The Testimony of Edelea Kirivitti

Yup, I’m Edelea, and yup, I’ve seen old Tax. Me and Papa were going out east of Amsherrat, past the hills and the mountain caves, into the brush up a hiking trail to pick juicy red wolfberries. We own a jam-making business, and we make teas from them too, so once every fortnight we go up through the scrub to pinch the ripest berries in the bush. Not many others do it, so we have prime dibs on the local market. You can’t get plumper or fresher than us. Our stall’s called Kiriberries, up in east quarter. Come swing by sometime! No, there’s not that much tichyan in it, but there’s tons of joy.

So it’s always a fun romp every time. You see lots of creatures up there; gazelle, zebra, jackals, flickers, sometimes scarier things like leopards or lions, but they don’t usually bother us. The trail itself is a mad winding thing, first up through the shelves of the mountains, where you can see Amsherrat hazed in the distance. Then you trek through the scrub tickling your heels onto hilly mounds of yellow grass, stippled with acacia and all other thin trees, until you get to the wolfberry grove. The sun’s beating down the whole time so you need to bring waterskins and sunshrouds, but you’ll still sweat.

Best remedy to that is to stop by the Katani; there’s a tributary of it that flows out right after crossing the mountains. Me and Papa were trekking down the cliffs, prodding down our walking-sticks, and singing:

“Ho ho ho! Over we go,
Down and down where the wolfberry grows,
On an adventure, nobody knows,
when we come back, except for the crows.”
We made up the words, and the game of it is, whenever you see a bird, you have to point at it and shout: crows! Then we’d argue over whether it was really a crow or not. That day, a flufftail scampered across the underbrush.

“Crows!” I yelled.

And Papa laughed at the silly thing, and he peered through the branches for more ‘crows’. But when you start seeing birds like that, it means you’re close to the river. We turned a bend out along the path, then left the treeline to the river clearing.

“—Oh,” I whispered.

Lounging upon the rocks just over the river, bathed in the sun, was a lion. Or almost a lion. It had a mane and big lion paws, but a goat’s legs, a bug’s wings, and then a fanned grouse’s tail. It wasn’t any creature that Czjeir had made. It was a mishmash of lots of them.

And most frightening, it had a man’s face, and a man’s hands folded to its belly between its paws.

I couldn’t see what that face was like, too clear, across the river, but it was pale. And praise Czjeir, it wasn’t looking at us. I stuttered back into the cover of the treeline.

“Papa, there’s a ghoul,” I murmured.

Papa straightened his neck over me to see the clearing. The ghoul arose and shook like a dog. A veil of white cloth fluttered over its front, which covered its head. As it trotted away along the river towards the bush—I stepped backwards, on a dry twig that snapped.

The creature’s long ears twitched and it looked towards us. We held our breath. Our cover in the treeline was shallow, as we’d almost bumbled right out of the bush; we’d frozen at the last moment when I saw that ghoul. I really thought it would find us. But it averted its veiled face, hung its head low, and stalked along the riverside back into the treeline. It disappeared quickly.

We should’ve been glad that it didn’t run at us, but my heart only drummed faster.

I dug in my walking stick and started a return up the trail. Papa caught my wrist, shook his head, and held his finger to his lips. Birds hooted—leaves rattled—and then came the creaking of wood. My back shivered, though I didn’t know why. Up in the trees I saw nothing, but suddenly felt that from somewhere between the branches, or higher up on the hill, a horrible white face would burst out, staring at us with wide eyes.

Papa guided me into the clearing, where we huddled at the rocks by the river.

The bush walled a ring around us. Hairs on my skin tingled. From every distant gap in the leaves, I thought I saw the flicker of a paw, or heard the tussle of disturbed grass, stalking us, in a circle.

While the shadow revolved, Papa spoke, “that ghoul’s faster than us in the forest. If we broke up the hill and ran for the mountains, it’d surely catch one of us, Eda. The trail’s harder to fight on, too.”

“We’re going to fight it?” I whispered.

He adjusted his grip on his walking stick. “We’re better if we can.”

“What if we pray?”

