Pleasant Valley was a patch of overgrown forest nestled within the heart of the Stone Cap Mountains. Surrounded on all sides by giant, imposing walls of solid rock, the scattered cottages and hovels that made up the remote village of Pleasant Valley were built upon lies. Brittle tottered beneath the scraggily black and gray trees, kicking at dirt clods as he considered what drove its founders to such a misleading name. Sunless Crater, Suffocating Woodland, Sparse Comforts – all would have been more fitting than a bold-faced fib!
There was nothing pleasant about the valley. Even the trees looked miserable. They were tall, scraggly toothpicks covered in shaggy blankets of prickly needles. Sticky sap dripped from their gnarled boughs onto the unsuspecting heads of anyone foolish enough to pass beneath them. Thrice now it had happened to Brittle. His bark still seethed at how, after hours of useless scrubbing in a nearby brook, he’d returned home defeated, coated from toe to antlers in sticky sap and dry pine needles. He could still hear Edvin’s howls of laughter and how he’d called Brittle a porcu-pine for days afterwards.
“Awful, nasty place,” Brittle muttered under his breath with a shudder.
Not like the swamp. Oh how he missed the swamp. The brooks and ponds in Pleasant Valley were pitiful in comparison, barely deep enough to saturate his brittle bark and return it to its mossy glow. The cold dry air made his bark itch something fierce and the mud was a step above watery sludge on a good day. The worst of the worst, however, was the sheer boredom. There were only so many times one could admire the same drab trees before their brain rotted from their head in protest.
With a sigh, Brittle traveled deeper into the forest. He wasn’t sure where he was going or what he was looking for, but he was semi-certain he’d know it when he saw it. It wasn’t until a streak of red-brown fur caught his attention that Brittle realized what his aimless wanderings were missing.
“Hello, friend!” he called to the squirrel.
The squirrel skittered from branch to branch high overhead, too preoccupied with squirrel things to pay him any mind.
“Are you hungry?” Brittle dug into his pocket and retrieved a crust of bread, lifting it aloft in the center of his wooden palm. “It’s no toast and loam sandwich, but it’ll do.”
By some miracle, the critter noticed him. It tilted its head, nose testing the air as it assessed the danger of accepting scraps from bog log beast strangers.
“Would you like to be my best friend? We could go on grand adventures and you could say witty things to me.” Brittle’s hopes swelled within his hollow chest when the squirrel climbed lower. “You can be the smart one if you want. I don’t mind. So long as I’m not alone anymore.”
The squirrel was within arm’s reach now. Brittle slowly moved his hand in its direction, breath drawn as the wee critter twitched its bushy tail at him.
“I think I’ll call you Chippy.”
The squirrel chittered back at him, edging noticeably closer.
Odd. Brittle couldn’t decipher what the small woodland rodent was saying. It hadn’t been this difficult with Gilly. Even without words, she’d made it rather easy to understand her. Maybe the name was wrong. “Treacle?” Brittle offered, wracking his empty head for names befitting a squirrel best friend. “Beetle Bark? Baldwin the Conqueror?”
Quick as a flash, the squirrel plucked the crust from his hand and dashed back up the tree without so much as a thank you.
“Oh.” Brittle tried not to take it personally, but his spirits sank within his hollow trunk so low, he feared they’d leak out the gaps between his cork bark toes. “You just wanted the food.”
“So sad,” a voice sniffed behind him.
Brittle whipped around in fright. “Who’s there?”
A large, undefined shape stood beneath the shaggy trees not far from him. It flinched, noticing Brittle staring, and took a hasty step backwards. Its form melded as one with the surrounding shadows. “No one,” it said, still sounding to be on the verge of tears. “Just us shadows.”
“Oh for peat’s sake. Not you again.” Brittle’s fear dissipated, giving way to annoyance. And here he’d thought sneaking out the window would have bought him at least an hour or two. “Well, you’ve already made yourself known. Are you going to come out or not?”
The shadow refrained from arguing this time.
Brittle tapped his foot against the needle-riddled ground with a disapproving tsk. “You might as well come out and introduce yourself proper-like. Skulking in the shadows watching unsuspecting bog log beasts is mighty shameful behavior for a god, you know.”
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“I’m not a god.”
“Me neither. Come on then, don’t make me have to go in after you.”
There was a hesitant pause before the wavering voice said, “Only if you promise not to throw pinecones at me again.”
Brittle’s hand dipped inside the pocket of his moss and lichen coat, confirming he still had a sizable stash of treasures. He resisted the urge to smile. The foolish spy had neglected to mention anything about rocks. Brittle made a shape over his chest with his other hand, stating, “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a splinter in my eye.”
A peculiar shape extracted itself from the surrounding shadows and edged closer, one cautious step at a time. Remarkably, it grew more peculiar the closer it came, until the spy stepped all the way out from under the shaggy trees and into the sparse light filtering down from above. The body was that of a short, squat man, but the head and feet looked as if they’d been borrowed from a sheep.
