The stairs were way worse going up, than they had been descending. Rusty didn't have a torch any more, so he couldn't see where he was going. He had to trust that his total recall would guide his steps. He took it slow, but it was still a heck of a lot of work. He was used to running around on flat Texan hardpan. Heck, even back home, he wasn't allowed to go upstairs that often. That was where the girls' rooms were, and Mom didn't figure he or his brothers had any business up there.

Rusty was tired down to his bones, and it was getting harder to think. But as he rose up the stairs, and his feet kept within the bounds of his memories, he realized that he could probably close his eyes and look at the words he'd missed back down on the edge of the pit.

An Adult Tarqual has died within your chakral radius!

Consuming chakra...

You have increased your chakra by 3.

Committed chakra: 6/42

Remaining free chakra: 21/42

“Yeah,” his familiar whispered. “Now I dig it.”

Rusty stopped. “Where did you go?”

“I never left,” his familiar said, peeking into the darkness of his closed eyes, its little silvery-gray head just visible to his side.

“So what do you dig?” Rusty asked. He liked the word. It meant “understand.” Cyrus had learned it in Korea, and taught it to him. Dad didn't like them using it for some reason, but Mom didn't care, and she was more important because she was around way more often than Dad.

“Well, I didn't know what chakra consumption meant, at first. The way the rune explained it, you could grow your chakra by getting it from creatures when they die. But I didn't know if you had to eat them, or if it just happened. Now there's this thing called a chakra radius involved. And I think... I think the more chakra we have, the bigger chakra radius we've got. I dunno how to test that, though.”

Rusty remembered, and his mind instantly snapped back to the ledge. He shuddered, as he remembered all the emotions and feelings he'd had at that moment, but it confirmed that he hadn't been looking down into the pit when the creature went “crunch”.

“Nuts,” his familiar said. “Well, if there's more of those things around, I'm sure we'll figure it out sooner or later. Or more Grach. Pretty sure we'll run into those again, since they're servants of that dark lord.”

“Terathon can teach us,” Rusty said, resuming his climb. His legs were getting heavier. He had to get up there soon, or he'd collapse where he was standing.

“Yeah, but we have to get to him first,” his familiar said. “That might be tricky.”

“We just have to head south until we come to Lasthold,” Rusty said, slowing down. A fresh breeze had just ruffled his hair. He was getting close to the top. “Shush a second,” he said. “Let me listen. I don't know if that dark wizard is still out there, waiting for us. Or maybe Terathon won?”

His familiar just looked at him, and shook his head. Rusty knew in his heart that it was a dumb question. If Terathon had won, surely he would have come down and found them. No, he'd either lost or been forced to flee. Or been captured. Like when Saruman had grabbed Gandalf and put him up in a high tower.

I'm getting distracted, he thought, and listened. The only thing he heard was the distant swamp, and that was pretty muffled.

“You could try assessing again,” his familiar said. “But I think your chakra radius ties into that somehow, so I dunno how far you'll be able to see. And whoa, hold on, the rune knowledge is telling me that when you do that, you get brighter. It makes US easier to see with assessment. So never mind, probably a bad idea.”

Rusty nodded. “What's your name?”

“I'm your familiar. I'm part of you. I don't really have a name.”

“I think you should have a name,” Rusty decided, listening to the distant song of insects, and the rattling of leaves in the trees.

“Why? I'm you.”

“I just think you do. It would make me feel like I'm not talking to myself.”

“Well you kinda are.”

“Yeah, but talking to yourself is pretty crazy. I don't want people thinking I flipped my lid.”

“If you just think to me instead of talking to me, people won't see you talking.”

“Yeah, but I want to talk to you. Because that makes me feel less like I'm... alone.”

His familiar patted his hand. And there was maybe something like a ghost of a touch on his fingers, when it did that. “Okay, Rusty. I dig it. So lay some names on me.”

“Flash.”

“Buck Rogers is cooler. He was first. Flash just copied him.”

“He did it better!”

“Maybe some things, but Ming was a really stupid villain.”

“He had hawk men!”

“Buck had a robot!”

“It was a stupid robot.”

“Yeah, but even a stupid robot's better than hawk men.”

Rusty grimaced. He remembered he hadn't liked how the hawk men had been drawn. There was something about them that creeped him out. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“You're welcome.” His familiar grinned, toothlessly.

“Okay, no Flash OR Buck. That jerk in fourth grade was Buck.”

“Oh yeah, that asshole!” his familiar stopped smiling. “He threw our binder off the bridge! Papers went everywhere. You should have pushed him off, after it.”

“What? No! Mom would have tanned our hide if we killed someone!” Rusty realized he was shouting, and slapped his hand over his mouth. But the seconds went by, and nothing broke the swamp noises coming from above. “Okay. I think we're clear to move up. We'll think of a name for you later.”