Papa nodded, staring out at the trees, head swivelling to follow the beam of attention upon us. “That’s good.”

“Oh Czjeir,” I whispered, hands clasped. “Please help. I know we went into the wilds, and that it’s dangerous here, but it’s never been before, and we just wanted Your berries... please don’t call that a sin.”

I don’t know how to pray beautifully, the way that anointed folks do. All I could hope was that He had heard my wish and that I hadn’t said something bad that would doom me.

Dry leaves rattled around in a gust—I yelped and gripped my sunshroud’s hood, as Papa shouted, “no!’ and stepped out behind me. I turned and saw the terrible beast charging at my back, paws and hooves clattering on the river-shore’s rocks, so fast that it sent up the wind, and its veil billowed out like a halo. The face was just three black, sloppy holes, one full of fangs, and bottomless, that stretched all the way down its neck. It could swallow up a hippo in one bite, much less us. We were doomed, facing death, if we fought it.

Papa braced his walking-stick horizontally, when something strange happened. The monster’s paws and legs morphed into human hands and legs, its body morphed into a human body, and its stretched taffy face morphed perfectly into Papa’s. It scrambled onto two legs, mouth frothing, and pale, as if Papa had died and his body risen again to kill us.

It was naked. I wanted to hide under my hood, but couldn’t look away from the monster. It raged with fists raised to strike Papa; but Papa flung out his walking-stick first, with a sharp blow across its tummy that sent it stumbling backwards. Papa struck again and again with the rod until it fell and then drove the stick’s point into its throat.

It gurgled and flailed its arms. They were strong arms; they were Papa’s, and the monster caught Papa by the shirt, dragged him onto his knees, and began strangling him. I screamed. Papa, choking, snatched a rock from the river-shore and struck it against the monster’s temple, over and over, until blood spouted out and speckled the ground.

Brains, meat, and terrible gore poured out of Papa’s double. Stupefied, I still couldn’t cover my eyes. The evil doppelgänger huffed a horrible breath and slumped dead, its skull concave, with its face forever stuck in a hateful scowl.

Then its head fell away and its body shrivelled up. The corpse of the ghoul withered into a thing like a tiny white ape, and at the stump of its neck, was a mirror.

Papa pummelled the body twice more, but it was dead.

“Eda, Eda, are you alright?” he said, running to me. I was sobbing and he hugged me, with the sun glaring down hot, and the river’s spray wetting my back. How was he asking me such a question after he had fought off that creature? I had never wanted to see anything like that in my life; I couldn’t bare to even look down at its body again, so disgusting it was.

My forehead was set on my knees; from a glimpse, I saw Papa’s neck already bruising purple, and sobbed even harder.

“You’ll be alright. You’ll be alright, Eda,” he stroked my back. But I should be fine. It was him who needed a doctor.

Then the air blackened. In a quiet way, with a silent weight, like how a corpse turns more pale. All the birds had gone mute as if killed in secret, and the trees stood up like petrified prisoners. Something like an evil ghost was announcing itself as here.

Around me, my warm cocoon, Papa stared across the clearing.

Padding nearer was the same creature we had just fought. Beneath its hooves and paws, stepping so carefully as if not to break glass, the unsteady rocks of the riverside barely scritched together.

I stared so transfixed, by the silky exactness of how it moved, like it was a living question, that meant something truly huge. In my mind a galaxy dragged across the sky.

The veil hung so straight and heavy, it could’ve been set on the head of an unfinished statue. What face would be carved underneath? Was there anything? In the natal purity of the Tabula Rasa, infinite potentiality—

Then a white human hand sprouted from under the veil and flung off the covering. The whole figure blurred like watercolours running together, and reformed, just a couple meters before us, as a messy, underwhelming-looking man in a white shirt with goat’s legs.

Trees swayed. The river burbled behind us. He basked in himself for full moments, like he knew how dramatic he looked.

“Guess I’m late,” he pronounced.

And the spell broke. I hated him instantly. Creepy stage magician pulling strange tricks. I curled myself harder into my fortress, Papa’s chest, and he cradled me tighter.

