Not even a full hour had passed for my soup to settle before Boss Strise had loudly proclaimed it was time for the camp’s tear down to begin. The troupe then sprung to life.

  Tents fell flat and were loaded into packs with bedrolls strapped underneath. Half of the brutes helped Everrnak’s apprentices load trunk after trunk of puppets into the older of our caravan’s uncovered wagons. It took the lot of them acting as pallbearers to heave the Puppet Master’s large casket of a personal trunk up and onto the pile.

  I watched Charlie and Reginald haul Marguerite’s heavy cauldron toward the back of the rapidly filling wagon. Together with Icarus, we set about dismantling the mess tent once they were both cleared from its entrance.

  Despite not being altogether that old for a human the troupe’s accountant had faded brown hair that was steadily receding away from his forehead. He blamed it on the stresses of managing our leader’s outrageous whims while raising a family on the road. More likely it was due to how often he’d be secretly burning his candle from both ends while working on some personal project he was adamant to keep hidden, all while everybody else was settled in for sleeping.

  He yawned and let go of the pole he’d been pulling from a corner of tent fabric to rub at his eyes. They were grey and often looked lifeless if you caught a glance at them without him noticing. When he knew someone was looking he did his best to flash them full of enthusiasm, but he couldn’t hide the bloodshot exhaustion taking root around each dark iris.

  We worked together in silence, which seemed to suit us both nicely. Everywhere else the camp fell to pieces and into the hands of chattering groups and pairs, except of course for the bird masked puppet players. Without a puppet to speak from we all knew they saved their hushed bird calls for when they thought nobody should be listening.

  A long, flat and round serpent skull bathed in red flames causally drifted toward where Icarus and I were standing to fold together a large sheet of the mess tent’s canvas. It hovered over the middle of where we’d meet as we took several steps toward each other to reduce the big canvas square down into a rectangle.

  Most of this skull’s fangs were missing on the right side and the surrounding jaw bones had multiple fractures. Each line smashed into the skull from the killing strike, then painstakingly fused back together with melted down copper wholes by an apprentice puppet master.

  As with each of the other grisly grinning spectres we used to light up our nights, a small fragment of the monster’s soul remained trapped within the mana gem at the puppet’s core. Their light took the form of fire thanks to the fury each skull felt for what is was that they had become.

“You know,” said Icarus with a tired voice that snapped me back to attention, “I really do hate those miserable things.”

He was looking up at the serpent skull and scowling.

“I know what you mean,” I replied while following his gaze, “You know about my mana, right? How it makes me fairly aware of the emotions in my surroundings? Well I can tell you for certain that when they’re active the only thing flickering inside of those cursed skulls is hatred toward all of us.”

Icarus sighed and turned his gaze back down to me.

“I’ve tried so many times,” he said, “To convince Strise to add torches to our regular supply orders. There’s plenty of room in the budget for something so common and affordable. But-”

“But the man would stop for every last dirty iron bit he spotted on the road if only he could see them?” I finished for him.

“Well,” he said while trying not to look too amused, “That’s not exactly how I’d have put it, but yes.”

We both shared a light chuckle, our first of those together, and finished up with our folding. The serpent skull was slowly carried on and away to another site with more work still left to be done. It drifted along by the guidance of a spectral hand.

  After everything had been packed, covered and tied down we all made for the carts. That was when I first noticed that Fastrada had seemed to have taken Persephone and Morte under her wing.

  They stood together with Fastrada and Icarus’ daughters near the back of the covered wagon, where the mother was nursing her young son and chatting pleasantly with Persephone. I noticed Morte standing back behind his sister and looking down at his boots. The younger of the seamstress and accountant’s daughters was standing behind her mother doing much the same as the new boy. I supposed they did look to be roughly the same in age. The elder daughter, with green hair from her mother and grey eyes from her father, was caught turning her head side to side from between both talking women. She seemed desperate to follow the conversation.

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  It definitely looked like I wasn’t the only person developing an interest in the new pair.

  The group of them waited for Icarus and the sparrow to help Marguerite up out of the dirt and into a seat. The whole while the old soup witch cursed the men out for not being gentle enough with her delicate frame. I noticed that Mirrin and Shay had opted for Charlie’s cart instead after seeing the line waiting on the soup witch to be settled.

  I had my pick of seats between the one my seniority earned me in the covered wagon and a space offered up to me in Charlie’s new cart. When I thought of sitting in the back of the covered wagon with Persephone I wanted to jump at the opportunity. But then I considered the impossibility of trying to talk with her in a spot where all of the other passengers would be much too eager to listen in.

  On the other hand, sitting in the back of an uncovered wagon with a pair of bickering musicians and the merry crew of the brute squad didn’t exactly sound appealing. Things had changed drastically somehow, and all in the span of an evening.

