Beneath a cloudy sky, the unruly wind sighed mournfully, in an echo of the traveler’s mood. It whipped across a rolling landscape of grass, tossing it like waves upon a sea, and he trudged painfully through it as it beast chest-high around him.

He had never seen the sea himself. Sometimes visitors from far off had brought tales of it: a lake of water that stretched endlessly outward and endlessly down. Sometimes good fish were brought in from it, but the water itself, they said, was foul and undrinkable, and the hungry waves were apt to eat those who paddled rafts too far from the land. His tribe had never been that way, and had avoided it in their migrations; in their legends it was the end of the world, with nothing to be sought within or beyond. He had always wondered if they were right, and had desired to see it for himself. At the very least, the fish might have kept them fed.

He supposed, now, that there was nothing holding him back, should he wish to go. Truly, the spirits of land and sky were fickle in their meddling with mortals.

—

He marched for as long as he could, his nostrils sniffing the air for fresh water. When at last he found it, he had nearly reached the limit of his strength; his stubby wings and antennae were flushed and outstretched from the exertion, but trembled with the effort of holding them up to dispel the heat. Homing in on the sound of water babbling over stones, he shuffled wearily toward it, sliding awkwardly down a slope, and sinking wearily onto a stony bank by a swift stream. He dunked in his head, drank gratefully, and lay back on a wide, flat stone to rest for a time.

This was the traveler, lying on his side as he faced the water. His body was covered in tiny, dark-brown scales, shading toward a rusty red on his stocky chest. Long, wiry limbs ended in clawed hands and feet, and a long, heavy tail stretched out from the base of his spine. Two vestigial wings, to small ever to bear him in flight, emerged from behind his shoulders. His neck was long, and terminated in a crocodilian head, wide and flat but with a narrow muzzle, beneath which dangled a bright red dewlap of loose skin. His eyes were a dark amber around slit pupils, shielded under increasingly heavy eyelids. Around his neck he wore a necklace of polished bone beads; a short kilt of woven grass hung from his waist, and just above it, crudely lashed in place with a length of twine, was a blood-soaked bandaged on his side. Beside him, where he had laid it, was a bundle containing what meager store of food he had managed to gather as he had hurried away from the wreckage of his tribe’s camp.

He dozed for some hours, lulled by the sound of the stream, before dragging himself into consciousness. He undid the twine, removed the makeshift bandage, and glanced at the wound beneath his ribs, grimacing at the sight of the blood still dribbling from it. He hauled himself to his feet, swaying slightly, and glanced around the streambank. No softseed here; too stony for it to grow.

He picked up his bundle and shuffled downstream until he came to a place where the land flattened out and the stream formed a shallow pool. He smiled grimly at the sight of what he sought: tall grasses growing at the margin of the water, with greenish-yellow orbs clustered near the top. He waded in and collected some of these, stowing most in the bundle, and broke open the last few to reveal a matted white fluff inside; these he worked into a broad wad that he lashed back into place over the wound. As he stood there, a fish swam past his leg, and his long arm flashed down into the water and caught it before it could move away.

He waded back onto shore, stuffing the fish into his mouth. He would have preferred it cooked, but he had nothing to cook it with, and in any case was hungry and weak enough not to spurn a gift from the spirits of this place. The sac beneath his muzzle inflated briefly, and fluttered as he emitted an unsteady but resonant thrum of gratitude.

But the brief moment of hope passed all too soon, and he sank to the ground amidst the reeds. His tribe was gone; he was still bleeding, and there was no one with a healer’s skills to tend his wound properly; he had all too little in the way of food, and all too little strength with which to gather more. A fish and a new bandage were welcome, but they would not carry him far. Perhaps, he thought, he should stay here for a while – perhaps there was. Surely he was far enough away from the raiders by now.

A raindrop splattered on the top of his head, reminding him that finding some kind of shelter might not be a bad idea either.

But later. Just now, he had to rest. Reaching up, he pulled down the tops of a cluster of the nearest grasses and pulled them over him, awkwardly tucking their ends under his body as he lay down; it would not keep a heavy rain off him, but it might spare him a casual soaking. His head dropped to the ground, and, in spite of the increasing drumbeat of the rain, he fell asleep.

He lay there for hours. He never heard the rustling of approaching feet, nor the muttered words; and the hands that seized him wakened him only briefly before a carefully-judged rap to the skull with a cudgel returned him to unconsciousness.

—

At first, he thought had had been captured by the same raiders that had attacked the camp, that they had followed him. But those, like their victims, had been lean and ragged; they had attacked and killed out of desperation rather than malice. But the band that led him, tethered by the wrists, toward the north, were much different; purposeful, well-fed. And, indeed, well-equipped; they had weapons and tools of bright metal, such as he had only ever heard about.

And, surprisingly, they were not overtly hostile. They were not friendly, either, not by any means, but they were… hospitable in a businesslike way, if that word could be applied to captors acting toward a captive. They fed him well, better than he had been fed in some time. They had cleaned out his wound with some kind of strong-smelling liquor.