example, five stones.
"Four seasons?" Grung railed, pacing around the small kitchen at dinner time that night. "Four seasons with the scavenging patrol?
It's ridiculous, it's unheard of! I won't stand for it."
"It's okay, Grung," Z'thandra said, watching from the table as her adoptive father effectively swept the floor with his thick tail.
"It'll be an adventure."
"An adventure she says, an adventure. You don't know how rough it is out there Z'thandra. The patrols only get one warrior each, one – do you know how helpful that is if their set upon by...well, by anything? Not much, that's how much!"
"But, you can get me on a good crew right? I mean, that's part of your job right? Organizing the patrols? I'm sure it will be okay."
And it sure beats the alternative she thought. She and Ulda had
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decided against upsetting Grung further by telling him about her initial sentence. There was no point.
"I can," Grung said, slowing his harried pace, "but it's still dangerous Z'thandra."
"Oh Daddy," Orga cooed from her spot at the table, "you couldn't do that, it would be favoritism."
"Orga, don't start." Ulda cautioned.
"Yes Orga, don't start." Grung concurred.
"Oh, you always take her side! Who saved Itra hmm? Did you even tell him that part of the story? Did you? I did Daddy. I saved him."
"Did you, did you really?"
"Yes, I was going to get water this morning—"
"But you never get water."
"Argh! I was going to get water. I was. Why don't you ever believe me?"
"Good thing for Itra you didn't get any water when you went storming out of here and down to the lake last night, eh Orga?"
Z'thandra asked. She wasn't sure why she said it, it wasn't like her to be so sneaky and she was only acting on a hunch, but the look of horror that crossed Orga's face confirmed her suspicion.
"Yes, well...last night I...I wanted to think. You said we were like snakes!" she recovered quickly and pointed an accusing finger in Z'thandra's face. "I saved Itra and no one cares!"
Z'thandra sighed and rose from the table. "Allow me to save you the trouble of storming off Orga," she turned to Ulda and Grung in turn. "It's been a long day for me, may I be excused."
"Of course," Ulda said, patting Z'thandra's chestnut-colored hand as she passed by.
Grung nodded and Orga sat back down in her seat, speechless.
Back in her room, lying on her thin mattress, Z'thandra
pondered the events of the day. Surprisingly, she found her thoughts, more and more, pulled toward the stone. The stone. It was one of the reasons she stayed in this village even with the open hostility she faced everyday. It, Ulda and Grung. Of course, she admitted, there was also the fact she had no where else to go, but still the stone was a huge factor in the equation.
The reptar worshipped it, it was easy to do. The stone seemed to have a will of its own and would occasionally perform miracles, like when it healed her headache this morning. It was an amazing
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thing, an artifact worthy of kings and Z'thandra could not think ill of the Reptars for putting so much faith and devotion into it. She too loved it, but she did not worship it – rather, she felt connected to it.
All day, no matter where she was in the village, if she closed her eyes she could feel it. It didn't call to her, it didn’t occupy her every thought or anything like that but it was there. It was there and it was benevolent. She felt more protective of the stone, she suspected, than even the reptar shaman who bowed to it each
morning for his prayers. She couldn't explain it more than that, in fact, this was the first time she could actually remember thinking about it in so much detail. Perhaps because, while she felt herself at the very depths of despair, right before the shaman had entered and announced Itra's arm was not broken, she thought she'd felt the touch of the stone inside her mind, a comforting touch.
That was crazy. She thought, standing up and getting
undressed and ready for bed. The stone was many things, but
intelligent was not one of them.
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Chapter Seven
Scavenger patrol was far worse than Z'thandra could have ever imagined. Each morning before dawn Grung would shake her awake and she'd dress and join him for a cold, dark breakfast in the kitchen before either Ulda or Orga were awake. Whenever she could find the time, Z'thandra would go to the lake to get water for Ulda, knowing there was no way Orga would do it, but more often than not she had to rush to the clearing of the sacred grove instead.
Z'thandra had always loved the clearing. Aside from when she
was in the presence of the stone it was her favorite part of the village. It was near to the village, just down a short hill in fact, and here the trees grew close together and the ground was covered with velvety moss that tickled the bottoms of her feet. There were always fireflies here for some reason as well, day or night. When she and the other scavengers huddled, shivering, in the early morning the fireflies would dance over their heads, performing for them.
Each morning they would break into groups – three scavengers
and one warrior, and would be assigned a section of the swamp.
Their job then was to scavenge. The swamp was a tricky creature, it randomly held onto the belongings of those it had taken and just as randomly spat them out. Sometimes they found bodies and they
knew they'd died after the curse was lifted, but sometimes,
sometimes they just found equipment from the days of the curse when no one dying in battle stayed dead. Z'thandra far preferred the latter.
Wading through the water, using sticks to penetrate its depths
– poking and prodding, looking for anything that might be useful to the village, was without question the most unpleasant way Z'thandra had ever spent time. The most difficult part was avoiding looking at any of the reflections on the water. It was incredibly tricky, she had to continually look up, away, or dart her eyes to the side, but she did it because the alternative was unthinkable.
