Young Writers Society

She nods in agreement. "Shyriik can take watch as well, so we can split it up into three shifts. Which one do you want?"

"I can take the last shift." He would need the change of pace after laying nearly motionless for the majority of the night, and didn't want to have to go back to it after a brief reprieve. Last shift was the best shift to go with. "By the way, what do you have for supplies on you? We should probably take stock so we know what we need."

"About three days' worth of rations, rope, my bow, some daggers and knives of various sorts, a grappling hook, and some lockpicks," she replies. "Mostly I just hunt. You?"

He glanced down at the bag he had slung across his shoulder. "I have a couple of old documents, an artifact or two and my zatnikitel." He held up his weapon. "One shot painfully stuns, the second kills and the third makes the body disappear."

"Better get hunting tomorrow, then. My food won't last us that long."

He involuntarily shuddered at the thought of having to eat food. He had managed to avoid it during his travels by some strange stroke of luck, but it seemed like he would be unable to avoid it this time. The indigestion was going to be horrible.

"That sounds good to me."

She raises her fist and the eagle takes off into the woods. "She'll see what she can find for now."

"That sounds good to me," Maahes replied. There was an awkward silence for several minutes. Now that there was nothing major that they needed to decide, he suddenly realized that he had no idea what he should be talking about. Any conversation they had wasn't necessary. And it had been awhile since he had been faced with a conversation like that.

After thinking on it for a little while longer, he finally decided on what to say. "So what is your home like, Rowan?"

"Small. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. It's just a cabin in the Ravenwood - at least there aren't many people. You?"

The question took him by surprise. Though he should have expected her to return his inquiry, he hadn't prepared a response. He thought for a moment. He struggled to come up with the best response. Home was a place of chaos and cascades of interlocking thoughts. It was even more beautiful than the array of twinkling stars in the night skies of alien plants.

But it was also his seat on his impressive ship that traversed the galaxy. It was the piles of boxes and old artifacts, caked in cobwebs and the dusts of civilizations long forgotten. And it was more than his little vessel of the stars. It was the ruins of an quaint village, the life that had once filled it forever snuffed out. It was the small grave in the center of it that marked what had once been. Even that didn't completely cover it. Home, though the memories were becoming increasingly more faint with each passing day, as the library nestled in the center of a bustling city, and the little boy who dreamed of someday touching the stars.

"Home is a lot of places," he finally replied. And he left it at that, because even he wasn't quite sure where home was now.

"I used to be like that. Still am, in a way, though ever since I became a Warden I've been a bit more tied down."

He looked over at her. "What's a Warden?"

"A keeper of the wilds. I protect the Ravenwood."

He scanned the skies for her eagle. How long would the bird be gone, and how would she convey the information to Rowan? He wished he knew the answers, but he also knew that he only had to wait for the eagle to return to have them.

In the meantime, he could learn more about the elf he was now with. "Is the Ravenwood a forest?" he questioned.