“Keep back! You’re scaring my daughter,” Papa palmed a river rock and raised it to throw.

The man juddered still, halfway through his stride. “—I guess you have just experienced a kind of ordeal, hold on, sorry. Wow, uh, really, sorry. Um—um, well anyway,” ‘well anyway,’ the hurt’s gone that easy? “The procedure of two—uh, three—beings meeting each other says, I should at least introduce myself, right? I’m Mephi tel-Sharvara. It’s, probably easier to you if I say, ‘the Tax Collector.’”

“Then, are you here to kill us?” Papa’s throwing arm lowered slightly.

“Um, no. That was—kind of the opposite, of my intentions.” ‘Mephi’ glanced aside, as if relieved, but a demeaning tang still laced his voice. “I was thinking to... you can see I failed with this, uh, subjugate that ghoul before it could, kill you, but, you dealt with it... fine. You’re... not really hurt or anything, are you? I could’ve been a lot more expedient. Um, and, I’m sorry about upsetting your daughter, too.”

Now I really did hate him. I’d never heard a ‘sorry’ more fake. A heat blazed up from my chest that insisted, more than the fear that he might be unfathomably clever, he was actually incredibly stupid.

So stupid that I hated myself for ever letting myself shrink away from him. Scowling, I wrenched myself out of Papa’s arms.

‘Mephi’ frowned like I was the weird one.

“...um, and I just wanted to say, thanks, for dealing with him. And just, establish that I’m here—in the area, and... I-I-I don’t, I kinda suspected, but didn’t really think—uh, that anyone would travel this deep into the wilderness. That... well, it’s only really dangerous because I’ve been slack on the job, but it makes me, kind of, curious why you’re... here?”

Papa still held the rock, but relaxed his arm to the ground.

“Or, or sorry, did I mess that up?”

“Yes! Of course you did!” I leapt onto my feet. “What on earth was that? That was the worst apology I’ve ever heard. It actually just made me feel worse, and angrier! You’re blaming yourself, like I shouldn’t be mad, but everything you said was... so terrible! We’re not really hurt? Papa’s neck is purple! And I—I had to watch all of that, it was awful...”

“Eda,” Papa chided, but my brain sizzled too much to care.

“Okay. Wow, uh, I am—you know, inconsiderate. Kinda...” he sauntered over and plopped himself upon a large, flat boulder. His thick, furry tail meandered in weird spirals. “Mmn—no, I’m really sorry. My social life is uh, trees, birds, and my, and myself—for ages, so I’m... a really clumsy speaker, sorry. I’m—yeah, wow, I really upset you.”

“If you’re really sorry, it’s not coming across at all! What about Papa still, or what about me? We’re hurt. Shouldn’t that be the first thing you care about, instead of how mean you’re being? If you had even a little bit of empathy—”

“I don’t,” he snapped.

The words slapped me motionless.

“Have any, or much,” he continued. “I am really trying.”

He glared across the clearing as he spoke, but his attention burned my way like an arrow. In his scowl, his teeth were knives, and his fingernails were claws that etched trails in the hard stone.

Papa seated himself also upon a flat rock, parallel to ‘Mephi’, and suddenly two ends of a triangle were staring at me like I’d done something wrong. My whole body blushed. To be the only one standing felt embarrassing, somehow.

I sat quietly next to Papa. A pressure then seemed to lift off ‘Mephi,’ and with it, my mind cleared fresh, too.

“...I’m sorry. You’ve been bitten by Shien, haven’t you?” I looked down at his furry legs. “You really can’t think right... you’re a familiar.”

“If he’s who he claims, he’s Czjeir’s reaper, Eda.”

“Czjeir’s... Czjeir has a reaper?”

‘Mephi’ nodded. Then with a shrug, his body blurred, and a beautiful green cloak patterned in gold fell over him—suddenly he looked exactly like how I imagined the Tax Collector.

“I know the stories,” I insisted abruptly. “But I thought they were only fables...”