“I kind of like Conan.”

Rusty flashed to the runny picture of the mostly-naked guy that had been on the book. That guy had thews. His familiar? Not so much. “Yeah, you're no Conan.”

“Neither are you, mister thin,” his familiar hurried to keep up, as Rusty strode up the stairs. “Need to spend a lot more time doing push ups if you wanna plunder the jeweled thrones of the earth.”

“At this point I'd settle for plundering some more oatmeal,” Rusty muttered, emerging from the stairwell, and peering around into the starlit darkness.

There were no signs of a struggle. Maybe Terathon had lured the dark wizard off for a wizard battle? This was a good sign.

“Hey! We just got lucky!” his familiar said.

“What?”

“Look at the pot!”

“Oh!” Indeed, the small metal pot that Terathon had used for the meal was off to one side, sat there to dry and then presumably forgotten.

Rusty hurried up the steps and picked it up, hoping that maybe some small bit of porridge was still in there. But no, the wizard had been thorough.

It felt a little funny under his fingers. He traced the rim in the dim starlight, and found a rough patch along the side. The metal had been crosshatched by engraved lines. “Is this to strike a match?” he wondered.

His familiar shrugged. “I don't think Terathon needed matches to light a cookfire. I don't know if they have matches here. But I guess Terathon probably didn't make this pot, so maybe those elves he mentioned did it. Any way, it's one more tool than we had a minute ago.”

Rusty weighed it in his hands. Well, he was going to go and try to find Terathon later, so he didn't guess the wizard would mind him using it until he brought it back to him.

How can I use it without matches, though? I guess I could try to rub sticks together.

And instantly his mind filled with every diagram or advice from the battered “DESERT ISLAND SURVIVAL GUIDE!” that sat on the battered bookshelf at home. Then a few pages on the topic of fire building from the “PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR!” journal he'd found and read in the barn a few years ago. No idea why they'd had that one. It had been a long, long time since any Colfax who wasn't in the service could afford to be on a plane.

“Flint is easier,” Rusty said, slowly. “There's plenty of vines and bark and sticks out in the swamp to make a wood friction bow, but all that wood is going to be damp. So we might could find some flint or chert or rock that works like that if we look around this rocky spot.”

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“I think we need light for that,” his familiar said, squatting down next to him. “You woke up at night here. We can't use total recall to remember the place in the dark. And do you really want to wait until morning, here?”

Rusty shrugged. “I think a better question is do we really want to try to wander around in the swamp in the middle of the night? Especially once we get under those trees, that are going to block the starlight?”

“Oof. Yeah, I didn't even twig on that thought,” his familiar sighed, and put its legs criss-cross applesauce. “It's kind of frustrating only having part of a brain. It's like hey, could I at least have been the part that didn't feel screaming fear when giant snake monsters try to eat us? Would that have been too much to ask?”

“You're doing fine.” Rusty reached out and tried to pat its head. His hand went right through the little guy without touching anything, but his familiar giggled and made a show of squirming away like it tickled.

Rusty laughed. He couldn't help himself. Then he clapped his hand to his mouth, and looked around the dark ruin. Nothing moved. No sign that anything had heard him.

“That was a pretty big snake thing down there. I'm pretty sure there aren't any other predators around here, 'cause it would have chased them away.” Rusty said, more to reassure himself than anything else.

“So you're thinking we stay here tonight?” His familiar sighed. “At least it's kind of warm up here. Better than down below.”

“I don't want to have to climb all those stairs again,” Rusty said. “Let's find some place to hide. Maybe we can get some sleep while we're at it.”

Rusty was tired, but sleep evaded him. He did find a corner of the ruin where a wall had been hollowed out by rain and creeping vines, and wedged himself into a two-foot wide hole that led far back enough, that he was out of sight from the outside. The only thing he could see was the faint light from the opening, and when he closed his eyes, his familiar sitting next to him.

Hours passed, and he killed time talking things over with the little guy. And by the time morning came, they had a name for his familiar.

“Roz,” the little alien said, tilting his head. “Roz Well. Yeah, I like it!”

“Cool,” Rusty moved past Roz, and poked his head out of the hole in the wall. “Let's find some flint.”

The good news was that when he was seven, Rusty had gotten seriously bored and read a book called “GEOLOGY AND THEE!” So he knew roughly what he was looking for.

The bad news was that a lot of the rocks Rusty and Roz found around the ruins didn't match anything like what he'd seen in that book. They were on a completely different world. Of course the rocks were different!

But after about half an hour of gathering and testing samples, Rusty found something that was blackish with orange bands, that made sparks when he dragged it on the striking plate of the pot. Not huge sparks, but enough that he figured he could maybe start a fire. So he put the biggest shards of it he could find in the pot, and stood up.

