The days were beginning to blur together.

  Now that the issue of cold was solved, they travelled from sunrise to sunset and often skipped over the first encampment they came across. Echo said that now they were covering ground twice as fast as the adventurers did on foot, and she seemed more and more certain that it was the toad tracking them rather than the other way around.

  Judging by how often the toad stopped to sniff the air, they both agreed they were getting close to the moment where the echo of the toad would catch up with the adventurers in real time retive to them both. Or, well, Echo expined it that way, and Denholm just nodded along, pretending he understood what retive time meant.

  Despite the fact that for once, he seemed to be on a quest that might actually end in something positive, he found his thoughts looping over and over again on a far too vivid dream he’d had the night before. In the past, Denholm always had trouble remembering most of his dreams once he was fully awake, but st night had been different. Even well into today, it felt like every third thought was an image of the white mask, vertical eyes blinking behind the eyeslits.

  Denholm shivered, and it was not because of the cold.

  After eight total days of toad riding, the snow had mostly cleared, all but for a few patches under the shade of tree bows. Denholm had eaten most of those nights. Truffles and left over nuts from squirrels that hadn’t survived this abrupt and harsh winter were proving to be surprisingly repeatable sources of protein. He was grateful to have a break from his previous berry-only diet, but it was not without its problems. Mainly, how quickly and, sometimes unexpectedly, the need arose to expel it out the other end. That mild inconvenience was, however, made much worse by the fact that, since Denholm wore the goddess over his body most of the day, he frequently–and often frantically–had to request that she remove herself from him until he was finished with his business.

  It was something even Denholm, after all he had been through, could find humor in. Of all the things he might have imagined making a travelling companion of a god would result in, a constant source of embarrassing moments reted to his own bodily functions was not one of them.

  Finally, on the ninth day since they first began seeking out the adventurers whose echoes had helped sustain their warmth throughout the night and given them a sembnce of purpose throughout the day, something changed. Around midday, the toad came to a halt, turned its nose up into the air, and sniffed audibly, just like it did several times per day to keep track of the adventurers' scent. But this time, it did not merely continue walking on after it found the scent again.

  Without warning, it leaped into the air.

  Denholm only managed to keep hold of the wart thanks to the goddess adding her strength to his. Even through the yer of goddess stuff coating his entire body, he could hear the hiss of air from how rapidly they were flying. And did they ever fly.

  The toad’s leap must have carried them several hundred feet. When it nded, the impact was enough to shake loose their grip, tossing the two of them into a nearby tree canopy. They hit several branches on the way down, their spinning descent only coming to an end once they smmed down on the forest floor. If it wasn’t for her substance covering him, he would most certainly be dead. Instead, he turned over onto his back, groaning. Sore in a dozen pces, but alive.

  Without asking his permission, Denholm was floated up to his feet.

  “Hold on!” Denholm pleaded. “You should get off me… I think I’m going to vomit.”

  “Look,” Echo replied.

  Denholm blinked, and followed his own finger being pointed for him. The toad was sailing through the air again. After it nded, it wasted hardly a second before making another mighty leap. And again, and again, until he lost track of it.

  “It knows its quarry is close. The moment the toad and the adventurers meet is near. Come on. Our quest is about to either take a great leap forward or be proven a fruitless chase of those already taken by madness of the Outside.”

  She started forcing his body to walk forward, again without asking him.

  “For a god, you are really impatient!” Denholm compined, then felt a wave of nausea approaching that he couldn’t fight any longer. He wretched.

  Her lips–still yered over his own–tightened around his, pressing them shut to prevent the vomit from escaping his mouth. Denholm tried to protest but eventually swallowed his pride, along with the acidic mess.

  “Don’t waste what little food we’ve managed to find,” Echo said, voice completely emotionless.

