The snake responded to Bel’s awkward greeting with what Bel thought was a cute little dance. At the same time, the crocodile woman started thumping on her chest with her short, muscular arms. Bel tried to look at both of them at once, her neck and snakes turning back and forth. She was soon making herself dizzy, and her snakes were getting tangled.

She held up her hands to try to calm down the duo.

“Uh, I don’t really know what’s happening…” Bel trailed off. The pair seemed good intentioned – maybe even cheerful – but it was hard for Bel to be certain since neither of their faces were wholly human. Bel pursed her lips, confused about how she should continue.

The crocodile lifted a large, clay jug of water from her side and poured a stream of water into her mouth. Then she looked Bel in the eye and began to gurgle loudly.

Bel held up her hands apologetically. “No, sorry, I don’t, um, gurgle.” She pointed at her mouth. “Just talking.”

The crocodile gulped down the water. Bel thought that her lips were pressed together with dissatisfaction, but maybe that’s was just how crocodiles looked. Her lipstick made the expression look more severe.

The snake-person tapped on Bel’s knee, trying to get her attention.

“Yes?” Bel queried, bending down to get closer. Then the snake person thrust its face on top of Bel’s head, starting a terrible bout of hissing and writhing with her headsnakes. Bel tried to stand to get her snakes away from the small snake person. To her dismay, the snake guy had become entangled with the snakes on her head, and, not realizing how light he would be, Bel hoisted the now panicking person into the air as she stood. She suddenly found herself with an angry, flailing person her head.

Bel desperately tried to calm her snakes and extricate her unwanted passenger for a solid minute before the crocodile woman came forward and plucked the snake from her head with her stubby, short-clawed hands.

“Thanks,” Bel gasped, desperately trying to smooth down her agitated snake hair. Her snakes hissed and writhed, clearly upset after the encounter with the unexpected guest.

The crocodile lady staggered Bel with a slap to her back and made a deep gurgling noise that Bel decided to interpret as a laugh. Bel rubbed her shoulder – so far her attempts to communicate were not going well.

She inhaled a deep breath and sighed. I wonder how James is doing? She looked in his direction.

Her eyes narrowed.

He was doing fine. Bel could see him, laughing and smiling as he chatted with the half-ant woman. The owl was hooting as some joke while the man with the thick tail was leaning back on and thumping his foot into the ground in apparent amusement.

Bel looked back at her two conversation partners. Why did I get these two? Is it because I’ve got snakes on my head? Or am I just terrible at communicating with strangers?

The little snake person was in some deep conversation with the crocodile, tapping rapidly on a metal pipe as his body weaved through the air. The crocodile chortled and gurgled back in response. Bel reached up, still trying to calm the bundle of agitation on her head. She couldn’t see herself making any progress with these two.

She looked back at Beth, her eyes pleading for help, but her former guardian had fallen asleep in the shade of the tunnel opening.

Bel pulled on her battered shirt, forcing some air against her skin. It was hot. More hot and dry than she’d ever felt in Satrap.

She looked around for the first time, only now becoming aware or the world around her. She’d been so distracted by the strange people that she hadn’t even gotten a good look at the world outside of Satrap’s Barrier.

It was… empty. Bel spun around slowly as she looked around. On this side of the Barrier, the Spine mountains were rocky and barren. She could see small clumps of brownish shrubs clinging to the higher reaches of the slope above her – a far cry from the snow-draped pine forests in Satrap. The tunnel had opened upon a ridge overlooking a large… beach? But without a sea? Bel wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

The ground under her feet was dry – it crunched and shifted under her boots, a curious mixture of sand and pebbles that looked like it hadn’t experienced rain in years. Everything around her was just more of the same, although down the ridge she could see splotches of lighter, almost white sections of the sandy ground. And on the horizon…

Bel’s breath caught in her throat and here eyes widened with wonder. The horizon went on forever. There was no blue glow of the Barrier in the distance. The land just continued until features shrank too small for her to see.

