Gero prodded the mushroom cap with his finger. It was a glowing green spherical shape with black and purple dots covering the top. He had never seen that species before, it was obviously poisonous.

As he touched it his fingertip began to swell and blister.

“Huh, interesting,”

“Move boyo let me see.”

Gero didn’t have to move, Jaharv pushed him out of the way. The older man peered at the mushroom from less than an inch away. Then he took a bite out of it.

Gero wasn’t shocked by this, in fact he had mostly ignored it as he pulled out a few herbs from his pack, wrapping one around his finger and eating another two. His master finished chewing on the mushroom with a satisfied look on his face.

Jaharv was a with skin as dark as coal similar to Gero’s own, but their similarities ended there. Jaharv was in his mid fifties and was tall with graying black hair and cocoa brown eyes, he was also tall and might seem lankly at first glance, but was corded with muscle on his thin frame.

Gero on the other hand was nearing twenty with bright blue eyes and his dark hair having shades of orange and red in it. He was also rather short compared to the other boys in the city.

“Yes yes! Definitely poisonous.”

“Master, my Plant Lover Card already told me that, not to mention the fact it was a glowing sickly green.”

“You can never be sure, what if the plant was tricking your Card?” his master replied, pulling the rest of the mushroom out and popping it into his mouth.

“Why would a plant trick me into thinking it was poisonous? Wouldn’t it rather be the other way around.”

“Well it doesn’t want to die does it? So of course it would try and trick you into thinking it was undesirable.”

“But it was undesirable.”

“A trick within a trick!” Then his master dove face first into the dirt, chomping away.

Gero knew that his Master wouldn’t get sick from the dirt and mushrooms, Gero had once seen him eat a rock, just a rock. There was also a time he had disgustingly taken a bite out of a rotting corpse, his reasoning? To find out why it was rotting.

“Master.”

Only the sound of gurgling dirt told him his master was listening.

“You know you could have just asked the mushroom instead?”

His master could literately speak to plants, it was one of the things that made him such a desired herbalist even with his eccentric behaviors. He could just ask the plants how good their leaves, sap, or fruits were doing, if they wanted something to help them grow and if there were any pests that needed to be taken care of.

Suddenly his masters face shot up, covered in dirt with a few bugs crawling around.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Shh, they are speaking now.”

Then Jaharv jumped onto the tree next to him, wrapping his arms and legs around it in a bear hug and resting one ear on the trunk. Gero rolled his eyes and began to sketch the mushroom from memory, they were currently surveying this area after the Shuffling. The city had forbade anybody leaving until the patrol brought back news of any places considered too dangerous to travel to. It was only around three months ago that they started letting merchant caravan's and explorers go back out.

Gero understood, what if a dragons nest had been brought close to the city? But at the same time his Master could deal with most things found in the Labyrinth, not dragons, but most mundane monsters didn’t hold a candle to his master in combat.

Not that you would be able to tell from the way that Jaharv nodded along with whatever the tree was telling him then licked the bark and kissed it rather intimately. Gero had to look away, yes it was a tree, but that made him even more uncomfortable.

“A boar has died nearby,” his master told him.

“A monster?” Gero asked, closing his notebook.

“No a child.”

“I thought you said it was a boar.”

“Yes a boar killed by a child.”

“What do you mean child?”

Jaharv looked at Gero like he spoke a different language.

“A young female human has recently killed a boar.”

“Give me an age range, you call me child all the time, was she my age.”

“How would I know? I’ve never met her, and the tree can’t tell the girls age.”

“But the tree can tell its a girl? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Women taste differently then men.”

“Tree’s don’t eat people.”

“These trees don’t. We have a few carnivorous tree’s back in the garden.”

“True.”

—

The voices were somewhat close, but I couldn’t understand a word. I was not entirely sure if it was because I was too far or if they spoke another language. I was on the other side of the world and I had heard of other languages before. I teared up a bit at the sounds of other people’s voices, and I wiped at my single remaining eye. I had hardly spoken in the past six months, only whispering to myself at night to remind myself I was human and to not feel so alone.

The sound of other people talking, even if I couldn’t understand them made me remember tucking my sister into bed and telling her stories. It also reminded me of the other people from the tribe, many of who were probably dead after the attack on the prince’s encampment, but compared to my little sister they didn’t matter as much.

No matter how useful the Meta Card was it still wasn’t worth my only family.

The voices quieted and a few moments later I saw a young man around seven or eight years older than me walk into view. The first thing I noticed about him was his skin tone. I had never seen anyone with that dark of skin. Most people from the tribes had skin like amber while merchants from the city were usually fairer.

That really told me that I was in another part of the world. His clothing was also different. There were no furs, but instead he wore a thinner spun tunic that hung almost to his knees along with a pair of pants and boots. Most of his hair was beneath a straw hat but I could see braids touching his shoulders. He wore a large backpack that seemed to be full to bursting and held a notebook in his hands but wasn’t looking at it.

Instead he was looking around, was he looking for the person he had been talking to earlier? Where was that person? Maybe he had been talking to himself the whole time.

A part of me wanted to use my abilities and to just kill him and take his things. What kind of things were in that pack that could help me survive? But I didn’t want to kill someone for no reason what so ever. Also there was the fact that this random stranger, however unlikely, could be as strong as Tario or the Prince, maybe even as strong as that dragon I had seen.

I gripped my obsidian knife in my hand, but calmed my breathing as the guy beneath me studied the things I had left on the ground. There was no reason to become a savage and attack every living thing.

A dark skinned old man with a graying hair and bunch of grass sticking out of his mouth fell from above upside down. He screamed something unintelligible in my face and I immediately attacked him with my knife.