When he awoke from a fevered dream of blond-haired maidens, Garrick knew the talking toad was real after all. Thoop was perched on his chest, throat sack pulsing calmly.

“How do you feel, friend Garrick?”

Garrick was laid out on his back on the forest floor, alongside the log where Thoop had summoned him… when?

“How long?” he asked.

“Only a day. The Mender was quite efficient.”

Frantically, Garrick moved his hands over his own body, sitting up and inadvertently tossing Thoop to the ground.

“What did they take? What part of me did the Mender demand?”

Thoop landed gingerly on the moist leaves to Garrick’s left. “Only a taste of your blood, which was already flowing.”

“How can that be? Where I come from…”

Where do I come from? How do I know this?

“They demand a piece of your flesh and bone as payment,” Thoop finished Garrick’s sentence for him. “So I have heard.”

“Fingers or toes, or an ear or an eye,” Garrick said. “Sometimes, the cursed witches eat it right in front of you.” He sat up more stiffly now, wary that the Mender – a servant of the Winnower – might still be near.

“That’s… excessive,” Thoop remarked. “A mere taste of the patient’s essence is enough.”

“Thoop, I do not understand any of this.”

“I’m afraid, Garrick, that you have found yourself summoned into the politics of an ancient détente. The Trucewood Vale lies under siege, her bulwarks weakening by the day.”

“That warlock, the crocodile?” Garrick asked. “She was an invader?”

“In a manner of speaking. All Eld-Beasts are welcome in the Vale, even longpaws,” Thoop said. “But some come with ill intent, to conquer or pillage. Or, like Sythgoryx, to break the Truce.”

Garrick stood, began pacing, rubbing his eyes out of confusion more than dizziness.

“What truce?”

“Long ago, at a time even the elephants cannot remember, when even longpaws still lived in the Vale, the Painless Queen decreed that no animal should be made to feed another against its will. She reached deep into the Lingering World, communed with Eld-Tree and Winnower alike, and brought back the Seeds Of Accord. These, she planted throughout the Vale, and had birds fly many of them to the world beyond, so other places of peace could flourish. And in those places where the Seeds took root, a Truceland was born. A place where no animal fed upon another, where even predators could live off the bounty of the land. In this way, the Queen brought peace to all the clades who walked or crawled or swam or burrowed or flew.”

“So no flesh is consumed here? There is no hunting?” Garrick didn’t believe it.

“None, except that which Trucemockers like Sythgoryx bring. As you seem to already know, the eating of flesh grants power to some adepts. Many find that power hard to resist.”

“Yet, you still have Menders here. They must eat part of their patients in order to heal. It is the Winnower’s curse upon them.”

“A mere taste is all that’s truly necessary, Garrick. A wisp of hair. A drop of blood. Any little bit that carries the essence of the patient. Nothing more.”

Garrick nodded, fascinated. “I did not know animals could speak, let alone use magic.”

“Why should this surprise you? Men are animals, are they not?”

“Certainly not!” Garrick protested. “Some of us have bestial manners, I concede. But we are no mere brutes.”

Thoop merely blinked his globular black eyes.

“How do I even know you are really a toad? I saw you transform, just like that crocodile. If that’s what it was.”

“I am not a shape-shifter, Garrick. What you saw was a manifestation of my ancestry. Like the Rememberer adepts of your race, I can tap into the Lingering World and summon abilities from ancestors. I follow my kin’s branch of the Eld-Tree back until I find what I need, and then call it forth.”

“Rubbish,” Garrick said. “That was no toad-spirit I saw possessing you. That was not your ancestor.”

“Toads have not always been toads, Garrick. As men have not always been men. The Eld-Tree which carries the memories of life is far older than you can imagine.”

Garrick began to wish even harder that this was all a strange dream. He wanted to go home – to remember home – but Thoop’s words had the ring of truth about them. Even if he was just a toad talking nonsense; men have not always been men?

“Thoop, you promised to release me when this battle was done.”

“If that is what you wish, Garrick. Though the bond between us will remain, in any case. Unless one of us dies.”

“Meaning what?”

“We will always be able to sense each other, to know the other’s fate, to share something of the other’s essence. Though I will always have a far greater share of that bond, I’m afraid. Among adepts, it is called Resonance, the bond we share with our familiar across the gulf of clades.”

“I do not wish to be anyone’s servant,” Garrick said. “But I can’t remember my life before this. How do I know I wasn’t already a slave?”

“I very much doubt you were, Garrick. The way you fought, I suspect you are a warrior.”

“In whose army?”

“I don’t know,” Thoop said. “But some day, you will remember.”

A movement in the sky caught Garrick’s eye. High above, a dark shape was circling. Some kind of raptor.

“I just have trouble believing it,” Garrick said.

“I don’t know what more I can say to convince you, Garrick.”

“No, Thoop. Talking animals, ancient queens, lost memories. All that is clear. It’s this Sythgoryx creature.”

“Oh?,” Thoop asked.

“You say she wanted to come into the Vale to violate the Truce, to hunt and eat flesh?”

“It is her species’ natural way. Some beings fetishize the ancestral paths.”

“But she is a doppelganger, a shape-shifter. That means she has already tasted flesh, and already hunted.”

The bird above seemed lower now. It clearly was some kind of raptor, Garrick could now see. A hawk, possibly. Is it part of this ancient Truce?, he wondered.

“So why risk an attack on one of the Trucelands at all? It doesn’t seem worth the trouble. She must be after something else...”

Suddenly, the circling hawk dove. Before Garrick had even finished his rumination, the raptor swooped in and snatched up little Thoop like the defenseless toad he was.