“They’re real, Edelea. Those books came from these very moments,” said Papa, as Mephi’s cloak smeared back into a boring white shirt. “Seeing him used to be commonplace, so much, the Bishops would confirm four new tales a week—especially in Amsherrat, walking about the crowds in the streets... but that was years ago. Then he disappeared one day... or, we thought.”

Mephi rolled his neck and rapped his palms on the stone. “...I really should ask if you uh, need medical treatment.”

Pinching his bruised neck, Papa shook his head.

Mephi nodded like he expected nothing else.

My tongue soured.

“Well—yeah, that’s all correct,” he continued with a grin. “A-a-and the Bishops, they came up with this huge justification, to say where I’d gone, right? But I... I didn’t go anywhere.”

He spread his hand and perked his tail as if waiting for applause.

“I just—decided I needed to ah, not, impose myself so much on, the people like you. At daytime... so it’s not, it’s not like, my tenure finished, or... like I ever stopped hunting that filth...”

He panted excitedly like a hungry dog when he said that word, ‘filth’. I squeezed closer to Papa.

“...mm, but, but, but, yeah...” he gazed at the wilderness as if in a dream, at the babbling stream, and the whispering trees, and all the earthy rocks. His tail flicked. And then he sobered like death and he stared blankly at us with some heavy question.

I decided that I still didn’t like him.

“How come Czjeir needs a reaper?” I said.

“Eda,” Papa chided again.

Mephi squinted and raised his chin, as if stung, but liking the pain. He was a dark sort of person that ate other people and found stupid things fun. The stories all said that. And that’s how he looked right then, proud.

“...Maybe for messes like that,” he muttered, inclining his head quietly toward the shrivelled, monkey-like remains of the ghoul that attacked us.

My back shuddered and throat tightened to even look at it. Mephi raised his hand contemplatively, pondering the dead beast like it would still move, then clicked his fingers and the ugly little corpse burst aflame.

The purple fire roared; I flinched in my skin. The little monster’s flesh wasted away and its bones glowed blue until they smeared into nothing—then, replaced by just clean stones and ash, it relieved me how totally the awful creature was gone.

Mephi eyed the blood spattered across the rocks.

I hadn’t thought of those traces.

He drew his finger across, and the line of flickering fire spread, whirled, and faded. The rocks after that were pristine, not charred, and even polished like the Katani had washed them.

Adjusting himself on his seat, Mephi muttered, “I’m, watching my diet.”

But I was still thinking of what he had done, burning that creature up.

“T-T-Temerin,” he blurted suddenly. “He, he—he, that was an a-a-apostate. Who...”

“An apostate? Then, for anathema?” asked Papa.

“Hsst! No! Think—think a little, maybe, sorry, would, would I give a cremation to someone I actually hated, instead of just eating them up? Would I have... even let him rot that much? My body is... Hell, it’s like Hell, and, they’re starting to uh, comprehend that and call me by, another new nickname, ‘The Gate of Death’, or ‘The Gate of Hell’, in all their stories and... it’s nice, that’s a sensible nuance.”

He paused. “I don’t even hate it. But yeah, the word ‘apostate’, you’d probably, probably think Czjeir hates... I’m really, getting off track. But I-I-I, I was apostate. You know? Not to, say there’s much familiarity, of mine, with him, on that basis, but...” he chewed his nail.

“Of course there is,” I scoffed. “An apostate making friends with apostates.”

“Edelea, gentle.”

“She’s fine. Really.” Smirking, he leaned back on one arm. “Well, we weren’t really, friends. Uh... uhhm...”

“Go on—tell us about that little beast, Temerin.” My eyes widened with a thought. Then the memory arose of Papa fighting the creature, and suddenly I wished we weren’t discussing it at all.

“You know, at the judgement, everything you say will be raised for your punishment, by a worse pedant than me.” Mephi’s fingers knit and legs crossed and back straightened very abruptly.

He looked like an evil business consultant, earnest in his advice, but covered in a flowing wave of black scales. His furry tail changed to be like a crocodile’s, and his hands like eagle’s talons, and it didn’t seem like he noticed himself at all. The image came to mind of a dragon dressed in a mathematician’s geeky suit and tie, and I would have laughed, if the spite in his voice weren’t so terrible, that it sickened and twisted my guts.

