped her assent loudly and vocally. Emile forgot about her exhaustion for a moment and stood up. Gypsum was dancing around her feet now, chirping and chattering. The little redhaired girl danced around with the dragon in a circle, with Gypsum jumping up and nuzzling her hands. Emile was overcome for a moment, and felt a bliss wash over her erasing her woes and her fears, until finally she collapsed in the soft grass again, and lay with Gypsum resting her head comfortably on Emile’s chest.

The brief bout of elation could not last however, as Emile was forced to remember reality staring up at the sky. The horizon wasn’t visible for the treeline, but the shadows were growing long and the pale powder blue of mid afternoon was quickly changing into the deep violet of evening. She knew it would be dark very soon, and in spite of all of her supplies she wished dearly to be under a roof for the night. It doesn’t matter what the people are like in Ravina, someone will let me sleep in a bed. If I ask nicely. She gathered up all of her supplies, double checked her map, and began down the road again.