  ***

  Denholm didn’t have much say, as his body was more or less being controlled entirely by Echo. To be fair, things were quite a bit quicker this way. Even with him wrapped up inside her, Echo could still move their two bodies faster than Denholm could if he was left to his own devices. Their every step together glided further than it should have, as if he only weighed half as much as usual and was twice as strong. When various obstacles such as creeks, small gorges, or hefty pileups of deadfall blocked their path, she made easy work of them. She couldn’t quite fly with Denholm’s weight to carry, but she could send them leaping across absurd distances and was deft enough that Denholm would bet she could have moved from tree top to tree top with as much ease as she did down at ground level. All the way, she spoke often to Denholm, narrating her every thought from the sound of it. After the first few minutes of it, he decided it was best to keep his mouth shut in regards to his surprise at the amount of excitement she was clearly feeling towards the prospect of their quest reaching its end. In the time he had known her so far, he’d rarely heard more than a hint of emotion leaking into her speech. Well, besides that hellish scream when they’d very first met and he’d thrown himself off of a cliff face. But… in retrospect, that reaction seemed a fair one.

  After less than an hour’s pursuit aimed in the direction it had leapt off in, Echo informed him she sensed that their unknowing travelling companion and makeshift steed had come to a stop completely, some ways ahead of them. She couldn’t tell for certain why, and perhaps it was in his imagination, but even Echo seemed to be getting a little worried. Until, only a minute ter, she stopped completely at the peak of a ridge and spoke to him with both excitement and worry in equal measure bleeding into her voice.

  “I think I sense it clearly now,” she said, still wrapped around him as a god-cloak. “I believe I have the answer to our question, but we won’t know until we see for ourselves, since my sense of both the echoes of the toad and adventurers are dissipating.”

  “What does that mean?” Denholm asked.

  “We have caught up to their present, so I can no longer see,” she replied evenly. “The toad and the adventurers' paths cross only a few minutes ahead of us now.”

  Even though it had been their goal all along, a knot of worry began clenching up inside Denholm’s stomach. It only now occurred to him that since they were going to meet the real creatures and people behind the echoes they had followed for so long, Echo would no longer be able to predict the outcomes of what might happen next. “Do you think the toad really ate them? Or are they going to kill it?”

  “Feeling worried for it after how far it has brought us? I do remember you mentioning a fondness for the creatures.”

  Denholm squirmed, though the god-stuff wrapping him didn’t leave much room to wiggle in. “No,” he said more defensively than intended. “The toads in the gde could fit in my hand. They were harmless, maybe even a little cute,” he admitted–it had been his pn to sell them as pets, after all. “That thing we rode was nice and all when it was just an echo but… I’m…”

  “Scared?” her soft voice asked. Annoyingly, he again felt her smile, the corners of her cheeks tugging at his own.

  Denholm sighed. Once, before the Trickster, before Silvi’s death, he would have felt the need to retort such an affront to his pride. After how thoroughly the world had been in showing him how small and meaningless he was, he found he only had barely enough energy to give the easiest answer of all, the honest one. “Yes.”

  “Good,” she replied. “That means you’re learning.”

  It didn’t take long to find the toad, or what was left of it.

  They found the carcass of the huge toad with the adventurers still mulling around it. Judging from the fact steam was still rising from a gaping crater in the upturned toad’s torso, it couldn’t have been all that long since they killed it. Not even a day. However, it did seem like some time had passed since one of them had already set up a cook fire and was currently inspecting a cut of goliath toad meat before putting it into his pot of boiling water.

  Denholm and Echo watched from a nearby tree, standing on a branch about twenty feet off the ground. Denholm’s assumption had proved right. Once they heard the first traces of voices coming through the trees ahead of them letting them know they were close, Echo–and by extension Denholm–had jumped up into the tree canopy and closed the remaining distance by hopping from branch to branch until they reached their current spot, crouching low, hidden in the evergreen bows. Together, they watched the scene with trepidation.

