Thankfully, our ride isn't interrupted at any stage by anything from the Wilds. We're able to reach the brook, slake our thirsts, clean our clothing, faces, and bodies, and then fill up all of our water storage flasks. After about an hour of handling all that, we're back onto the traveler's path and heading in the same direction as the village. We occasionally joke back and forth, but otherwise, the riding is pretty sedate and not stressful. I'm thankful for the break in the high intensity of the last week or so, and truthfully, I'd be concerned if we had hit any snags, but thankfully, we continue to head without interruption.

As the sky begins to change its shade and the moon begins to creep up further in the sky to take its night-time ascendancy, I start to look for a good place for us to settle down for the night. Since there are only two of us and Ranger, we don't need a large campsite, just a space on the traveler's path with a little clearing on both sides, so we can't be surprised if something were to have nefarious intentions. It doesn't take much longer for such a place to present itself, and I tug on the reins to get Ranger to stop, which he does with some degree of resistance–almost like he wants to keep going. Either way, we get stopped and settle down for the night.

We eat the three steaks that we heat a little over the fire to warm them back up, and then, as promised, I take the first watch. I settle in once Khalil has gone to sleep; I lean against Ranger's shoulders to relax while Khalil softly snores nearby. By the time it's Khalil's turn to take watch, my eyes are heavy with sleep. We swap off without trouble, and the last thing I remember is Ranger snoring just before my eyes close and sleep overtakes me.

Much like the morning before, save that Ranger is still with us when I awake, we get started on the traveler's path. This continues for a couple of days, and when Ranger gets hungry–or perhaps when his senses pick up the sounds of prey–he winds up hunting for the three of us without Khalil prompting him. It's a good time; it's just Khalil, me, and the wiretail. It reminds me of hunting trips we'd go on before all this nonsense started after that trading run. Calm, sedate, unhurried, and unworried–the true Wilder way. The darkness seducing me had been fading each day that we traveled the Wilds, as if the sun, in its ascendancy, was cleaning away the moon and the darkness it protects. I still thought of Cassandra but didn't want to seek out and track her down as strongly as the day and night after her departure.

Having made good time because of Ranger's pace and natural quickness, I spied the outskirts of our village in the near distance after only another day's travel. Khalil gave a little bit of a cheer, and I smiled at his joy. I encouraged Ranger to pick up the pace, and before too long, we were coming up to the gates of our village. Khalil was quick to call out, so the guards and others didn't panic at the sight of a wiretail bounding towards the village. Because of the early warning of our arrival, when we arrived, there was a small host of people gathered around–weans included–to see us and the wiretail we'd brought back with us.

"Khalil! Ori!"

I hop off of Ranger's back when I hear the familiar cheery voice of Lani rising above the clamor of the other Wilder oohing and aahing over Ranger. Khalil gets down, too, which is just in time. Wearing regular clothes–some old human band shirt that I don't recognize the name of with jeans–rather than the more protective stuff we wear during trading runs, Lani brushes past people and lunges to grab hold of Khalil in a crushing hug. Once she squeezes him long enough for him to start laughing, she releases and does the same to me.

"You two idiots! What have you gotten yourselves into now?"

I laugh while Khalil blushes. The slender and wispy half-elf, half-air pixie in front of us fixes us with her hazel eyes and puts both hands on her hips. I casually denote Khalil, face still flushed, is the first to talk for us.

"Lani, dude, you are not going to believe us."

"Oh, I don't know, I might. This looks a lot like the wiretail who wanted to eat us a couple of weeks ago!"

"Yeaaaah, it's the same one. He named himself Ranger. Kinda."

"Ranger? Okay, sure. Are you guys hungry? I bet you are. Come on, we'll get you some food."

Finally, I interject, otherwise Khalil is sure to go and be led by his stomach.

"Whoa, whoa. Wait, before we do that, I need to see Gallen about Ranger here, and then we need to go and talk with Hannah and Jorge again."

"Can I come with?"

"Normally, Lani, you know I'd be good with it, but…"

"But not this time, huh? Is it serious?"

"Maybe not serious-serious, but we definitely need to tell them what happened. We'll catch you later in a few hours at the Forgetful Fox for food, drinks, and all that?"

"Suuuure. I'll see you guys at the tavern then."

Ranger rumbles and growls, sending a few weans scattering into the distance, half in terror and half squealing in playful excitement. I step back next to Ranger and snag his saddle's reins.

"Scaring the kids, you big beast."

I grin and pat his coarse fur before leading him toward the stables, where I know Gallen will be posted up doing some work for the village. Sure enough, he's there, and though he gives Khalil and me some guff for bringing a wiretail in, I can tell he's excited to have one there. We try to explain that Ranger can come and go if he wants to go hunt, which makes Gallen give us an openly "not-going-to-happen" look. I try to protest, but I'm shut down every time until I finally give up. Khalil tries as well, but Gallen isn't having any of it. After a few more minutes of trying to plead our case, we eventually accept defeat. We finally agreed to leave Ranger with Gallen in the stables under his rules, and set out in the direction of Hannah and Jorge's lovely home nestled to the side of the center of our village.

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As I step up the stairs to the door and knock, I'm glad that there was a brook at least once on our way back to the village. Though Khalil and I are probably pretty ripe now, at least I'm not covered in blood and swamp muck. I know I'm a little grimy from the road, but it's better than looking like I was in the trenches of a war. When the door opens, it's Hannah herself who opens it. For some reason, I half expected a vine to open the door, or maybe even Jorge, but with Hannah looking us over with her kind eyes, I felt a small bit of shame creep up in my chest. Perplexed, I don't understand why, and it causes me to furrow my brow.