The rocks in Brittle’s pocket slid from his fingers as his desire to throw things was immediately overwhelmed by curiosity. He knew deities possessed the power to shapeshift. The spies sent to watch over the cottage often took the form of birds, animals, sometimes even people, but he’d never seen an amalgamation of more than one at the same time before.
Brittle tilted his head to the side. “You look different. What happened to the chicken?”
The spy’s ears fluttered as his strange, amber eyes looked away. Brittle swore he saw a flush of color creep beneath the grayish-white fur on the spy’s face. “It’s the sap,” he admitted sheepishly. “It’s hindering my shapeshifting.”
“Is the sap anti-magic?” Several wonderfully terrible ideas darted behind Brittle’s hollow eyes.
“No, just annoying.”
“Oh.” And just like that, Brittle’s hopes once more were dashed across the proverbial rocks of life. Such a shame. He thought he’d finally found a way to get back at Edvin for all the unnecessary porcu-pine comments.
The spy mistook Brittle’s disappointment for something else. The edges of his downturned mouth pulled deeper into a frown. “I’d like to see you try maintaining a shapeshifting spell when you’ve got sap slowly oozing down the back of your neck, making your fur all a mess.”
“So this is your real form then?”
“It is. And, just to warn you, if you say something teasing about it, I’m going to march right back into those shadows and not say another word.”
“Why would I tease you?”
Wordlessly, the spy gestured to his body with both hands.
“I’m a sentient log with arm and leg bits. I throw pinecones, not hurtful words.” Brittle was beginning to regret throwing those as well.
The spy eyed him skeptically. “Most find me repulsive. Even the gods and goddesses. That’s why they sent me out here, away from the public eye, so I could work somewhere quiet without being seen.”
Brittle didn’t have the heart to tell the spy that he hadn’t quite mastered the art of working without being seen yet. It was the spy’s poor shapeshifting that had given him away several weeks ago, back when the household first noticed strange, anatomically incorrect animals wandering around outside. Brittle and Sir Thomassin agreed that the two-headed deer had been their favorite.
Brittle jutted his hand out, mimicking the way humans greeted one another. “I’m Brittle Rotten Wood. The last of the bog log beasts and thorn-in-the-side extraordinaire.”
“Lastar.” The spy hesitantly shook his hand. “Demigod.”
“Of what?”
Lastar’s fuzzy brow furrowed. “Nothing.”
And here Brittle had secretly been betting on Lastar, the Demigod of Extra Extremities. “Of Nothing, huh? That sounds like…something.”
“Nothing as in I don’t have a power yet. It’s sort of the reason why I’m here. To prove myself.”
“No it’s not,” Brittle disagreed. “You’re not here to prove anything. You’re here to find Mara. I know what lying is, good sir, and you’re terrible at it.”
Lastar attempted what might have been a shrug. The poor fellow’s heart wasn’t in it, though. His shoulders gave up about halfway, too ashamed to commit to such a blatant lie. “I can be here for two reasons.”
“Well Mara’s obviously not here. So you can just be on your way then.”
“Obviously. But they wanted someone to watch over you in case she reached out. Regardless, I’m still stuck here for the foreseeable future.” Lastar lifted his hand and scratched the back of his fuzzy, sap-encrusted head nervously. “...Mara hasn’t reached out, has she?”
Incredible, Brittle thought. He’d never met someone so ill-suited for the task they’d been given before. He couldn’t even muster the effort to be riled by the demigod’s overt nose poking. He just felt sort of sad for Lastar instead. “Nope.”
“Didn’t think so,” Lastar said with a sigh.
“No use moping about it.” Brittle hopped onto a fallen log and traversed over the top of it with his arms held out at his sides for balance. He stopped halfway, glancing over his timber shoulder at the crestfallen demigod staring hopelessly at the ground, as pathetic things were oft to do. “Well don’t just stand there counting the pine needles. Come on. We’ve got adventuring to do.”
Lastar lifted his head in surprise. “We do?”
“Oh, yes. Just wait ‘til all the big name gods and goddesses learn how close their best spy got to Mara’s favorite abomination. I daresay, there’s probably a promotion in store for that lucky guy. Who knows, maybe his powers will come through as well.”
Lastar followed, dragging his cloven feet through the soft dirt with far less enthusiasm. “I’ve never been lucky at anything.”
Brittle turned back around and continued forward, fighting a smile. Lastar may not have been a sassy-talking swamp monitor, but he was the most exciting thing to happen to Brittle in a month and a half. And while a part of him – the naughty, attention-starved little beastie part – considered leading Lastar towards the ravine, Brittle altered course for the pools that collected along the basin of the foothills instead. There was no sense in getting rid of his companion straight away. They could at least log a few misadventures under their belts first.