  The adventures were exactly as he remembered them from the echoes. The tall one with long hair and a sword was pacing back and forth with his hands on his hips, his yered robe covered in an unfortunate amount of toad blood. The one who sat by the fire going about the process of boiling the toad meat had hair almost as long, but an entirely bald patch encircling the top of his head. He also had a thick mustache, adding to his appearance as far and above the oldest in the group. The st male member of their group was a stout, yet absurdly wide man. He was sprawled out, lying on his back atop the toad's corpse, a pair of small axes still clutched in each hand. His garb appeared simir to the sword wielder, though showing somewhat more wear and tear around the fringes.

  There was one, however, that drew his gaze even more strongly than he had expected she would, and that was saying something. The girl with hair down to her waist and bangs that went almost to her eyebrows, just like Silvi used to have, was just as she had appeared as an Echo, only that now he could see her in full color. And with that, he found a peculiarity he was most certainly not expecting. Her hair was purple, and vibrantly so. She wore simirly functional clothes to the other men, though her’s included a series of fps that hung down to form a shape not unlike a dress or a long skirt, though it appeared far less restricting to movement than a dress.

  “What should we do?” Denholm whispered, trying to pretend his voice and body weren’t both shaking with anxiety.

  “This is your quest,” Echo replied. “Think of me as a curious observer willing to lend a hand.”

  “Could you use your observation skills to tell me what I should do?”

  “Talk to them,” she said simply.

  “Maybe you could talk to them first?”

  “That would probably go much worse. Humans tend to fear Wanderers like me, and for very good reason.” Her voice held an undertone of notes that made Denholm acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, that someone as friendly as Echo might have suffered quite a lot of loneliness due to her kind's reputation.

  Realization sparked in Denholm’s mind.

  Suddenly, it was obvious why she sounded so excited as they got closer. She might not admit as much, but he got the feeling she was quite eager for an opportunity, even a slim one, at making more human friends. And the only thing standing between that happening and not was whether Denholm could bring himself to overcome his little bout of uncertainty.

  With a level of unthinking confidence that echoed his former, more naive self, Denholm stepped off the branch. Echo mirrored his movements without resistance, floating the both of them down towards the adventurers. “Hello!” Denholm decred through both his and Echo’s lips–though it was his voice that came out.

  “God!” the man lounging atop the toad screamed, pointing at Denholm as he floated down from the branch.

  The long-haired one was already drawing his sword, but that was far from the worse of it. Before Denholm or Echo could react, the man had already lept off the ground and was somehow sailing through the air as if gravity didn’t apply to him, and worse, he was headed right at them with his straight-bded sword poised to slice right through their midsection.

  “Wait! Wait!” Denholm yelped, filing his hands in front of him.

  Echo tried to jerk them to the side, but she was too slow. The sword passed right through them. Denholm and Echo crashed to the ground, their momentum carrying them into an awkward sprawl, though her form never left its pce yered over Denholm.

  Two things were immediately apparent. One, despite expectations, Denholm’s groping hands found that he was not cut in half, nor had his guts been spilled all over the ground. The second, while less relieving, was punctuated by the tip of the sword less than an inch away from Denholm’s nose. Thanks to this cheery fact and the completely devoid-of-cheer face on the man wielding it, Denholm decided he better stay completely motionless where he was.

  Without any prompting from Denholm, Echo’s substance slid away from his face, and he felt the thick green hood pulling back of its own volition as well, revealing Denholm’s head.

  “You’re a human,” the man said with a quizzical bend to his voice. “I almost killed you.” This time, the words were ft and with a terrifying ring of truth to them. In fact, Denholm still had no idea why he wasn’t in two very dead pieces at current.

  “Sorry,” was the only thing Denholm could think to respond with.

  It was met with a raised eyebrow and an ever more confused expression. “Get to your feet, but no sudden moves.”

  Denholm obliged, his hands held up in surrender.