Scavengers could very well be described as Scourers. They
walked in a straight line an arm's length from one another, scouring the swamp for anything non-organic. When they found something the goods, or corpses, were stacked in mounds on the nearest high ground, then at the end of the day corpses were stripped and goods were split up between all the party's packs and taken back to the
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village. Z'thandra invariably found herself at the end of the line; a position she enjoyed because it offered the most solitude.
Reptar children played games in the tamer parts of the swamp; hide and find or Reptars and Humans, but she'd never been welcome to join in. Perhaps if she had, she reflected somewhat bitterly, she would have found it easier to walk on the uneven ground of the uncivilized wilderness.
For weeks she was the target of much mockery and mirth as
she seemed to spend more time splayed out in the muck or spitting out foul water than she did on her feet. Most of the jokes started out,
"For a swamp elf..." with all the emphasis on the third word. That made them relatively easy to ignore, even if her clumsiness wasn't.
Eventually, however, Z'thandra found her swamp legs and
scavenging became a much simpler task. She still found the job tedious and resented being there as punishment for something she hadn't done, but in the spirit of making the best out of a bad situation she took advantage of the time to think.
She composed stories in her mind. She tried to share one with her fellow scavengers during their lunch break once, but one after another her coworkers turned their backs on her or resumed their conversations, talking over her.
It saddened her that she'd not been with the swamp elv
es long enough to learn their written language. The Reptar language, she was told when she asked, was another victim of the curse – lost. She turned her mind toward creating a written language of her own despite the fact she knew she'd have no one to share it with. The combined distractions of Z'thandranese and scavenging served to wipe the memory of the man she thought she'd seen from her mind until one particularly crisp morning.
Now that the leaves were falling from the trees and a thin skin of ice covered the open water when the scavengers went out in the morning, they no longer focused their attention on the water, choosing instead to stick with the, much warmer, land. Whatever goodies the water held, it could keep them now, at least until Thaw.
Z'thandra was walking with Fuma, a particularly cantankerous
Reptar, to her left and a wide expanse of open water to her right. She was having difficulty visualizing the figure she wanted to represent the short a sound in Z'thandranese and paused to use her prodding stick to trace it in the mud at the water's edge.
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The mud was partially frozen and she had to press fairly hard to leave an indentation. Just as her stick swept up in a delicate upswing she saw it – the highly detailed imprint of a boot in the mud near the water's edge.
"Hey!" she yelled, stopping and pointing at the print. "Look at this."
Fuma looked over and snorted. "You never seen your own
boot print before, swamp elf?"
"It's not mine." Z'thandra placed her boot-clad foot alongside the print. It was significantly larger than hers. "And unless Reptar have started wearing boots when I wasn't looking, it's not one of yours either."
"Hey, Greasl," Fuma called, gesturing toward the water. "The elf's found something I think you should see."
Greasl waddled nosily over. He wore a motley assortment of
armor, all stuff previously salvaged from the swamp. His ring-mail hauberk jingled with each step. Z'thandra had found it on a corpse just last week and knew it had covered its previous owner to the middle of his thigh, but on Greasl it only reached his waist. Leg armor for humans, or any biped, never fit Reptar warriors because of their immense thighs and tails but usually women of the village could modify armor to fit individual soldiers. In Greasl's case, his stomach was so immense they'd been forced to take apart two
different pairs of leather breeches and sew them together in an open-ended sort of skirt that tended to get caught on underbrush as he walked.
The other Reptar stopped in their place to let him pass by,
watching as he approached Z'thandra at the end of the line.
"What?" he asked, tugging at the waistband of his leather skirt.
"I found something," Z'thandra said, gesturing to the footprint.
"You've never seen your own footprint before elf?"
Z'thandra sighed and put her foot up against it again. "It's not mine."
~*~
"So then they cancelled the scavenge for the day so that Greasl could go back to town and report it to the rest of the warriors."
Z'thandra concluded before picking up a chunk of potato with two fingers and plopping it in her mouth.
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The kitchen table grew quiet, even Orga had nothing snide to
say. After several minutes during with Z'thandra's excitement was the most vibrant thing in the room, Grung turned toward her and sighed.
"Do you realize what this could mean?"
"That there could be a human in the swamp?"
"Yes, a human. It could be a scout, it could be a –"
"It could be anything," Z'thandra interrupted, then clamped her lips shut and stared, shamefaced at her plate. "Sorry."
"It's okay Z'thandra," Gung said, "but your excitement concerns me. Promise me you won't take any unnecessary risks.
Promise me."
"I promise," she whispered, more to her plate than to Grung.
"I know you're too young to remember, but there's been
innumerable battles between the humans and the reptar – most of them fought over the stone. It's only luck really, that the Reptar had most of it in their possession when the curse ended. If that human is a scout, it only means bad things for the village."
"I know, but we don't know – I mean, he may not be a scout."