And he was smiling. “So perhaps you’ll be lucky and pass through the gates into Paradise. But if Czjeir decides you’re out—and ha! Heaven forbid that!—you’ll weep when you think about that ‘little beast’, since you’ll be that ugly, too.”

A strange boldness against him straightened my spine. “That’s why I’m not an apostate.”

“Mhm. Well, we’ll see. ...I really do, hope that’s enough...”

“Do you know much of the judgement?” asked Papa.

“Not really...” Mephi looked toward the woods. All the scales melted away and he seemed much calmer. Then he snapped back to us, as if from a dream. “Um, so... I’m sorry, I really meander through, topics a lot...”

“Temerin,” Papa said.

“Right. He—he ran into witches. So, after, disposing of those...” Mephi sucked his lips plaintively. “I-I, found him, in a box, they’d rewired everything, backwards.” I didn’t know what that meant, but he reeled like it was atrocious. “So, I fixed that... he was a familiar. His state, wasn’t that bad yet, uh, in terms of, his soul rot, and he was begging, ‘don’t kill me, don’t kill me,’ so, you know... I didn’t. I thought maybe, he could have a few more months to, live, in uh, the middle of nowhere, without being... tortured.”

Mephi spread his open palm to show us the bush. He and ‘Temerin’ must have been living here, for weeks and weeks, but we didn’t know.

I pressed my cheek against Papa’s chest.

“That was, maybe, ah... it’s hard to keep track of time out here. Four—four months? He lost his mind, maybe a week ago, uh, and, yeah, I’ve just been slack... dealing with it...” He fingered his teeth with a claw. “Like—like, the way he manifested,” Mephi rolled his eyes. “What a drag. You—saw, right? He’s some kind of mimic. Yeah, um, wrestling with something that actually... has the same—equivalent power as me, is... I, just kinda suck. That... I might not have won that. So, I really, do have to say, thank you, for stopping him, but...

“I just really, didn’t think, the problem would be so immediate—be, because it is the middle of nowhere, and the point is that... nobody comes...”

“Well, you’re wrong!” I jumped up. “We come here, and it’s somewhere! Every two weeks, and we’ve done it for months!”

“I’ve never noticed. That’s, a compliment, by the way...”

“And we go and pick wolfberries!” I crossed my arms and nodded, feeling too righteous to sit down too quickly, even as I started to blush.

“Eda—forgive us, Tax Collector, we didn’t know this bushland was claimed.”

“I’m not—I don’t have a deed here, unless it’s like, I started somehow owning every atom I touch. But, um, yeah... yeah, there is uh, I do think I know what you’re talking about.” He tilted his head backwards dreamily. “The grove’s only, what, f-five... minutes that way? ...Then, w-will you still be going?”

Papa looked to me. I hugged my elbows and stared at the pebbles below, as a lump grew in my gut. I found that no—to go was too normal, and ‘normal’ had become a thin linen laid upon a weeping cadaver.

The hurt must be ripped off, and popped like an abscess. Yet how to find the edge of a cloth that was not real?

I couldn’t bare it. I only wanted to run home.

“You know,” Mephi upon his rock softly offered a thought, shockingly and soothingly dovelike, for a self-professed psychopath. “I-if, if... this is something that brings you joy, don’t let something this stupid take it from you.”

I shook my head. Such rising force and such venom... but truly, my thoughts were all noise.

“I, really mean it. Because, I-I can’t feel it. R-right? So if you have it, I think that it’s precious.”

“Tax Collector, she’s only nineteen, a young girl. Today has been tough. Oh, Edelea...” and he stood and cupped his arm around me, so I could cry into his chest. But my cheeks flushed to be babied and to be babied so obviously. Nineteen was still a woman.

“Let’s go home,” Papa whispered into my hair with a kiss.

I shook my head and wiped my tears with my wrist. “No,” I said more firmly, because I realised the Tax Collector was somehow right. It wasn’t to be stroppy or dismiss my own heart, and I didn’t think he understood everything, but if I ran into comfort in my room, I wasn’t sure when I’d come out.