Freedom. It looked like she could just pick a direction and go. With her back to the Spine mountains, she couldn’t see the Barrier at all. The sky was wide and open, without a single cloud in sight. Two of Olympos’ moons were visible in the sky, the ill-omens of the reddish hunting moon drowned out by the calming blue-white light from the disk and tail of the hunting moon next to it. Her view was bisected cleanly by the Blade of Heaven – the thing that James insisted was a ring around the entire planet. Now that she could see it dipping down into and below the horizon she could imagine that he was right.

Bel was broken out of her examination by a poke in the shoulder from the large crocodilian. They were apparently ready to try again. For this attempt the two strangers were holding a small collection of flags on sticks that they were waving at Bel with great enthusiasm.

Bel stared for a moment, frustration tightening her chest.

“Ugh, look, my brother is doing fine just talking out loud,” she complained, pointing at James. “I mean, can’t we just do what they’re doing?”

The crocodile glanced at the other group and made a loud snapping noise, followed by a hiss. The owl glanced in their direction and waved a wing. A moment later and the other group was coming in their direction.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

James trotted ahead to reach Bel first.

“Hey sis,” he called out in English, “it turns out that Daran – she’s the ant girl with the silver ’fro – speaks Satrapian.”

Bel looked between the too of them, flabbergasted.

“She doesn’t call it Satrapian though,” he rushed to tell her, “she calls is Mycenaean. I think maybe it’s like some kind of early Greek? Do you remember when I told you about the Greeks?”

He barely paused for her to respond before continuing. “They’re the ones that came before the Romans. They wore togas and stuff.”

“What?” Bel struggled to follow along with the flood of words coming from her overexcited sibling.

Then the ant-girl skittered into the conversation, speaking Satrapian with a strange accent. “Greetings Beloved, sister of James! I wish to introduce myself as Daran, daughter of–” She made some noises that could have been a name, or she could have swallowed a fly. From context Bel guessed name, but one with clicks and chitters rather than the neat sounds of the languages that she understood.

Bel’s thoughts froze for a moment, her concentration grabbed by the antenna that protruded from the woman’s head before she snapped her attention back on newcomer’s face.

“Um, hello, people call me Bel,” she awkwardly introduced herself. She certainly wasn’t going to mention anything about her own mother or explain that her name was more of a title granted to her by her mother’s followers. Instead she held out a hand to shake.

Daran stared at it blankly for a few moments, long enough to make Bel worry that handshakes were some kind of taboo.

“Oh,” the ant girl gasped, “sorry, James is just showing this to me.” Daran’s legs skittered forward and she timidly reached out her hand to gently grasp Bel’s fingers. She gave a single, small up and down shake before blushing and taking her hand back.

“We are usually just bowing here in the Golden Plains. Not all people here has a proper hand for this shaking.” Daran’s antennae beat the air enthusiastically. Bel suppressed the urge to poke one of them. “Yes, many hands of different kinds here.”

Daran smiled widely. “But no people like your! You are gorgon yes?” Daran twisted to reach her hands into a small bag fasted to the back of her ant body. “I am having a scroll with many creatures in it,” she explained.

The ant-girl pulled out a small scroll with a triumphant expression. “I remember that your people and my people are from similar place, am I right?”

Bel’s brow creased with confusion. “Your people?”

“We are the daughters of Myrmex,” Daran explained. “You are daughters of, hm, someone. I have it written here…” The ant girl unfurled her hide scroll and began scanning through it, her lips pursed with concentration.

“I think she means that gorgons and ant-people both come from somewhere around Greece, maybe,” James guessed. “Back on Earth.”

Bel rubbed her nose, irritated by the dry air and frustrated with her confusion. “Does that have anything to do with this place?”

“No. Oh, but the Golden Plains is where we are now,” James explained. He dropped into English for the next part. “I told them that we’re from some place called the Lip – well, she thought that we were from the Lip because you have some snake parts and she’s only heard rumors about the place but hasn’t been there, so I rolled with it.”

Bel glanced at the group. Daran’s antennae were waving through air as she alternated between looking through her scroll and watching them with wide-eyed curiosity.