  With how my troupe mates were seeing me now I could feel how eager most of them were to have a chance to talk with me. And I just wasn’t ready to commit myself to so much conversation so suddenly. And definitely not after some of the things I’d told Garris during breakfast.

  If I talked too much without thinking then eventually I’d end up letting something slip loose to hint at my real age or true nature. Keeping away from long conversations about myself would likely be a necessary choice for some time to come. At least until I could figure out how to talk about my past like any ordinary human would. That meant mentally having to compress the well over eight hundred years I had already spent living. Condensing it down to a believable series of events for a twenty-something year old human to have had. Then again, perhaps calling myself a young looking thirty-something year old would actually be better?

  As our caravan began the bumpy journey through the muck of a farmer’s barren field I found myself sitting silently, next to the sparrow. We were perched together at the head of the middle cart where he worked the reigns. The one filled with puppets, assorted camping supplies, tools and a slumbering ancient thing which was being pulled along by the black scaled prairie strider. The flaming serpent skull bounced around above her, bathing her in red light.

  From her snout to the tip of her tail, the flightless dragon was nearly as long as the wagon she pulled. Her body was flat and long with a neck she could crane up high to pick fruit from trees or dig down into creature dens and burrows with. Her scales were black as the night sky and she had two pairs of bloody red orbs for eyes dotting each side of her head. The ridged crest of of her skull was topped by an impressive crown of spiked horns.

  Like with all prairie striders living within the Wooded Realm, Princess had been smuggled across the borderlands as an unhatched egg. As I’d heard it, her specific species of dragon all hailed from a single province in the southern reaches of the Empire of Saga. A land of endless fields where flight hadn’t been necessary to their evolution.

  The woman, Patrina, who had smuggled her across the border had been just one of countless refugees to escape into our land. Desperate people fleeing from the empire’s tyranny and into the Wooded Realm in a near constant trickle over the past thousand years. She had braved countless trials, all in hopes of finding a better life here within the trees. Her only real possession had been the large dark egg she had kept tucked safe inside her pack. Patrina had been a member of the troupe for nearly twenty years before we’d lost her. And to me she had been much more than just a companion.

  The bond we had shared before an illness took her from Princess and I was likely the only glue still binding the prairie strider to the troupe since Patrina’s passing. After all we had been alone in my tent, Patrina and I, when the egg had finally started to hatch. The baby strider had imprinted on us both in that moment, first on Patrina and then me, as she flopped out from her shell’s crumbled remains and happily wriggled all over us. The troupe became her surrogate family but her only real loyalty still remaining was to me.

  I felt a deep sadness knowing that she would likely never leave the troupe unless I were able to go with her. And that meant that Patrina’s precious Princess would never get to live a better kind of life than the one she had always known. Forced into servitude by Boss Strise.

“Sorry, Patrina,” I breathed out for no one to hear, “We always used to talk about packing our things and disappearing with our girl into the setting of the wakeful moon. Just like in those romance novels you used to love reading to me...”

I could only think back on my time with her with a sort of melancholic fondness. Just the same as any other time my mind saw fit to bring up old memories of my lost lovers.

  Possessing an immortal soul had lead to a very long list of hearts mine yearned to be near, despite the impossible distance keeping us forever apart. Did I really want to add Persephone to that list as well? Thinking about it made my heart feel hollow.

  Princess snapped her head up to eat several of the glowing night flies that had gathered around under the flaming skull. She snorted contentedly as she chewed, lines of glowing drool spilling out from around her fangs on each bite. At least my lost love’s darling dragon seemed fairly content with her lot in life. The sparrow stared blankly ahead through his unpainted and poorly carved mask as he guided her along.

  I leaned back and stretched. Something telling me that this night was going to be exceptionally long.

  The lead wagon stopped bouncing forward and started to roll more smoothly. I could see its horse as he clopped eastward, pulling his wagon onto the road with relative ease. Princess followed suit, taking great strides through the low brush at the edge of the field. And then her claws were sinking into the dirt of the road and we were on our way.

  Bound for the quaint little town of Barken.

  I looked down to the south at old Fellorne. Torch light flickered high up in the watchtowers trimming the walls. Boss Strise would be having us make a stop at the mill to collect our ill-gotten flour and then after that I wouldn’t see this city again for some time. Because of our troupe’s curse we would all be forgotten just as soon as we’d traveled a certain distance away. Save for that scattered handful of Boss’s acquaintances who were tattooed with his seal.

  Before the next moon, all that anyone would remember of us would be the vague memory of seeing a nice puppet show in the capitol. And likely that would get buried under the confusion of having lost something precious and valuable without noticing somehow during the previous day.