The first task Oksar gave me was to reorganize the campsite. I thought he was kidding, but that was genuinely what he wanted. Because I was human, he figured I’d know how make it more comfortable and efficient. He’d been there for eight days and planned to stay another five or six--maybe more, now that I’d joined him.

“Just move things around so it works better for the two of us,” he told me.

“‘Just move things around,’” I repeated, giving him a sour look.

“Exactly!” he said, then vanished into the trees to check his traps.

Big blue bonehead. I wasn’t sure how to start, so I just sat there for a while. Then I shifted a couple logs around to act as benches. That made sense, right? More seating. Then I fiddled with a corner of the tent roof--well, an overlayer attached to a branch, a waterproof drape of fabric above the tent itself. I angled it into a barrel to catch any rain runoff, which was maybe stupid considering the stream nearby, but hey, I liked laziness. Also, I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, I cleared a little space in front of the tent to make entering easier. Oksar only had the one tent, but it was big enough for both of us, especially after I arranged a corner for myself.

I took as little space as possible, of course, given I was mooching off him.

I rearranged the food-prep area nearer to the stream then ran out of ideas. I mean, what did I know about campsites? I’d only gone camping a dozen times in my life, and most of those were at campsites with picnic benches or beach access. Still, I was a semi-professional groundskeeper. So I fiddled around with this and that, then took a nap and then fiddled a little more. I didn’t do anything special, but fortunately the campsite had been pretty messy and poorly laid out, so I at least made it less bad.

When Oksar returned, appearing silently at the edge fo the campsite, he laughed. “Humans.”

“What?”

“Look at this!” He gestured with one blue hand. “A campsite fit for a prince!”

I snorted. “I didn’t do much.”

“You only think that because you’re human. It’s like an ollie saying a tree stump doesn’t weigh much because they’re so strong. It just comes naturally to you.”

“I guess.” I looked at his empty hands. “So no luck with the traps?”

“Got a nice squirrel boar for dinner.” He tapped the strap of his backpack. “Nothing in the traps, though. I only catch valuable prey once or twice a week. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

We chatted about Earth as we sharpened tools and mended clothing. I told him about important cultural touchstones such as Starbucks and edible gummies, and he told me a little about himself.

“When I was a young man, I enjoyed taking risks,” he said. “And my wife and I, we had kids young. So I was young, they were young, I wanted nothing more in life than to provide for them. Our island connected with this one, with this pristine forest full of opportunity--full of riches. Bridges almost never form for less than a few weeks, so I crossed over and spent ten days culling and gathering, dreaming of the house I’d build for my family. Of the life I’d build with them.”

“How long did the bridge last?” I asked, when he trailed off.

“Eleven days,” he said. “It was still there when I returned to the coast, but it wasn’t whole anymore. The middle was underwater. I tried to swim ...” He gazed into the forest shadows. “One day I’ll find my way home.”

“Yeah you will,” I said.

He smiled at me, a little sadly.

“How will you know when another bridge forms?” I asked.

“I used to stop in Ryetown or the Port fairly regularly,” he told me. “And when another island reaches the shallows, people usually blow horns to spread the news. Though now, with all the bloodshed, with Six Coves militias rounding people up, I’m keeping to myself.”

I wanted to ask about those militias, but he sounded so forlorn that I just said, “You’ll find your way home, Oksar. I don’t know how often islands touch, I don’t know anything about this crazy world, but I know that one day, you’ll find your way home. What, uh, what’re you kids names?”

He told me about his family, his voice growing softer and his eyes fonder. We didn’t do much else until that afternoon, when I watched him skin and gut and roast the squirrel boar, which to my surprise didn’t look piggy at all. It was just a big-ass hairless squirrel. Tasted like pork, though. Yum. And I found eating a mammal far less disturbing than digging around in spider guts. I decided to learn how to skin and butcher food animals. Apparently humans were excellent at that sort of thing--and at cooking, too.

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Oksar seemed pretty good at both, but he told me he’d been practicing for ten years, and had some human ancestry, too.

“You do?” I asked.

“Most infenti do. We’re good at interbreeding, that’s like our ... what did you call it? Superduper?”

“Superpower.”

“Right! At this point, we’ve all got some human in us, some ollie, some everything. Except maybe strider, but ... “ He grinned and shrugged. “Back in the day, pure-bred infentis would screw anything, so who knows? They weren’t infenti like we think of infenti. They were daevonci, but--“

“DaVinci?” I said. “Like Leonardo?”

“Daevonci,” he repeated. “An ancient, arrogant, ‘pureblooded’ race. There’s only a few of them still around. They live for hundreds of years. They’re powerfully magical, but couldn’t breed true, so they mixed with the other races to form the infants--the infenti.”

“Oh,” I said. “Huh.”

