The fire crackled and spat merrily, sparks flying up and into the night air.

Elrik sat huddled by the campfire, as unobtrusively as he could manage, trying not to look around. His sorry excuse for a spear lay by his feet. They’d invited him in and he’d walked over to the campfire.

There wasn’t much else he could do. He was hardly going to squeeze back into the cave he came from. They tried to talk to him, the members of this little band, but all he could do was to gesture dumbly.

The Band. That’s what Elrik called them in his head. The people who sat here around him resting by the campfire. As for what they called themselves.. well.. that was harder to figure out.

They spoke a language unlike any Elrik had ever heard. Elrik was fluent in English, Hindi and Deutsche - but what they spoke was nothing close to any tongue he knew. He couldn't catch even the hint of a single word he understood. What could Elrik even say, even if he somehow spoke the language? He hardly had any idea how he’d ended up here, in this place.

So, he sat there, dumb, trying to follow along..

While they discussed what to do with this strange, injured mute that had wandered into their camp.

The large bearlike man the others called ‘Agrisu’. He was loud and boisterous, inviting Elrik to sit at their campfire with almost unnerving cheer.

“Senu!”, Agrisu roared now,

“Anei! Anei! Yesu baagratilu ra!”, he gestured to Elrik and shrugged - making a ‘what-can-you-do’ face, “Shilu maan di na?”

“Hehehe!”

Senu chuckled quietly.

Senu was a silent giant. He was twice as large as Agrisu (who was a large man), and quiet as a ghost when he wanted to be. He’d emerged from the dark, behind Elrik, without a sound or a footfall. He just sat and watched the fire. He was also about as talkative as a ghost. Senu hadn’t spoken a word since Agrisu had jovially sat Elrik down.

“Tch”, the third man spat, “Seriik chupp!”

Elrik thought his name was Sakka.

Either that, or ‘sakka’ was just the curse word they called him. He was a narrow little rat of a man with a face made to suck lemons. He had nervous eyes that never seemed to stay still. His eyes went to Elrik, to Agrisu and then the dark around them.

He fidgeted with the lithe looking spear that never left his hands.

“Maan di na”, Sakka threw up his arms in disgust and walked away.

They all wore rough mismatched clothing, a patchwork of tunics and leathers. They looked run down, with overgrown stubble and dirt spattered armor. As if they’d been on the road for some time. Not that Elrik was one to judge - looking as he did.

They carried weapons with a casual ease. The giant - Senu - wore a pair of deadly looking short-axes on his hip. Agrisu had a massive bastard sword that lay by his feet. The last man in this little band wasn’t a man. It was a woman.She swept across the little camp, with her shoulders up, furious.

“Sarasa! Shiru visa sanikula essu! Essu!”

She glared daggers at Agrisu and spat out some rather unkind words, judging by her tone. She barely glanced at Elrik, but gestured at him offhandedly as she continued to argue with Agrisu in a low angry tone. She wore black leather armor. At least to Elrik’s eyes it looked strong, well kept.

The large bear of a man didn’t lose his temper though. He simply held up his hands in surrender.

“Yena Yeli.. Essa fufufu ena ya?”, Agrisu’s tone was quiet and reasonable when he spoke. Their voices died down, till the two were arguing in whispers for several minutes.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Faa..” she gave up in the end.

She walked over to Elrik, grabbing a spear that lay against a rock, and shoved it into his arms. “Essa fue wa?”

She looked in his eyes for a long minute before shaking her head and walking away.

“Haha!’ Agrisu guffawed, his seriousness evaporating as suddenly as it materialized. He slapped Elrik on the back hard enough to almost bowl him over.

“Ennue na?”, He grinned conspiratorially at Elrik and winked.

…

The woods were endless, dark and deep.

Any way he looked, they stretched out for miles, and all Elrik could see were the tall pine-like cosi trees. Ramrod stright and sharp, the trees rose straight up into the sky - almost comically tall - taller than even than any redwood Elrik had ever seen. Their leaves were needle-sharp but soft, a dark rich green, and littered the ground. Every footfall was muffled quiet, by the carpet-like cover underfoot, almost hushed.