  “Now, who might this be?” The one holding two axes asked from just behind the sword wielder as he finished jogging over. Somehow, in the tiny span of time Denholm had spent rolling on the ground, he had already made his way down from the toad to back up his friend.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl who resembled Silvi moving over as well, though she was taking her time and seemed overall much more rexed than the other two. “Both of you are idiots. He’s just a kid. You look silly.” The voice of the purple-haired girl nearly took Denholm off his feet, though the lump in the ground his heel snagged on as he backtracked away from the pointy end of the sword didn’t help either. Every word was like honey flowing over the call of one of the more pleasant-sounding songbirds he had known from the Gde.

  “And you are not nearly cautious enough, even after all we have seen, Nuzumi,” the swordsman said, raising an eyebrow at her, yet he did reluctantly lower his bde. It was not lost on Denholm that the weapon still remained in his hand rather than being resheathed, however.

  “Are you marked?” The axe wielder asked, gesturing vaguely at Denholm with an expression that reminded Denholm of the butcher from the Gde just before he started yelling.

  It took him a long moment to pry his mind away from the memory of Nuzumi’s voice. And more, now he knew she had a name, and a pretty one at that. “Marked?” Denholm asked, a small spark of recognition making itself known at the back of his mind, though he couldn’t say exactly why.

  The axe wielder gestured at Denholm’s body again, and it was only then that he remembered that he was faintly glowing all over thanks to Echo’s god substance covering him. The only somewhat ordinary part of his appearance was the thick, green cloak draping him. It was also made from Echo, but due to its ck of glow and muted tones, it cked the same supernatural appearance. “Oh, that’s… well, that’s Echo.” Denholm was never much good at coming up with lies on the spot. Even so, he probably should have known that an answer like that left a lot of room for expnation.

  “Echo?” The swordsman’s face was ever more a mask of confusion by the moment.

  “She’s a Wanderer, a god trapped in the Outside like us… I guess.” Denholm realized only a second too te that perhaps he should have thought before making the presence of his protector known. While they had chased these adventurers for weeks with the hope that they might be amiable, even friendly, it struck him in this moment just how little he actually knew of them. Well, regardless, it was out there. “She just stays like this to protect me. We call it the god-cloak.” Denholm gestured at a random spot on his torso where the dimly glowing substance hugged him tightly, though there really was no need.

  If an eyebrow could raise any higher, it would be called a skybrow. “Uhuh,” the swordsman mumbled.

  “Wait,” Nuzumi interjected, pointing a long-nailed finger and moving yet another step closer despite her companions’ obvious standoffishness. “I think I believe him. Look at the way his cloak is moving. It’s twitching like it’s alive, yet there’s no wind.”

  Denholm gnced down only to find it to be the truth. In fact, the way Echo’s cloak was erratically rippling, it seemed nervous. The swordsman took a step back, as did the axe-wielder, who then made a long, sweeping sidestep so the swordsman was no longer in between him and Denholm. “If it is true, then make yourself known, Wanderer.” He sneered the st word like a curse.

  Denholm took a reflexive step back, mirroring the dispy of uncertainty.

  “Hold on,” Nuzumi said, stepping into the continually widening gap between them. “We’re not tyrants,” she said, directing those words poignantly at her two skittish companions. She then turned to Denholm, giving him a brief, searching look, before her expression settled on resolve. “And we won’t hurt you. My friends scare easily, but I don’t.” She continued toward him until she was close enough he could have reached out and touched her.

  “Nuzumi, you should really–”

  “Shut up,” she shot over her shoulder. Then, turning her attention back to Denholm, she kneeled down, bringing them almost eye to eye and making it apparent just how much taller she had been than him when standing. Her eyes were piercing, perceptive, and most noticeably of all, they were the same unnatural shade of purple as her hair. “Tell me. Just how did a kid like you end up all the way out here?”

  “I’m not that young. You don’t have to treat me like I’m stupid either. I get it. Things are dangerous out here. Echo–” Denholm blinked, realizing what he was about to do was going to look awfully like he was talking to himself unless Echo responded. In fact, a small, terrified part of his mind worried she was just a figment of his imagination all this time. Denholm cleared his throat and steeled his nerves, doing his best to ignore the pair of purple eyes boring into his soul. “Echo, I think it’s ok if you come out now. I know you’re scared. I am too. But it’s either this or we go our own way.”