I didn’t want to be that ghost who shivered when asked to go pick berries in the woods; of rocking on my bed and quieting when Papa called “let’s go,” of hearing the door close as he left alone, and soaking in the loneliness like it were a blanket, to soothe my wounds by crying about how scared I’d feel going outside.

Then cursing the ghoul or cursing myself or cursing the Tax Collector for not killing the thing sooner.

The frightening thing that the Tax Collector pricked me to was how easily I could imagine, and how smoothly I could see, myself becoming her.

So I broke myself from Papa’s hold and tried to blink my eyes dry. “It’s not even noon. We can still go. And what about you, do you want to come with us?” I challenged the Tax Collector.

For if he would press this onto me, I would push it back on him.

“...Alright,” he said with mild surprise, and then smirked. “I am, a little curious.”

I nodded.

For now, he wasn’t a hypocrite.

Papa led us, through wiry tickling boughs, over the loose dirt trail to the grove. Red and green burst over all the trees as the wolfberries dappled, then abounded, on all the branches like baubles.

Lining our left and right and then closing in a big ‘u’, the wolfberry trees here formed the perfect cul-de-sac for picking. Czjeir might have shaped it exactly so people would pick, it was so inviting; and the treetops stretched so tall they sucked in the sky. Papa and I had cheered when we found it, because it was such a place that made one wonder if it existed exactly for joy.

I froze at the lip with shivering legs.

I froze for so long that Mephi caught up. Leaves crunched behind me, and I startled slightly to turn, and he was there looking quite white and ugly and gangly (like a hideous walking cadaver).

He boggled at me, (like a ghost), then thumbed his chin and smirked like he was very important and very intelligent and very much thinking about something stupidly vile to say.

I glared at him and stepped forward with my basket.

Inside the grove, I plucked handfuls of berries and tossed them into my basket. As I did, my heart quivered like it would stop. Somewhere in the darkness under the leaves, between the tree-trunks, there prowled a nasty cougar or another horrific ghoul with a face—that awful stretched face, running at me, and that rim of unclean fangs around that ghastly gullet, black as a pit.

If there really is a ghoul or cougar, Mephi will fight it off, I asserted to myself.

Not because I trusted Mephi—but if, after he told us to come, we were attacked and he failed to protect us, he would be such a terrible person that I’d celebrate to resent him.

But nothing popped out.

The toughness in my back unfurled and the sunny grove felt strangely warmer. As I discovered new sprigs, handful by handful, I found myself happy for the familiar peace of the work. Cottony white clouds scudded in a blue sky. Papa scooped off big fistfuls of berries and rained them into his basket like Zeus. He wasn’t beaming his ‘Bless the Day!’ grin, but still sprung from tree to tree.

Usually we sung ditties while we picked, and we’d race, and we’d gloat at finding the brightest, fattest berry that we called the ‘loomster’. I only hummed under my breath like a sad piper.

What of Mephi? I glanced aside to spy him. He was collecting his berries in an empty lunchbag, since we’d eaten atop the mountains, and only brought two baskets. He plucked every berry very strangely: going one-by-one, poising each one between his thumb and finger like it were a jewel. Then he tugged, and the berry released, and he’d lay it singularly in the bag.

Though a storm inside me wanted to hate him, I decided I liked that. He seemed very gentle.

“Now we’ve come to the wolfberry grove,
over rock and river we strove,
between bush and boulder we wove,
to find for us a ruby trove.”
I muttered the song loud enough so Mephi would hear. His ear twitched, then he quirked his head a bit like a puppy.

“Huh. I-I didn’t realise people actually did that. S-sing when they’re happy, I mean.”

“Well I’m still not really happy,” I disputed, though his reply twigged me surprisingly nicely. “But maybe I’ll be happier if I act like I am. Papa and I sing all the time—when we’re actually happy.”

“Hm,” he muttered, and brushed his hand over a protruding sprig. “Do you think that’s effective?”