“So we’re lying to them?” Bel asked.

“Well… I was worried that they might have something against Satrap.”

Bel looked from her brother to the wide eyes of the eclectic group. “We have something against Satrap, James. Let’s just trust them, otherwise this will get too complicated. We don’t even know anything about the Lip, there’s no way this lie will last more than a day.”

“But we can just make things up as we go,” James objected.

Bel turned back to Daran. “Hey Daran, I think we’ve had some misunderstanding. My brother says that you think we’re from some place called the Lip?”

Daran nodded. “Yes, I have knowing that it is a place lying on the far south with much mud and wetness. Since your tribes have not joined our grouping we have little talk with your people, but we all welcome you to the Great Swap.” She scrunched up her face, clearly struggling to think of the proper words to express her intent. “We welcome all for the group’s good.”

“Uh, that’s nice.” Bel glanced at James, but he just shrugged. Great, so he doesn’t know what she’s talking about either. Hopefully not some kind of friendly group sacrifice.

Bel cleared her throat. “So, anyway, there’s a little mix up. See, we’re not from the Lip.”

Daran tilted her head and scratched at her abdomen with one of her back legs. Bel found the long insect legs very distracting and almost didn’t hear the ant girl’s question. “So were are you coming from?”

“We’re from Satrap.” Seeing the girl’s blank look, Bel pointed over the mountains behind them. “On the other side of the Barrier.”

“The other side? From Atmos? The land of great lizards? You are look very small for Atmos.”

“The what? Atmos?” Bel repeated.

Daran pointed at the mountains, making a curved motion with her hands. “Around the great blue and across the eastern sea.”

“No, no from inside of the Barrier – the great blue. We’re from inside of it.”

Daran’s antennae beat the air frantically for a few moments. She looked at Bel like she’d just laid an egg. Wait, maybe laying eggs is normal here.

“From the inside?” Daran clarified. “Not around?”

“Yes,” Bel confirmed.

Daran turned to her companions and said a few words in her own language. Then she made a few hand gestures to the crocodile, who turned to the snake and tapped on the smaller person’s metal stick, apparently passing on the message until everyone got the news.

A series of squawks, clacks, and hand dances commenced as the strange people discussed amongst themselves. James looked at Bel while he nervously fidgeted with freshly shaved chin, but Bel wasn’t too worried. Sure, the group was strange, but she didn’t get any feelings of hostility from them. Eventually, Daran turned back and cleared her throat.

“So, we have very much interest about the place inside the great – the Barrier. But, first question that–” Daran made a glurbling noise and pointed at the crocodile woman. “–asks is if you are having some sample of food?”

Daran poked the ground with her stick-like ant-feet and bashfully hid her hands behind her back. “She has much interest with cooking and is insistent about new flavor.”

“Um,” Bel hesitated.

She looked at her brother. “Do you have anything left?”

He shucked his pack and started digging through it. “Maybe some nuts? I gathered them while Ken was pulling me through the woods, just in case they weren’t planning on feeding me. Here they are.”

James pulled out a beaten up package paper. “Sorry, this is all we’ve got. We ran out of most of our food getting through the tunnels. Although I guess that stuff probably came from here anyway.”

The crocodilian grabbed the package eagerly, and then began handing out the small collection of nuts to the other strangers. Bel watched with amusement as the snake person sniffed and licked at a small nut, clearly not equipped to chew it. A brief discussion followed, after which the crocodilian put the rest of the nuts into a satchel at her side before stomping off with a spring in her awkward waddle-stomp.

“She will make us the evening meal as thanks,” Daran announced. “It is early, but we have time to talk and we have much questions. Are you going to the Great Swap? How do you learn about it inside of the Barrier? How do you pass through? Are there many people in the place where have come from? Are they all interested in the Great Swap?”

Bel cringed – it was too much all at once – but James jumped in with a smile, eager to explain more, so Bel relaxed and let him take the lead. She was just relieved that they had apparently lucked out and met a friendly group of people.

Maybe the world outside of Satrap will be nice.