Overhead, if he looked straight up, Elrik could see the distant blue sky. The view was hemmed by the endlessly tall cosi trees, almost as if he were looking up from the bottom of a deep well. Somewhere, up there, it was perhaps a bright, hot, sunny day under blue skies. Down here, there was just the cool, dank forest that went on forever.

The band had been making its way through the woods for three weeks, with Elrik in tow. They were steadily but cautiously making their way through the forest, and through to the other side of the valley. From what Elrik could make out, this valley was hemmed on two sides by two arms of a mighty mountain range - the Gula peaks. This forest flowed through the valley and spilled out far into the north west for hundreds of miles. Along the south it was hemmed by a river - the Yitka. As far as Elrik could make out, they were steadily making their way to that river now.

“Look at this errittu Kassi” the woman, Yena, sighed under her breath behind Elrik.

Elrik had understood some of what she'd said there, though he tried not to let it show on his face.

He'd started to pick up the language, after the first week. What at first seemed an utterly alien tongue, started to sound more familiar in his ear as his brain started to make sense of the language. At first it was a word here and there - then names of things like the cosi trees or pieces of geography. Soon he heard and understood nearly everything they said, somehow picking up on meanings for words he heard just once.

That was Elrik’s first inkling that there was something strange happening with him. It had been three weeks since he’d first walked into their campfire - and now he’d started to understand the language almost perfectly.

This was decidedly not normal.

If you were a linguistic genius (which he wasn’t) you could learn a language in three months. Three weeks to learn a language you’d never heard before? From context? That wasn’t human.

His brain was moving too fast - remembering phrases from half-heard conversations - interpreting context - intuiting meanings where it shouldn’t be able to. All of it without any effort on his part - just meanings dropping into his head as if he’d been learning the language for years. The others hadn’t seemed to notice yet - that he understood them.

Even with his fragile grasp of the language, Elrik didn't really yet understand what these people were doing here, in this forest - or why they'd let him tag along with them.

Perhaps they still thought he was something of simpleton with a head injury. Elrik was content to keep it that way for now.

Elrik tightened the grip on his new spear and soldiered on.

Elrik had picked up on a few other things as he traveled with the band. The bear-like Agrisu seemed like the leader of the little group. Senu the quiet giant and Sakka the sour spearman shared the easy comfort of veterans under his command. The woman was called Yena - and Elrik hadn't quite figured her out yet.

Agrisu seemed content to just have Elrik tag along with their merry gang. Elrik wasn't quite sure why. He wasn't going to question it. After that first night, the others seemed to have gotten over their objections. Elrik had started to notice that about this group - they didn’t seem to mince words when they disagreed - but once they decided on a thing - it didn’t get brought up again.

"Tch, Serruppa! Watch for my face kassi!", Sakka grabbed the butt of Elrik's spear, that had almost poked him, and roughly shoved it aside.

Elrik lowered his head in apology and let Sakka walk ahead.

Now that he was thinking about it, back then, in that moment in the caves - when he’d first run into the wolves the first time - that was strange too. There was a strange disconnect in his mind. One moment, he’d been standing there, shitting his pants - the next he’d known what to do.

Even now, as he walked through - looking around at the trees and the forest floor - if he actually let the background thoughts through - they flooded in.

[Coniferous trees, such as pine and fir, are common in the Taiga. Coniferous trees have needles instead of broad leaves to protect them from the weight of the falling sow. The taiga is a forest of the cold, subarctic region…]

His gaze wandered over some animal scat lying by the natural trail they were following.

[For most large predators, it is not uncommon to find fur or bones in its feces. The whitish residue in the feces contains calcium and serves as a sign of the animal’s well-being.]

What on earth was going on with his brain?

[Burrs missing from the foxtail weed by the side of the path. Bent grass. Depression in the earth. The trail shows signs of being recently tread.]

Wait.

[Signs of stealthy human movement. Recent. Likely ambush. Caution: ambush ahead!]

Wait. What?