As he described the situation, it sounded to me like the daevonci were pretty much elves. They could live for five hundred years, they were made of magic. They were almost entirely unable to reproduce among themselves, so they were the cause for all the ... I didn’t know the right word? ‘Hybridization?’ For the uniformly bipedal appearance of all the common sapient species save striders. Apparently even people who looked like ‘purebreds’ probably had bit of a mixed parentage, if you went back far enough.

I kept asking questions, mostly trying to keep his mind off his family, and he kept answering them, probably for the same reason. Well, plus I also needed to learn about this world. And ... we just sort of ‘clicked.’ You know when you meet someone, and it’s immediately like you’re old friends? That’s what it felt like with Oksar.

That evening, I followed him in a wide circle around the campsite while he trickled mana into his black bead to establish the ward. I didn’t feel anything, though. He said that because I was inside the ward while he drew the perimeter, it would accept my presence.

After we returned to the fire, I said, “So the daevonci are powerfully magical, right?”

“According to the stories.”

“Are there, like ... wizards or enchanters or archmages?”

“You’ve heard of those? I thought there was no magic in the Mericas.”

I almost explained that ‘America’ was one place, not one of the many Mericas, but his confusion amused me, so I didn’t. I just said, “There’s plenty of fictional magic. I’ll tell you about Merlin and Gandalf later.”

“I like a good campfire story. Okay, so everyone has mana inside them, right? Me, you, a squirrel boar. Most of us can use our mana like we use our breath. We can blow out a candle, or make kindling burn hotter. Maybe even use our breath for glassblowing. We can empower a black bead. But if we bond with a gem--like you did--then we can shape our mana to do impossible things. Powerful, magical things.”

“Ah.”

“Smoke. That’s really all it’s called, just ‘smoke?’”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Well, some of the gemmed, depending on their power, are labeled ‘mages.’ Bead-carvers are sometimes called ‘enchanters,’ even though they’re usually not gemmed or anything.”

“And archmages?” I asked.

“They’re different.”

My heart squeezed. “Oh?”

“According to what I heard, they develop so much mana, or so much control of their mana, that they don’t even need gems. Or at least, they can do even more than a gem allows. More than what people who’ve bonded to two or three gems can do. They’re almost as powerful as a plague.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“Well, not really, but they still sound like scary fuckers. One myth says they’re the ones who shattered one continent into all the islands, that archmages caused the Sundering. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear much about them. If one showed up, people might not welcome them with open arms.”

“Ha,” I said. “Yeah, I guess not.”

So much for mentioning that--at least anytime soon.

We sipped warmed spice-wine while I told an incredibly mangled ‘story of Gandalf,’ then we went to sleep. The next day, I followed Oksar on his rounds. I watched as he checked traps and inspected spoor and game trails. He spent a lot of time staring at the canopy, listening to birdsong, and foraging for mushrooms and edible ferns.

I followed him around like a newborn duckling who’d imprinted on a blue demon. I tried to help. I carried most of the weight, I chopped wood, I told stories. And I’ll say this: you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a blue-skinned demon-ranger giggle madly at a badly-retold version of Star Wars. I kept telling him it wasn’t a comedy, goddamit, but he wouldn’t stop laughing. So I laughed, too.

I also slept a lot.

Like, more than was healthy. Except being summoned across dimensions must’ve caused psychic damage. I didn’t mean like, ‘Psychic Health 12/50’ type damage, just the regular, boring emotional kind of damage. The stress of being torn from everything familiar. From family and friends. And the stress of finding yourself thrown into a strange, dangerous world with strange, dangerous powers.

After a couple of days, though, I started to feel like myself again. At least, like a new version of my self. One who slept in a tent and didn’t mind gutting a deer.

We rarely talked about anything important. I was pretty sure that Oksar was avoiding heavy subjects on purpose, to give me time to be quiet and unbothered--and to recover. He was younger than I’d first thought, but had a sort of ‘dad’ energy that was exactly what I needed. He was a combination of nurturing and gruff, kind and goofy: he kept changing into my Earth clothes after dinner, just because he enjoyed lounging around in sneakers and a Milbert T-shirt.

Or maybe he even had a bit of ‘mom’ energy--if you’ll forgive the traditional gender roles. Because after dinner, we’d sit facing the fire with needles and thread, sewing rips in our clothes and patching our gear.

“I can’t believe how fast you catch on,” he grumbled. “Humans.”

I tugged on my thread. “I’ve sewn before.”

“Like twice, you said. I’ve been doing this for five years.”

“Man, if I can figure how sewing machines work, we’re going to be so rich.”

“Sewing machines? I suppose they’re like selfmobiles, but for sewing?”

“Automobiles,” I corrected. “Not ‘self.’”

“Do you all ride around on big machines that hem your trousers?” he asked, laughter in his voice. “Or are sewing machines more like those pocket-sized speaking-machines that also take moving pictures and crush candies? With the tinder that has nothing to do with fire or--“

A roar interrupted him, so loud that I felt the sound in my body.