Chapter 3

I realized as I bit into the dripping hot harpy meat that my appetite was back. That was simultaneously both a good and bad thing. Good because I really needed to eat more, but bad because it was primarily my pain meds—and the cocktail of supporting medications that dealt with the side effects the others caused in an ouroboros of misery—that suppressed my appetite. The cramps would come back soon. I decided not to worry about that at the moment and enjoy the few pleasures I still had left. It’s not like I’d be able to get my prescriptions refilled in Earris no matter how much I cried about it.

I was dirty, half my body was uncomfortably cold, the other half uncomfortably warm, but… the meat was pretty damn good. “Did you add spices to this?” I asked. It wasn’t only fatty and rich—more like duck than chicken—but it also had a sort of fruity undertone. Quite simply, it was the tastiest white meat I’d ever had in my life.

“Do I look like a royal chef?” Ferrith asked sarcastically as he tore off a piece of the harpy for himself. “We just got lucky. This flock was surviving on wild pessimin berries. That’s what you’re tasting. When they’ve recently found and devoured a rotting carcass they taste worse than goblin shit. Harpies are kind of like ogres when it comes to food: they’ll eat whatever they can get their hands on. The only difference is they can’t survive on trees and mud.”

“Ogres really eat trees and mud?” I asked between bites. I glanced around until I found the spot I thought that tree had come down during the fight. It was gone. Just a few scattered sticks were left to show it’d been there at all. Two of the surviving ogres were sitting nearby with bellies bulging so much I would have assumed they were pregnant if I hadn’t seen them so recently.

“They prefer trees, but they’ll eat mud too,” Ferrith explained. “I think the only thing that keeps them from eating dirt is how dry it is. Do humans not eat mud?”

“No way. Most of us prefer meat, but we also need fruits and vegetables to maintain a balanced diet.”

“S’ balang die-uh?” Ferrith asked around a mouthful of harpy meat. The crunching sounds coming from his mouth made me cringe internally. He seemed to be eating the bones as he went. He actually gave me a weird look when I pulled my bones out of my mouth and tossed them in the fire.

“A balanced diet is just attempting to eat the best combination of foods to stay healthy,” I explained. “It’s just a silly human thing. Like shaking hands.” Come to think of it, it wasn’t as though eating a balanced diet had ever done me any good. My mom had forced me to eat healthy food most of my life and I’d still ended up with a terminal disease.

“Huh,” Ferrith said. “You sound less like an ogre the more I learn about you.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” I said. I pulled off a fatty chunk near the breast of the cooked harpy, where there weren’t any bones. “So what’s your plan? Are you taking me to that Haemir place you were telling me about?”

“I’ve got one detour to take care of on the way, then I’m heading there to get paid for the harpy job. I figure I can take you to see Clarice when I’m done. She’ll love meeting you. She studies odd cases like yours.”

“She studies small ogres?”

“Yes, but not really. All she’s interested in is intelligent creatures from other worlds. I occasionally bring her ogres, but someone else keeps bringing her goblins.”

“And this Clarice person can get me home?” I clarified.

“Not at all,” Ferrith said, “but she’ll either know people that can or know where you can go to meet those people. She works directly for… oh, well I guess you wouldn’t know who he is.” Ferrith waved a hand. “She’s connected. A lot more than me, I can guarantee you that. I’m a bit of a loner. Let’s just say if news was milk it would be rotten by the time I got it.”

“I was sort of already figuring that out,” I said, “based on your only traveling companions being creatures you can’t actually have a conversation with. Sounds like I’ll want to meet this Clarice person when we get to where we’re going.”

“Oh, she’s not in Haemir, but once we’re in town I’ll get a message to her and have her pick you up. You know what she always tells me?” Ferrith asked with grin. I just blinked at him. I wasn’t even going to guess. “If it can talk and it’s not from Earris, bring ‘em to Clarice!” Ferrith winked at me with all the confidence of a middle-aged father that sort of knew his jokes—or in this case rhymes—were corny, but just didn’t care. That thought gave me a momentary pang of loss when I instinctively thought about telling Josh about this guy’s cringey rhymes and realized I had no way to contact him. It was like he’d died or something… or maybe I had.

“Ferr… am I dead? Is this heaven? Wait, no, this would probably be hell, wouldn’t it?”

Ferrith nodded like he’d expected that kind of reaction from his little rhyme. “Ah, yes. That whole argument. I don’t know, Vince. You’ll have to take that one up with the church. They’re always saying you can’t prove a negative.”

“Well that’s true,” I agreed.

“All I’ll say about it is people die here in Earris all the time. If this was where you went when you died, how could you die again? As for heaven? Even the church would say this isn’t it. If you want to get to heaven you have to take the bridge.” He pointed a finger straight up into the sky.

“Bridge? What are you—” I looked up. The sight I saw literally took the words out of my mouth.

It was gorgeous. Stunning. As beautiful as the harpy battle had been horrifying, proving this world to be one of extremes. Where I lived there was too much light pollution to even get a good glimpse of the Milky Way, but this? There were a few stars, sure, but what dominated the night sky was a sparkling vista of rings. I felt like I was standing on the surface of Saturn, only it was reflecting concentric rings of blues. It faded off over the horizon to either side of me in a gentle curve. “Heaven’s Bridge,” Ferrith said. He didn’t say it with even an ounce of the wonder I felt looking at it. “We’re passing under it now. It’ll be gone by morning.”

“You don’t have a moon, do you?” I asked.

“What’s a moon?” Ferrith asked right back, not realizing he’d essentially answered my question.

“Never mind. Why’s it called Heaven’s Bridge?”

“Your soul has to get across it to get to heaven. That’s why you’ve got to keep it nice and light, or so the saying goes.”

“Let me guess: by not sinning?”

Ferrith’s eyebrow shot up. “They have the Church of Marketh on Earth?”

I chuckled. “No, I just have a good idea how religions work. Normally I would say I’m an atheist, but… magic and stuff. You could say I’m open to having my mind changed now.”

“Nah,” Ferrith said dismissively. “I promise you there’s no god in Earris. If there is then he’s a cursed bastard with more evil in his heart than The Shambler. I wouldn’t want to worship a god like that.”

I had to laugh at how succinctly Ferrith had summed up my own thoughts on the matter, even if I didn’t get his “shamble” reference. “If there really is a god,” I added, “I’ll have some hard words for him when we meet.”

To my surprise, Ferrith agreed. “Me too,” he said wistfully, “me too.”

We sat like that for a while. I stopped eating and just stared up at the gorgeous night sky trying to guess at how much money some rich billionaire on Earth would have been willing to pay just to see what I was seeing as the planet’s rings passed over the sky above. A lot, I decided. But it wouldn’t matter what they were willing to pay, because they’d never see it. As my full belly drifted me off to a second sleep, I felt like this world’s beauty could be just for me to appreciate. Even if this place didn’t have a cure for pancreatic cancer it wouldn’t be so bad to explore more of it before I died. I still wanted to get back home, but maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing to stay here for a bit once I was sure I had a way to get back.

Two weeks, I decided. That was as long as I wanted to stay.