The niortak moved toward the great forests of the northern region. Riding in an aircraft was a whole new kind of terrifying to Keshel, though the rickety contraptions and niortak with questionable motives certainly didn’t help. He’d decided to trust them though.

  Keshel’s eyesight was finally adjusting to the daylight. With the aid of the cloth and hood, his antennae thankfully started doing their job right instead of hyper-focusing his mind on the light. He might have hurt their light sensing abilities, but he didn’t really care.

  They were useful once they started filtering out the pointless information. In the daylight, they gave Keshel a much stronger sense of the life around him, to the point where he could even dimly sense the niortak minds. He couldn’t control them of course; at least… if he could, he didn’t really want to test it. He got a sense of their emotions and thoughts, and that was enough.

  The first day, they camped a good distance from Karbion, and it was showing all signs of remaining an uneventful—if strange—evening. Keshel was still trying to get over the odd ways the sky folk acted. They had no visible hierarchy, which was novel to a suiki. He’d always known before which people were above him in status. Here, Keshel was at a loss of how to interact.

  Ruirel was clearly the man in charge, but no one really treated him that way. He helped with cooking and didn’t even hesitate to add his might to the giant spectral barrier they’d erected over the camp with their wings to keep the plentiful beasts of the hills away.

  After a long evening filled with worry and cultural isolation, Keshel tried to sleep. However, even weeks or months down the road, he would still only feel truly alive in the darkness.

  Keshel did manage a short doze for a few hours.

  “Do you think this peace will last?” A soft voice asked him.

  Keshel jerked upward in the darkness, blinking at the suiki sitting beside his bedroll. She was fairly young, probably around twelve if he had to guess. Her hair was a stark white in the darkness, the same color as the two large antennae above her head that drifted around as she shifted her weight; he'd never seen such a young person with white hair before—which I find odd personally, but whatever.

  He stared at her, incredulous as to why a stranger was watching him sleep, before finally remembering the voice from before the niortak had shown up. “I thought you were a hallucination.” He admitted slowly, frowning at her with speculation, “You’re the one who led the niortak to us?”

  The youthful girl was fidgety, but she nodded, “Do you think that solved the problem?” She tilted her head at him innocently.

  “I sure hope so. The larborak raiders will come back eventually—they always do—but next time they’ll hesitate.”

  She sighed, “So it didn’t change anything… I see.”

  “Abbil agreed to make a hesitant alliance with the niortak, that means they’ll be back too. Maybe even permanently if things go well there. I’m sure that will give the larborak pause.” He remembered how young she was and added, “But you shouldn’t worry about it.”

  She scowled, apparently that wasn’t even close to the right thing to say, “I assure you, I will worry about it. But that doesn’t matter for the moment. I’ve already tried and failed to get information on your people six times. It probably won’t be too bad if I just continue to waltz around like an idiot as usual, but I’m getting tired of dying thanks to that…” She muttered to herself incoherently for several more moments.

  Keshel stared at her blankly, his mind whirring around the words dying and information. The best way to describe his thoughts at that moment was ‘… huh?’ He finally blinked slowly, “I hope you know that made no sense.”

  “Yeah. That was the intention. Anyways, tell me about your people, I’d like to know everything; even if it’s something common that you would assume I already know. Just… pretend you’re talking to an idiot or a small child.”

  Keshel stared at her for several more heartbeats, still trying to figure out where the words from earlier slotted together. After a while, he hesitantly packed away the word dying and focused on the other half of what he’d actually understood.

  “You want information.” That wasn’t something most kids were interested in, besides, the way she worded things was far more… purposeful than he would expect. His mind was trying to dismiss that entire ramble from his memory, preferring to go on with life rather than choose suicide via extreme confusion.

  “Yes, I think that was clear.” She was oblivious to his internal struggle, which is just kind of how she worked. This particular child is a bit capricious as you’ll come to see shortly. So while on occasion she can read people like a sparking book, this is not on most occasions.

  “Well I’d like some answers too,” Keshel replied, narrowing his eyes, “Like, who are you? Where did you even come from? How come no one seems to know you’re here? You were at the burrow just a few days ago and I find it hard to believe you walked all the way here just to talk to me cryptically in the middle of the night—” except that last part is completely something that she would do “—I also think that Ruirel would have noticed a stowaway, and there definitely aren’t any other suiki in his group.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I like to pretend Keshel is an idiot sometimes—because sometimes he is—but he sure knows how to ask the right questions. She tilted her head at him, “What if I’m secretly a shape changer?” Even if she had been, that would have only explained about one and a half of those questions, but cryptic little girls in the middle of the night tend to be more eccentric than anything else.