  Denholm felt her god-substance peeling away from his body, a sensation he still hadn’t and he doubted ever would be able to get used to. She re-shaped herself into her vaguely feminine but not overtly human form beside him.

  Both men behind the purple-haired young woman flinched. Nuzumi, meanwhile, only smiled, eyes twinkling with curiosity as she studied Echo in all her glory.

  “Hello,” Echo said.

  “He has… control over a wanderer?” The axe-wielder’s voice was tinged with awe and lingering hesitance in equal measure. “There must be some kind of strange Mark at work.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” continued the swordsman. “He must have some Mark that allows him to bind it as some kind of… sve?” He frowned, suddenly looking very thoughtful and just a smidge devious. “A Mark from a Wanderer that gives control over other Wanderers… That could be useful. Quite useful indeed.”

  “Or deadly,” Axes said, narrowing his eyes. “He can’t possibly be keeping her stable in his control even while he’s sleeping.” He leaned in towards the swordsman conspiratorially. “I already know what you are thinking, Jezra, and the answer is no. Too risky.”

  The swordsman, whose name was apparently Jezra, made a contemptive gesture. “Maybe so. Maybe we hear out what his pet god can do first. Sometimes, a bigger sword comes with a double edge. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t swing it.”

  Something sat incredibly ill with Denholm about the way they talked, both as if he were not there to hear them, but also as if Echo was some kind of tool they could leverage. Without even realizing he was doing it, Denholm had shifted to put himself between the two of them and Echo. “She’s not a sve!” Denholm blurted. “And I’m not using some power to make her do anything. Her name is Echo, and she is my friend.”

  That was met by a long silence and surprised expressions by all but the bald one, who didn't even look up from his cooking.

  “You convinced a god to… help you?”

  Denholm frowned. He hadn’t even bothered to think about it until now. “Does that not happen very often?”

  Their entire group shared gnces.

  “He didn’t convince me to do anything. I found a friend in an unlikely pce is all,” Echo said in her usual, strangely melodious way.

  This time, it was more than a mere flinch. Even though Echo had not made any move from where she had first appeared and only spoken a brief and harmless greeting, the sword in Jezra’s hand was held up again, point aimed in their direction. The axe-man was frowning heavily, but less inclined than his friend to make an overt showing of aggression, though Denholm noticed his knuckles whitening as his grip around his two stubby axe hilts cramped down tighter.

  There was a short standoff where the only motion between the five of them was Nuzumi taking the time to rise up to her feet and roll her eyes at Jezra.

  It was only in the complete silence they now found themselves in that Denholm became aware of the subtle sounds of something metalic scraping, and when his eyes drew to it he then remembered for the first time since he had hit the ground that there was yet a fourth adventurer beyond the three who had been a part of this confrontation so far. It was the sound of a dle stirring broth in a metal pot, and its wielder was neither near as young as the other three adventurers nor apparently even remotely interested in the source of their worries. His eyes remained fixed solely on the pot he was stirring.

  As if he had sensed Denholm’s attention on him, the balding man began to speak in a voice so dry and earthy it could not have been a further opposite to Nuzumi’s. “Is anyone hungry?”

  Jezra scoffed. “Before we eat, we need to understand the danger posed by this new–”

  “Understanding comes with a full belly and a calm mind,” the old cook interrupted. “What you are doing is bound to end in an exceptionally unkind way. I can tell that by the tone in your voices alone. Come now. Eat and talk, or I will exclude you all from my cooking for the next week.”

  Jezra and the axe wielder shared a gnce with genuine terror in it, alluding to the possibility that this kind of threat had been made and followed through on before. Still, it was Nuzumi who was first to move. She was already sat cross-legged and warming her hands before the other two had even begun to move.

  Denholm shared an uncertain look with Echo. She smiled back at him, giving the subtlest of nods.