Then the next problem occurred to him. “So... which way's south?”

Roz shrugged. “Well, the sun rises in the east... no. Wait. That's back home.”

“Yeah, we have no clue how it works here. But... Terathon was using a spell to talk to us, I remember. And he said south. The spell would have translated it. So that gives us something to work with.” Rusty frowned. “Do you think the spell he used to transport us here would have shifted which way we were facing? He was west of us when he took us to this world.”

“Yeah...” Roz frowned. Then opened his eyes wide. “Oh! Yeah, you can remember where the sun was when you popped in, here! And it had to be close to nightfall, because we didn't sleep for THAT long, otherwise we would have pooped!”

“Roz! Ew.”

“Well we would have. No way you would have held it for a whole day.”

“Yeah, but talking about it makes me remember pooping. Every detail. Gross.”

“Sorry, Russ.”

“It's okay. Uh... you don't poop, do you?”

Roz turned his head completely around, and stared at his butt. Rusty couldn't make out what he was looking at. Come to think of it, every time the familiar had shown up, it was facing him.

“No butt hole!” Roz announced, cheerfully. “Aw man, this probably means I can't eat anything. Nuts.”

“You probably taste what I taste,” Rusty told him, settling the pot under one arm. “Okay. Sun was... there when we arrived, and it's just morning now, so south is probably... that way!” he pointed out of the ruin, down to where the hill melded into the swamp.

It was pretty good reasoning, so they set out and hoped for the best.

The good news was that the swamp wasn't as watery here, nothing like when he'd originally arrived in Elythia. Once they descended from the high hill that the ruins sat upon, they were picking their way across streams and tiny ponds that separated hundreds of low hillocks that bristled with vegetation and wildlife.

With a little care, Rusty was able to keep his feet more or less dry. This was important, he remembered. Cyrus had told him over and over again that wet feet would kill you when you were out in the wilderness, and had a long way to hike. He had told Rusty about Fletcher, a man who hadn't changed his socks for weeks, after going on long patrol around a place called Pyongyang. When Fletcher had finally taken his socks off, chunks of his feet had fallen away.

Rusty wasn't sure if Cyrus was telling the truth on that one, or he was exaggerating it a little bit. He did that sometimes, Rusty was pretty sure. But hey, on the upside, Rusty didn't have socks to worry about.

It did make the day pretty chilly, though. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't Texas, and he was used to Texas. Rusty found himself shivering and with goosebumps after an hour of walking. And as he went, his belly got louder about being empty. The thirst was getting to him, too. The air was moist, which had helped him get through the night, but now that he was moving his body needed water.

So once he was out of sight of the ruins, Rusty headed for a hillock that had a few towering trees growing from it, and started looking for deadwood.

There wasn't much. And what was fallen, was infested with little bright green bugs. The first time Rusty picked one up it snapped and mush and bugs hit the ground.

Rusty decided it wouldn't make for a good fire.

“Well, what else can we use for fire?” Roz asked.

“Um..” he thought back to the PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR book. “In Mongolia they use dried horse poop.”

“I mean, you could go back to where you took a dump to see if it dried by now, but something tells me you're out of luck, there,” Roz mused.

“Yeah. No horses here that I've seen.” Rusty thought and looked around. All the grass up here was pretty wet. The trees were probably his best bet. “I can maybe try to use the lip of the pot to scrape some of the bark off. The inside's got to be drier than the outside, right?”

“Only one way to find out.”

The pot rim didn't find a grip on the bark until Rusty got annoyed and whacked the pot against the tree, and cracked it a little. The noise echoed through the swamp, and the nearby tall grass rustled as lizards, bugs, and one thing that looked like a many-legged rat on stilts ran for cover. Rusty watched it go, debated throwing the pot at it to try and get some meat, but decided against it. He had no way to cook and clean it.

Besides, the fire was a priority. He couldn't drink until he'd boiled water. That was paramount when you were drinking in the wild, every book agreed on that.

The inside of the tree was a little drier. And there were no green bugs in there, just the occasional long worm that tried to slither away from him. He caught one, held it up to the light. They were translucent purple, and he could see their guts working, see their organs through their flesh. He thought about cooking and eating one, but even though it was empty, his stomach rolled, queasy. “I'll save that idea for later, if it gets bad,” he told Roz.

“I mean... meat is meat, at a certain point, you know?” Roz pointed out. “It's probably safer than trying to eat local veggies.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The fact that it didn't poison you when you picked it up.”

Rusty dropped the worm, and it instantly started double-timing it back to the tree. And after wiping his hand thoroughly on the dirt, Rusty went and built a small pile of bark, put the pot on it, took the sparking rocks out, and scraped them until he eventually managed to get a small fire going.