"Orion, Khalil, you two look like you've had another rough week. Come in and join me."

She steps back, allowing us inside, and we move in so that she can close the door behind us. She leads us through the home into her backyard and "workshop." I see that some of her paintings have changed, and I denote with some minor degree of happiness that she has some pigments of paint here and there. One of the other traders must have brought her some from another village. She settles down at a little circular table of twisted vines around a sturdy trunk and invites us to sit in one of the other chairs. We sit around the small table and look at each other, almost like we're waiting to see who gets started. In the end, it's Hannah who speaks first.

"That bad, is it? Has anyone seen the wounds on your arms?" Her tone is warm and interested-sounding, but there's something else underlying it, something she's trying to cover–defensiveness perhaps, or maybe worse, suspiciousness.

"Khalil and I don't know for sure anything. But we can tell you what happened, and then maybe you'll be able to guess better than we can. And I'm okay, mostly just scratches; I already made sure they won't get infected. I'll take care of them more a little later."

Hannah nods, her blue topaz eyes bidding me to go on. Hannah's long tresses of golden hair aren't braided today, allowing her long and sweeping ears to be what holds back her hair from spilling across her shoulders. Seeing her in a more dressed down state–though she's always still elegant–brings that little knot of shame back into my stomach, and I still don't know why; it isn't like I've done anything wrong. Still, I force it down so that I can speak.

I tell her the story of our trip from my perspective, leaving out the bits of my encounters with Cassandra on a personal level. I tell her how we split up, leaving Khalil and Kline at the camp while the trackers and I split off into three duos, with pixies' sparks in hand in case we needed backup. I tell her about the spark flaring into the sky, finding one of the trackers and his aid brutally torn to pieces, and how Cassandra and I had to fight the night terrors and the pair of two-headed basiliscu. Khalil looked shocked at the story being spun, as he hadn't heard the details before. I mention the lack of calvary and how Cassandra nearly lost it on Kline when we found the group again. Khalil lets me keep the lead for talking when I tell Hannah about how we took Ranger instead of letting Kline and the other two Blackham just kill him because he'd be "too much of a hassle" to get back to their Blackham City. Finally, with my story told, I lapse into silence and run my left hand down over my face, feeling the start of stubble along my jawline.

Hannah shifts her gaze to Khalil but doesn't say anything immediately. Khalil clears his throat a little.

"Right, my story isn't all exciting like that."

"Wasn't that exciting to live it, Khalil. It was pretty scary for a little while there, and I wasn't sure if I would make it out of that swamp."

"Dude, yeah, I get that. Sorry, I didn't mean it–"

"You're good, it's cool. Do your thing, man."

"Right, that night with the pixies' spark and all that, when everyone left, it was just me and Kline. We didn't do a lot of talking, but he kept going occasionally about how he wished we could have just left Cassandra behind. He was pretty bitter about having her around, if I'm honest. It seemed he didn't like having no 'operational control' over her while we were all out there."

Khalil lifts his shoulders in a shrug, then continues.

"Anyway, there's a big commotion, and the other two trackers bust it up the traveler's path, yelling at Kline to get the sleep darts and netting. Sure enough, not what like a minute later, here comes ol' Ranger tearing ass up the road after them full tilt. They're pretty suave about the whole thing, I won't lie. One distracted Ranger while the other hit him with a few darts. Once he started to slow down, they tossed a little net over him, which contracted and slammed him down to the ground so he couldn't move."

I frown a little, but I know they didn't hurt Ranger since I saw the after-effects and had to deal with him when he became untranquilized. Khalil doesn't notice my frown, and Hannah doesn't interrupt his retelling, just as she didn't interrupt mine, so Khalil keeps talking.

"It was honestly over in like a minute. They were efficient as hell and pretty impressive, really. So anyway, yeah, they get him down to the ground where he's all groggy, but he's not completely knocked out. They tell me to get my work done, so I talk to Ranger to ask him about what happened. Like I told Ori before, Ranger doesn't know what happened to his rider. The rider left him one day in the Wilds to carry something off elsewhere and didn't return. Ranger took a few days before he got super hungry, which is when we encountered him. So we missed whatever happened with the seam by just a few days."

Hannah finally speaks up.

"Did the wiretail describe what his rider carried off?"

"Er, no, I mean, I didn't really ask."

"It could be important, but it could just as easily be nothing."

I gaze at Khalil after Hannah unexpectedly focuses on that part of the story. After a few moments, I decide to add to the conversation.

"I mean, Khalil can go and ask Ranger if he remembers what his old rider was carrying, but it's been a while now; it's hard to know if Ranger will remember with any degree of clarity. He's still a wiretail, and he probably didn't think paying attention at the time was that important."

"You're probably right, Orion, but Khalil–if you don't mind–will you go check just in case?"

"Uh, now?"

"Yes, please."

"Sure, no problem. I'll get back here as soon as I can. It probably shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Hopefully, I'll get something for you."

Khalil pushes up from the tiny table the three of us are settled around. He nods to both of us before moving towards the home's front door and letting himself out. After Hannah and I hear the door close, and Khalil leaves, I turn my pale eyes toward Hannah.

"You sent him away, how come?"

"To get that information, of course."