I talked to the animals for most of the night as I no longer felt tired or empty.

I had no real idea what it would be like to step back over the line into the camp, and I was hesitant to find out, but eventually, as the false dawn approached, I had to say goodbye to my new friends and return to my tent.

While I didn’t know what to think of the tent or Ethan’s reasons for wanting me to stay in the tent, I had a feeling it had a lot to do with my powers being blocked and him maintaining some measure of control over me. I also suspected, after a lot of back and forth conversation, that he was – as the squirrel so indelicately put it – not one of them. As in, not real.

Ethan being other than real hadn’t occurred to me, though I felt as though it should have. There was so much wrong with the way he presented himself, especially given that he wasn’t responsive to all of this, my hot body, my tits and ass. Basically, me.

I ducked back into my tent and sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. I wasn’t tired and for the first time I wasn’t hungry and I could feel the essence of myself and my powers sitting right there. Accessible and inaccessible at the same time.

When the sun was up and I could hear Ethan moving around, I stood up and left the tent. He seemed happy and engaged in cooking and not at all surprised to see me coming out of the tent without being called.

I sat down at the table and took the plate he offered me except instead of eating any of it I let it sit in front of me untouched, as well as the cup of coffee. It didn’t take Ethan long to see I wasn’t eating and even though he made a show of eating the food in front of him, I realized he wasn’t eating either. Nor had he eaten anything the day before or the evening before that. Ethan appeared not to need food and while I wasn’t about to show my hand, I was going to figure this whole thing out.

“We’re going back to the river today,” he said.

“Are you more prepared to talk to me about anything?” I asked.

“When we get to the river.”

“Why there?”

“Because that’s where I’ll be best able and prepared to talk to you about the castle, the river, what I can and cannot see. Who you are. All of that.”

To be honest, it felt like he was stalling me, again. But I didn’t really know what else to say and leaving my plate on the table I got up and went to my tent and retrieved the backpack Ethan had given me. Part of me wanted to leave it in the tent, but I needed to see out whatever game we were playing. Not that it was actually a game, other than figuring the other one out first.

When I stepped out of the tent, Ethan was looking at me in a strange way, kind of like he’d not really seen me before, but not in that way. It was a different kind of not having seen me before. Which was awkward and weird and a lot off-putting.

I wondered for a moment whether or not the skunks that were at the ad hoc gathering in the middle of the night had gotten any of their spray on me. Skunks are, by their very nature, stinky and trail the scent wherever they go. Then I remembered I couldn’t smell anything other than the food, not even Ethan, and because that was also true I decided not to worry about whether or not I smelled bad.

Ethan led off, clearly the routine, and I followed. We stopped for plants and mushrooms that were growing, but instead of sticking them in my backpack I let them fall back to the ground. If we followed the same paths as yesterday, we weren’t going to come by these plants again and to be clear I wasn’t even certain we were following the same path or paths we’d taken the day before.

Ethan seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing and I thought that was good enough since I could feel the pull of the castle and the river. If we’d diverted too much or started off in the wrong direction, I’d know what was going on. I did feel the tug and pull at my clothes from the shrubbery, which I now knew was one of the forest animals trying to get my attention. Now aware of that I tried to look and see them, but that part of the problem was yet to be fixed.

Whatever was going on, regardless of what I’d learned in the past day, which was a lot, I still wasn’t able to peer through whatever veil Ethan was putting over me. Or, for that matter, why he was putting any kind of a veil over me at all. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere. If any of what he said was true, and I suspected a lot of it was, then before I could leave the forest, or even before I would allow myself to leave the area at all, I needed to figure out what had happened and why it seemed abandoned.

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There was more to it than Ethan’s weird presence, even though I suspected he was part of my current predicament and problems.

I got weird when he turned in an entirely different direction, not away from the river per say but definitely along an almost perfect parallel path. Going along with Ethan was easier I started to begin formulating a plan to head toward the river or get away from him when he made another turn, almost like he was somehow aware of what I was thinking, and made a turn toward the river.

When we came out of the trees, we were definitely upstream, much closer to a rock cliff face than I expected. Ethan, apparently, had an agenda and today that agenda started closer to where the river came out from the mountains. Before I had time to react, he had some of his equipment out and was already doing whatever it was he did with his equipment.

This time, though, he also had a notebook and a pen out and was jotting down notes and numbers as he looked at the small device with different bits of information appearing on the screen. No, I didn’t know, at the time, what a screen was. I do now. And watching him suggested he was definitely looking for something and the numbers and other symbols were important.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a device that scans for different kinds of ambient radiation,” he said. “There’s supposed to be a certain level that is natural and normal and I’m looking to see if the radiation in this area is outside of what’s normal. If there is a deviation from standard then we can design a different experiment to determine why and what to do to test for other variables.”

“That was a lot of words,” I said.

He smiled.

Because he was occupied, I decided to do my own looking. Trace magic. If things were working the way they were supposed to work, I should be able to see the residue of old magic. What I wasn’t seeing, or feeling, was magic at all. In fact, the more I tried to focus on it, the more dead the area felt in terms of magic.

I now knew that there was magic and there was life. Except around Ethan. What I didn’t know was how to penetrate his influence, whatever that was, and to see my forest friends who I knew were around us. After some time, though, I decided to bide my time as I waited for Ethan to finish what he was doing and head downriver to the castle. He was clearly not in any hurry.

When I got bored, which takes longer than you might think, I said, “I’m going to follow the river to the castle.”

Which got a response.

“Not yet,” he said. “A few more minutes and we can go together.”

“Is there a reason I can’t go by myself?”

“No,” he said and now his attention was divided between the device in his hand, the notebook, and me. He definitely didn’t want me to head off on my own and he didn’t want to stop what he was doing. This was going to be an interesting day.

Especially since, the moment he focused more on what he was doing, I decided to head in the opposite direction, directly toward the castle. Since I wasn’t dependent on Ethan leading me places, whether or not he actually understood that, I walked away.

And I made it almost halfway to the castle before Ethan caught up to me.

“You can’t walk off like that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You could get hurt,” he said.

“No. I can’t,” I said. “There is literally nothing in this forest or this bowl among the mountains that can or will hurt me.”

“You don’t know that,” he said. “What about wild animals. Predators.”

“You told me this part of the world was absent of any of that,” I said. “And if there are no creatures that can hurt me, because they’re not here, then I have nothing to worry about.”

That seemed to stump him for a moment. “I may have been wrong,” he finally said. “I may have been trying to protect you and keep you safe.”

I didn’t believe him, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was to get him to contradict himself and to have to backtrack on previous statements and assertions. Since I’d seen a lot of the animals, to include a small clowder of bobcats, I knew there were plenty of dangerous animals just like I knew none of those animals had any ability to injure me or had any desire to try. They never did.

I kept walking at a fairly quick pace, not really giving Ethan time nor opportunity to get ahead of me. It felt like what he wanted was to take the lead, to make sure I followed a specific path. Now that I was gaining experience with him, I could almost see the paths he wanted me to take and I was mostly following them, but when it seemed as though I’d encountered a fork in the road and it was clear which way he wanted me to go, I took the path less desirable.

He’d start down the other path and then backtrack and follow me. There was a delay in what he was doing and it was every single time. I considered taking any path I could that would cause problems, I am, after all, a morally and ethically ambiguous being, but decided the tests I was conducting, now, were working in their own right and Ethan could just follow or go his own way.

We made it to the bank across from the castle and for a moment I thought I could see some smoke from fires on the other said, but that was lost almost as quickly as I noticed it.

Strangerer and strangerer.