When you took me in and healed me, Marianne, I was lost for words. I know I’ve said it a hundred times since you taught me the phrase, but . . . thank you. Kindness isn’t really something my people know. But what surprised me more was when you offered to take me with you once I was healed. To hunt and fish and travel together. It was never a life I envisioned, yet it was the happiest five years of my life and that’s not even a contest. If I’d stopped to consider it, I’d have thought it funny that I never missed my homeland and family. But what was there to miss? I had no attachments back there. Nobody raided the humelands for their families back home. It was every grem for himself.

In our days on the road, we avoided your fellow humans and kept mostly to the woods and wilderness, where you taught me your father’s woodcraft. I taught you how to hunt with a bow, just as soon as I made one. We grem might seem backward, but we can certainly be clever, huh? We wandered into a village together just that one time, remember? You tried to dress me up as your child, which uh, didn’t go as intended. After that, I was quite content to just stay and watch the camp while you bought supplies.

One of the strangest things about traveling with you was watching you grow up, something I hadn’t done for nearly twenty years. You only grew perhaps another inch, but that put you nearly a head taller than me, and you filled out a little more, reminding me that you weren’t just a strange little girl who lived in the woods—you were a woman too. I know, I know, there are women everywhere. And we’ve been over this, but I just . . . hadn’t ever been around human women. I didn’t realize how beautiful they were.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have any romantic intentions. Not yet, anyway. To me, you were a novelty that brought me back to my homeland, where the grem women baked hideous but tasty food and took care of us raiders while we were shoreside. They weren’t the prettiest, nor the most well-mannered much of the time, but they were missed after a long raiding voyage. I was never married. But now . . . now I dreamed atimes of a different life, one where I met a cute grem girl and settled down. Didn’t have to raid or nothing, but had plenty to eat. Somehow our lands were good lands in my dreams, and the gremstress particularly easy on the eyes.

I think she looked a lot like you. Funny how that works.

The years passed, good years. Years where we grew to depend and rely on each other, stuck around, watched each other’s backs. Neither of us seemed to want to go back to society. Slowly, my affection for you grew, and I realized I more than admired you. Yet I’m a grem, and you a human, so it’s not exactly like those stories you used to tell of two smitten humes pining for each other. Just a strange attraction I couldn’t get rid of. And I tried. It was a sense of love that went so much deeper than grem words could ever express.

And then one day, five years after you found me, I awoke to find you gone. I looked and looked, but you just vanished without a trace. My first thought was that you were kidnapped by nefarious humes. Someone had surely seen your beauty and fancied you for himself, or worse . . . sold you. The thought never would have bothered a grem like me back in the day—in fact, why should it? But it did, and for the first time I felt an odd feeling of jealousy. I couldn’t say even now if that was a keep-the-treasure-for-meself kind of jealousy, or something born of real . . . what do you call it, virtue? I think that’s the word. Whatever it was, it was strong.

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

I went without food and sleep for days, wandering the forests, searching desperately for your tracks, begging the few passersby I came across for any morsel of info on your whereabouts. Shocked that I knew their language, the humes would only back away and hurry off, or curse me and beat me away with whatever passed for a weapon in those parts. I called your name at night, and when I drifted off to sleep accidentally, I’d awake and realize I was still calling. Marianne. It was the prettiest name I’d ever heard, still is, of that much I’m certain to this day. But now it felt hollow, as though I was saying it over your burning bones, watching the memory of you drift away. In some of my dreams, that was the case.

Slowly, slowly, I came to my senses and began to wonder if I was wrong about you all along. Not your kindness, not ever that. But . . . well, maybe you just couldn’t stand me anymore, and were too polite to say it to my face? That stung even more, somehow. Maybe you’d gone off to find work, or to trade with some merchants, or find a home . . . no, you would have returned by now and let me know.

So what could it be?

The voices began to whisper in my head: “She’s a hume. She cheats just like them. She hates you. Now you see it, Finch. She’s a hume, and you’re nothing but an insignificant, sniveling grem.” I’d huddle on the ground under a tree or a leaky roof, and hug my scrawny legs, shaking my head. My hair had grown long, and was usually wet with rain as well as filthy with grime. The voices would paralyze me, as though I still lay on your makeshift bed back in the sea cove. You know, I used to wonder where you slept, and why you had an extra cot and sleeping sack, until I finally looked and saw the whole cave and realized you didn’t have another.

I whispered back, telling the voices they could take those taunting words and stick ‘em up a troll’s . . . oops, I forgot you don’t like it when I talk like that. Anyway, I told the voices to go away. But my own grem nature accused me of being a fool. No, not just that, but I was angry and bitter toward you. Under the surface, beneath my pretend loyalty, I was eating myself. So angry. So sad. So afraid.

Maybe . . . maybe now is a good time to come clean. I fear this bitterness and sorrow has eaten me entirely. I don’t care anymore. No, I—I have more to explain. I can’t go down that trail yet. Marianne, if you’re somehow reading this, I’m not in a good way. I think I started out by saying that, but that was days ago. Maybe weeks. Something’s been chasing me, and I’m kinda in hiding. The locals are onto my whereabouts, and they don’t like having a goblin in their neighborhood. Point being, I’m actually wounded at the moment and not sure about my fate. I feel broken in so many ways. And . . . no, no, I’m doing it again.

Stick to the story, Finch. Come on. For her. For you, Marianne. My beloved, quirky, clever hume girl. Please be there. Please be OK.