"Maybe..." Grung said in his gravelly voice, but the way he said it left no doubt, he didn't believe it.
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Chapter Eight
Z'thandra started her day with an excitement she couldn't
remember ever feeling and things only continued to get better. When she reported for work she was assigned to the same crew as the night before, and they were sent to the same area. This time, in addition to Greasl they would be accompanied by his twin brother Treasl, just in case.
Greasl and Treasl weren't identical twins, in fact, they were nearly exact opposites of one another physically. Where Greasl was short and stout his brother was tall and thin. Greasl's scales were dark green with golden stripes and Treasl's were dark gold with green stripes. Unfortunately for Treasl the one place the pair did match was their armor. Treasl's gear was as ill-fitting and
mismatched as his brother's. It seemed that instead of having to combine breeches to increase the width, in Treasl's case the
modifications had been done to make them longer. Even so, his leather kilt-type thing wasn't sized correctly and rough bits of it dragged in the mud as he walked.
When Z'thandra's name was called to be a member of their
crew, Greasl and Treasl, along with the other scavengers all groaned, but even that couldn’t dent her good mood. She was going to see a human! She just knew she was!
For the first hours of work, while the sun struggled to make its way over the horizon, stretching the shadows of every rock, tree, reptar and swamp elf out at their feet, she was certain she would see a human at any minute.
As the day wore on and their shadows began to shrink and run
to hide from the mid-day heat at their owner's feet her faith wavered, but didn't fail.
Later, with their shadows leading the way home and a pack
heavy with loot strapped onto her back, Z'thandra walked, bent over with its weight and defeat.
It took an exceptionally long time to sort the findings so it was after dark when she returned home. As she opened the door she was surprised to see all the wall-mounted torches lit and a Grung slumped, rather than seated, in his usual chair. His scales were pale and his posture defeated. Ulda had turned her chair to face her husband's and was spoon feeding him something while Orga looked on in obvious distress.
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"Grung! Are you okay? What's happened?" she asked,
barreling in the room.
"I'll be okay," he answered weakly and now that Z'thandra was inside she could see what was wrong. His leg was bound to a pair of thick sticks, one on either side, his forehead had a bandage on it and his arm was in a sling.
"What happened?"
Grung looked at Ulda and she nodded, then explained. "Grung was inspecting the perimeter of the camp, its part of his job as safety—"
"I know his job, please, skip to the important part."
"He fell down a hole, a very deep hole. It must have been a sink hole that just opened up in the last rain. He'll be okay. The shaman thinks his leg is broken, and he hurt his arm and bumped his head on the way down, but in time, he'll be okay."
"Oh. Oh my. I'm so sorry Grung, is there anything I can do?
Anything I can get you?"
Grung shook his head slowly then winced and held fast.
Z'thandra stood up from where she'd been kneeling at his feet and backed away, glancing over at Orga whose face was absolutely
stricken. She didn't think she'd seen her foster sister quiet for so long and she found it almost as unnerving as Grung's injuries.
"There's soup on the counter if you'd like it, Z'thandra," Ulda gestured and then paused and turned around to face her more fully.
"Actually, I hate to ask it, but since Grung got hurt I didn't have any time..."
"Anything." Z'thandra looked from one adoptive parent to the other anxiously. "What can I do? I want to help."
"Could you fetch some water? I know it's dark enough you'll have to use your heatvision and it upsets your stomach but..."
"Of course, it's no problem. Really." She snatched the buckets off their pegs by the door. and, in a moment of selflessness looked over at Orga. "Would you like to come? I can –"
"No," the Reptar's wide mouth twisted into a sneer. "I most certainly do not want to go with you Z'thandra."
"Suit yourself," Z'thandra shrugged and left pulling the door closed behind her.
Stepping outside the swamp elf was taken by how beautiful the swamp could be at night. She could hear myriad insects calling, fighting and cavorting all around her. Most of the larger animals
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stayed away from the village, unwilling to become lunch, she
supposed, but the frogs never seemed to figure that out, and she could hear them singing her a serenade.
The Reptars, not blessed with heatvision, were all inside their cottages or huddled around small outside cook fires – either way, they weren't paying her any mind. That was to her advantage since Orga's words had stung her enough to bring tears to her eyes and she didn’t want to have to explain them to anyone.
After a moment's concentration her vision turned to heatvision and she started off down the path. Usually Orga's insults and harassment rolled off her back like water off a crocodile, but today her offer had been sincere – she'd assumed Orga was upset and thought perhaps a walk in the moonlight would help, but she'd been rejected again. She knew she should stop trying, she also knew she never would.
As she approached the lake and the sight and sounds of the
village vanished completely, Z'thandra sat down on a rotting log and held her head in her hands. She'd taken to wearing it in an elaborate style with one thin braid wrapped around her forehead three times before merging with another, thicker braid, that fell down to below her bottom. Without the braids her hair was so long it used to drag in the water when she scavenged, which was not a pleasant experience.
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