  “You aren’t.” He replied, confident that those didn’t exist; his confidence just put him back in the ‘idiot’ category, but he could eventually earn his way back, with effort.

  “Sparks, I was kind of hoping you’d believe that…” She started muttering and Keshel strained his ears to listen. “Despite those niortak wings clearly being force spells of some kind I haven’t seen any other kind of dimensionalism on Arendi or Arithren; even with their geological features which I’d normally assume would make any native abilities there stronger… hmmm.”

  Keshel sighed, his mind deciding it would rather just not, “You’re doing it again. How about you just leave, alright? You’re clearly not going to tell me anything substantial.”

  There was a long moment of silence, “Alright, I’m Fora, okay? I’m from a different world and I have the ability to teleport.”

  Let’s just pause right here for a moment alright? Yes, yes, I know exactly what you’re thinking—or not thinking, I’m not sure how good of a memory you have—my name is Fora.

  …What do you mean I never introduced myself? YOU kidnapped me, how did you not know my name?! No… No, please don't answer that; I’d like to keep assuming that people are intelligent. Stop trying to be threatening, I’m still telling the story.

  Keshel glanced up at Arithren in the sky, visible through the enormous glowing spectral wing that covered the camp in a bubble. He pointed at it, giving her a confused look, “A different world? The larborak are from Arithren too. I didn’t know there were any suiki there though.”

  “I’m not a suiki,” Fora responded matter-of-factly, “And I’m not from Arithren.”

  He looked the child in front of him up and down, just as dubious of her claims as you three were when you first kidnapped me. “You sure look like one.”

  “We share a common ancestor I think. I mean…I didn’t think any alanerea managed to get off-world, but you guys are clearly here, so—”

  “Alright so you say you aren’t from Arithren, so where in the name of broken fools and squalling stars else could you be from? The moon?”

  I’d like to put in here and say that I absolutely love that particular curse; I wish Keshel would use it more. It brings color to my life. But my past self ignored it, not yet understanding the beautiful implications of linguistic irony. Yes yes… I’m getting back to the story; please put down the fish…

  Fora turned her head to look up at the moon in question, which was currently halfway obscured by Arithren. She glared at it for… reasons that Keshel didn’t know and I’m not going to tell them to you, because clearly you don’t appreciate my information dumps—insert annoyed sniff here, “No, a different group of very annoying individuals live there.” She corrected him with a sigh, “I’m from one of the stars.”

  Keshel massaged his temples for a moment, well Fora had told him something that’s for sure. He was completely sure she was making the whole thing up, but at least she wasn’t just ignoring his complaints.

  “That must have taken a lot of snails.” He eventually responded. That was the best comeback he could have possibly made, and it’s hilarious I’ll have you know. No, I’m not going to explain why. You said you didn’t want my interjections anymore.

  She tilted her head at him, a blank look crossing her face. It went right over my head at the time, which just makes the comeback funnier. “So why do you guys live underground anyway?”

  He let out a long, annoyed breath—I have that effect on people, as you’ve hopefully noticed by now. “There was a war, we used to live in the sky but that got too dangerous. So we moved underground.”

  “How long ago was this?” A notebook appeared in Fora’s hands, almost like magic—I’ll have you know it was magic, but Keshel still doesn’t believe in magic, somehow.

  “I don’t know, a few hundred years?”

  She tilted her head, “I don’t see how that is possibly enough time to develop your own kind of magic… the timeline matches up though.”

  “Racial gifts aren’t magic, they’re from the gods. How would you understand how they work?” Fora rolled her eyes at that—again, I’m not explaining why, you lost your privileges—and Keshel went on, “The niortak and larborak started fighting each other, so we cut all contact with the surface, living underground and making our own society. They destroyed… just about everything I think.”

  “And then you went through tyrant after tyrant until someone decided to start maiming children to stop it?”

  Keshel opened his mouth and closed it a few times, “Uh… yeah essentially.”

  She sighed, “That’s such a boring history, but I suppose that’s my own fault for asking a bunch of underground weirdos. Did anyone turn into mushrooms by chance as far as you know?”

  “...No?”

  “Good, good, I’m a bit tired of dealing with immortal fungus at the moment.” Fora nodded curtly, thought for a moment, and then glanced back up at the sky sharply. Keshel followed the gaze, worried I’d seen something getting ready to attack us—Keshel was absurdly yet understandably paranoid about being on the surface for the first time—but there was nothing but the celestial bodies.

  When he finally looked back at Fora, she was gone.

  He was beginning to understand that that was just how I worked, which is a good sign for his sanity in the coming days.