“Don't you need water?” Roz reminded him.

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, that would be smart.” He picked up the pot, went and scooped the nearest stream, then concentrated on building the fire up.

He barely had enough bark to get coals, but once he did, the water boiled easily enough. “No cups. I'll have to drink from my hands,” he said, reaching out to the pot.

“Hey!”

“What?”

“Are you about to stick your hands in boiling water?” Roz asked. “Because there's easier ways to die, you know.”

“It wouldn't kill me,” Rusty argued, then frowned. He HAD been about to stick his hands in boiling water. What the hell was wrong with him?

“I think the Rune might have put a strain on your body when it healed you,” Roz said. “That's what it seems to say. You're probably going to need some time to recover. Gonna be slower and dumber until you do.”

Rusty tore out a couple of handfuls of damp grass, and shifted the pot off the fire to cool. “So you can talk to the rune?”

“Not... quite. You remember the instruction sheet for grandpa's wireless set?”

“Oh yeah, the crystal radio!” Rusty's face brightened. That old, battered kit had been fun to play with, until one of his brothers had found it and wrecked it out of spite. He never DID find out who'd done that little bit of stupidity.

“Yeah, it's sort of like the instruction sheet for the wireless. Only it's in a completely different language, so it made me to help translate it. And it's not like reading, I just have to kind of think hard at it in a special way and I realize that I already know certain things. Does that make sense?”

“No, not really,” Rusty hovered his hand over the pot, as the bubbles slowed. Still too hot. “I guess we can ask Terathon about this when we get back to him.”

“Yeah, he'd probably know,” Roz said, sitting down next to the smoldering coals. “I wonder what kind of familiar he's got? Wow, I wonder if you get another one every time you get another rune?”

“The instruction book doesn't say?”

“Not really. I kind of either know stuff or I don't.”

Rusty smiled. “I'm glad you're here. You're a big help, Roz. You're pretty swell.”

“Thanks!” Roz tried a smile. It made his noseless, toothless face go funny, and Rusty laughed to see it. And for a few minutes, it wasn't so bad on this strange, new world. The grass blew through the trees and vines, and sent the smoke from the fire skirling up and around and through the canopy. The sun shown down, the fire warmed him, and the water, after it had cooled, was the best he'd ever tasted.

And all of that calming relaxation vanished in a heartbeat, as Grach voices echoed through the swamp. Instantly, Rusty peered east, and saw the distant rustle of grass on the next hillock over. He felt the fear rise in his gut, and remembered with the arrow that had skewered his arm, and nearly killed him. And without thinking, without hesitating, he hit the dirt and started crawling through the tall grass, worming along on his elbows and knees, and praying that they wouldn't see him go.

“It must have been the smoke!” Roz shouted, running alongside him. “Shoot, I didn't even think of that!”

“Can we make them forget?” Rusty blurted out.

“Um... maybe,” Roz said. “You got back a few chakra overnight, and when you drank water, but making one animal forget you cost a lot. This is probably at least a few of them. I don't know...”

Rusty swallowed hard and kept moving.

The voices drew closer behind him, and yeah, there were at least a few. Three or five or so, chattering and clicking low, and one of them rumbling whenever they stopped moving. They seemed to be moving cautiously, taking their time.

On the upside, the hillock curved as Rusty went, descending to a small forest of reeds that grew out of the mud below a lazy stream. There was another hillock beyond, he saw. The grass was thick, maybe if he crossed over and made his way around the lower part, then snuck upward—

Rusty didn't get the chance to try it.

A sudden rustling right in front of him, and he stifled a shriek, and looked down to see a two legged lizard the size of a boa constrictor rear up, and stare at him from about three inches away.

Oh no that's a nest, Rusty realized, as he took in the bed of plant matter it was rising out of. And those are eggs... oh no.

The thing stared at him with two eyes wiggling on the end of stalks. Its beak clicked and clacked.

The wind stopped. There was no sound, save for the thing's mutterings. And Rusty watched in horror, as the thing's tail reared up, and up, scorpion like. There wasn't a stinger on the end of it, but it didn't look friendly.

Spell! I can use a spell on this! Rusty realized. He screwed his eyes shut, and started to visualize the letters again...

“RAAAAA TCHK TCHK TCHK TCHK TCHK!”

The thing had lungs all out of proportion to its body.

BLAP! BLAP! BLAP! That wasn't its lungs. That was the sound of solid hitting liquid. Repeatedly. Loudly.

Rusty startled back and screamed, as he opened his eyes to see the thing flailing its tail rhythmically into the mud, sending geysers of it a dozen feet into the air, as it screamed its warning.

“That's done it!” Roz shrieked. “Run, Rusty, run!”

Rusty ran.