“I thought it was nice,” I retorted. “It’s sunny and the berries are blooming, and I’m here with Papa. I had the thought to; why wouldn’t I sing?”

He eyed me suspiciously and then deflated.

“Okay... I’m... not going to start doing that...”

“Your voice would be too gloomy anyway.”

“It’s actually kind of, good.”

“Oh? And how do you know that?”

He fell cryptically silent and ripped several berries off their sprig at once. Then he counted them one-by-one with his thumb, and plopped them all in the bag. “It was mandatory, you know, weekly choir...”

“You could also cheat, and sound like a bird.”

“If I wanted...” He looked over his shoulder. “I wonder if, by pretending long enough, the brain starts running electricity through those pathways, and that’s how people change...”

“That’s so scientific,” I stalled while thinking. “I don’t think I’ve ever changed by just contemplating. If I could, I could become as wizened as an old gram-gram by just sitting in my room! I think it’s about what you experience.”

He eyed me askance.

“Because a person who has gone to a ball is different from someone who hasn’t, even if they’re the same person.” I tilted my head up professorially and shuffled more berries in.

“That’s true, actually...” he mused, fist to chin. If it surprised him that some people sang, it surprised me that some people thought that much. “Objectively, that is true...” and he looked at his own spread, clawed fingers.

“You’re actually right, at least a little,” he concluded.

“Hm!” I chuffed in victory.

Then he resumed picking berries, though mistily as if in a stupor. He wasn’t counting them anymore, but grinding the stems between his nails so that the berries fell into his bag.

A particularly large berry, more like a small pepper, popped out on a branch. I grabbed it.

“Papa,” I called, “Loomster!”

Papa galloped to land on my shoulders and admired the lumpy thing like an egg. Then I realised I was smiling too, and laughing too, and that I had gotten excited about finding it too.

“I’m glad you’ve cheered up,” Mephi said.

I almost poked my tongue out at him, but he wasn’t teasing. I’d never heard anyone sound so honest yet secretive. Did he think I would slap him? It was weird, but he was weird.

I laid the loomster in the basket and saw the sun glaring straight above us in the glade. Sweat rolled down my neck. It was past midday.

“We better start getting back, Eda,” Papa rubbed my shoulder. I nodded. We only pick berries for two hours, or three if we’re early, so we can tramp back home before sunset. I packed up my basket and took my walking stick while Papa received the lunchbag from Mephi.

“Thank you,” Papa’s mouth wrestled itself, “...Mephi,” he’d rather say ‘Tax Collector,’ “for joining our little company.”

“I—yeah,” he said.

He still didn’t have great social skills.

“Thanks,” he reattempted. “It’s been... an experience, at least.”

“A good experience?” I wagered, hand on my hip.

“A pleasant one, yeah,” he conceded, then chuckled wispily. “I wish my life was a little more like this.”

He told us such as we were exiting the glade, himself standing on the opposite end of it. It was like there was a river between us that he couldn’t cross, though it wasn’t so imposing that crossing it should be impossible. I wanted to run out, slap him, and drag him over. But I knew that would be like leashing a bear.

We might’ve ‘giggled like siblings’, as Papa put it, but he was still wonky and vicious.

He followed us distantly to the Katani, then up the hill-trail to the mountaintops. His silhouette haunted the peak as we tramped out of the foothills, then embarked across the sand towards Amsherrat. We yielded slightly more berries than normal, and as we cut their stems and boiled them into jam, laughing with Papa, I was relieved that we hadn’t quit before reaching the grove.

We returned every fortnight as usual and sometimes saw Mephi. Of those times, he picked with us ‘occasionally’. Then his visits petered out, into passing ‘helloes’ at the river or the cliffs, then into seemingly nothing, though still we might hear a strange breath or feel an intelligent gaze from the woods. I wanted to shout, ‘Stop hiding, Mephi!’, and felt he would really come out. But an odd animosity lingered in the air. Eventually I couldn’t tell if I was really sensing his presence, or imagining it.

I never understood what was so bad about us that he stopped coming, or so wrong about him that he preferred not to.