“Thoop!”

The hawk cackled in the voice of Sythgoryx.

Without thinking, Garrick drew his sword and leapt into the air, desperate to save his new friend. Sythgoryx in hawk form was already higher in the air than any man could naturally jump. But Garrick reached her height with ease. On instinct, he swiped at the hawk with his sword, grazing her wing.

Sythgoryx screeched in fury.

Only as his descent began did Garrick realize how high he’d jumped, and wonder at how he had accomplished it. He didn’t have time to ponder the feat, though, both because the earth beneath him was rapidly rising, and because Sythgoryx spun to attack him.

She swooped in at a right angle, her body transformed into a nightmarish amalgam of scales and teeth and feathers and claws and wings, snatching Garrick out of mid-air and knocking the wind from him. His sword tumbled out of his hand, leaving him defenseless.

“The little monkey has learned to jump, I see,” Sythgoryx growled. “Let’s see how you fair in my element.”

Her dive straight down sent Garrick’s brain and innards into a tail-spin. He lost all sense of direction, his vision a blur, his last meal fighting to escape his gut. The only thing he could sense clearly was Thoop’s voice in his head.

Swim, Garrick. Now!

They crashed into a body of water – a lake? a pond? how deep was it? – the impact sending a sharp wave of stinging pain through Garrick’s whole body. It was all he could do to flail about beneath the surface, but flail he did. The impact knocked him free of the crocodile mage’s grasp. He scrambled blindly away from the thrashing bulk of the monster’s morphing body, and only when he slowed to turn and look back did Garrick get any sense of which way was up. Desperate for air, he swam toward the glimmering light above him.

Gasping in precious air as he breached the surface, Garrick stumbled to the shore of what he now saw was a large pond in the middle of a marshy grassland, a sea of cattails with forest at the far edges.

The thrashing from the pond behind him reached a crescendo, as Sythgoryx roared her fury. She was locked in mortal combat with Thoop’s spectral “ancestor”, the tiny toad floating at its center and lending it some of his own agility. The ghostly animal leapt into the air and pounced down upon the morphing Sythgoryx, driving them both deeper under the water’s surface, their melee throwing up great brackish waves.

Garrick’s first instinct was to leap into the pond to help his little friend, but he realized at the last moment that he had no sword. And unlike the two animals in the water, he had no magic to help him.

“Where is my cursed blade?!”

Garrick scrounged about frantically, looking for any glint of sunlight off the ground, or at least for a large branch or rock he could use as a weapon. But there was nothing. Nothing but dirty water and a sea of cattails.

Suddenly, he sensed a calmness behind him. The waves emanating from the submerged battle grew smaller. There were no more splashing sounds. The fight was over.

Garrick crouched low, wary of monsters, ready to pounce or flee. The terrain played to a crocodile’s strengths, and if Sythgoryx had prevailed, who knows what shape she’d assume to attack him. Maybe the shape of Thoop himself?

“Garrick.”

The voice was small and baritone, coming from a low place near Garrick’s left flank. He turned to scan the water and tall grass for his friend, who might be his enemy in disguise.

There was a toad sitting there on, of all things, a lily pad. It looked exactly like Thoop.

“Sythgoryx?”

She is dead. The voice in Garrick’s head reassured him. A shapeshifter wouldn’t be able to speak to him that way. Would she?

“You fight well for a warlock, Thoop.”

“I told you the Thundercroaks are warriors. I am not without some training.”

“How do I know you’re really you?” Garrick asked.

“You would have felt my death. You are my familiar.”

“Fat lot of good it did you.”

“You helped me immensely, Garrick. Without the strength I drew from my bond to you, I wouldn’t have survived. Walking the branches of the Eld-Tree so quickly as I did, and for so long, is very taxing, and I am but a mere tiny toad.”

Garrick squatted down, to more easily look his little master – his little friend – in his dark, globular eyes.

“That jump I made. That came from you?”

Thoop nodded, a human gesture that was difficult for him to execute, that made his entire body rise and fall. “You drew upon my natural aptitudes despite the clade barrier between us. It is one of the few benefits a familiar receives from Resonance with its master.”

“Master.” Garrick did not like the feel of the word rolling off his tongue. It felt too much a violation of the natural order. “Am I to be your thrall, then, master Thoop? I would rather you count me a friend, if we are to be bonded.”

“I merely use the term of art. I have no intentions of commanding your every…” Thoop paused, and blinked his bulbous eyes. “Friend,” he said. “I promised I would send you home, Garrick. I could come with you, if you wish it.”

“I don’t know where home is yet,” Garrick said. “What’s the rush?”

“I would like to see the world beyond the Vale. Perhaps there is something to learn there about Sythgoryx’s agenda.”

“I’m not sure you would like to see the world, friend Thoop. But we can discuss that while we try to find my sword. I’m fairly certain it’s an heirloom.”

“Then we shall search for it high and low, friend Garrick.”

Garrick smiled, and gently scooped Thoop up into his left breast pocket, the one closest to his heart.

“I think I dropped it over to the west there.”

He marched off towards the western treeline, mud squicking in his boots, Thoop bouncing about in his pocket.

Garrick could feel the bond between them now, Thoop’s growing sense of ease and safety and warmth, the little amphibian’s heart slowing as he grew calmer next to Garrick’s own. It gave Garrick a similar feeling, that this handful of a creature had brought him a purpose he somehow knew he’d lacked even before he’d lost his memory.

Garrick decided he was a lucky man, indeed, to have a talking toad for a friend.