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world of sky and trees within spitting distance. Such an arrangement would keep safety and fear perfectly balanced.
    He hobbled stiffly around his rough camp in his damp linen undergarments. His wet outer clothes were spread out across the butts of several large boulders encircling his fire. He moved from one to the next, flipping each of them to facilitate their drying. Each turn of the leathers sent him cursing at the sting the act brought to his hands.
    The aches and pains suffered in his flight were overwhelming. His right eye was swollen fully shut. His body was a painter’s canvas of scratches and bruises. His hands were raw from the brambles back at the road, and he had several split nails. But the crown on his entire miserable affair with the river was that he’d broken at least two ribs, probably three.
    On a happier note, however, his head wound had at last stopped bleeding.
    He sat back on the spike of the last boulder and collected his breath. Strewn about the gravel floor between his meager bed and the fire were the bony remains of a half-eaten rabbit whose luck had turned out to be even worse than his own. He considered putting the uneaten remnants in his pack, but the rabbit was all the way down there, and he was all the way up here, and the effort required to transition the two seemed insurmountable at best.
    Instead, he kicked the last faggots of wood he’d collected into the fire and watched as an explosion of sparks sallied up to the craggy ceiling where the smoke slithered away through the shards. Then he crossed around the fire and collapsed into a hastily built bed of leaves.
    His body serenaded him with a melody of aches and pains, the heart-wrenching ballad of a man whose fortune did him wrong. He’d wrapped the ripped skin of his hands and damaged eye in the fat, oily leaves of a flesca shrub he’d found on route. It would help speed the healing, but it didn’t do a damned thing to temper the pain. And though the pain was unmatched by any he’d experienced before in his roguish life, he remained grateful to the gods for having kept him alive to experience anything at all.
    He braced his ribs and winced as he rolled his way onto his back. The growing fire's warmth appeased the aches in those muscles fortunate enough to face it, but those abandoned to the colder, darker side of his bed whimpered their complaints. And since the act of turning was an excruciating ordeal at best, he opted to spend the night in one position, the halves of his body clearly divided between warmth and cold, comfort and agony. It was accurate rendition of his life’s story.
    As he waited for sleep, his mind wandered back over the wretchedness of his recent past. Though it’d been a mere two mortal years, it felt like a lifetime. The bloody savages hadn’t allowed him a single minute’s peace in the seven hundred eighty-three days he’d dedicated to his search. Small wonder he was so exhausted. And for what grand purpose had they spent so much time persecuting him? For a lousy gem? For an artifact they had neither the intellectual savvy to understand nor the cultural sophistication to appreciate.
    It was like a pig wearing a hat; it just didn’t make sense. Why do packs of wild dogs attack and kill civilians and then leave them dead and mutilated without even eating them? Because it’s their nature. Because violence for the simple sake of it gives them a deep, visceral pleasure. There’s no deeper significance in it than that. The savages may have been enlightened once a long, long time ago, but they’d since fallen feral and unpredictable, and there was no more dangerous creature on all of Calevia than beasts that’d once had a taste of civilization before reverting back to their animal temperaments.
    A wave of fatigue washed over him, as hot and breathtaking as a desert wind. He needed to push the whole affair over the abyss of his darker mind and get some rest while he was able. He removed the pouch with his