“Beaver, what’s wrong?” Frie asked.

  Everything! “The giants weren’t down there when I found this pce. If they’re really living so close to us… that is very, very bad!”

  The otter tilted her head. “What are you talking about? This is fate! It’s extremely convenient for us! Now we don’t have travel a long way to find civilization—our journey begins right here! Maybe they can teach us magic, too.”

  Oh, dear. “Frie… You’re not really thinking of going down there, are you? It’s too dangerous. The giants hunt things like us!”

  “Oh Beaver, don’t worry! I’ll teach you about plot armor ter. And it’s not like they’re the kind of giants that mindlessly eat everything in sight! This won’t take long, trust me. I made it to nationals on the swim team, so I’ll be back before you know it! Cannonball!”

  Before I could stop her, Frie leapt over the edge of my dam and spshed into the waters below.

  I hadn’t known her for very long, and she was already gone. The thought crossed my mind that I might never see her again… although her confidence suggested the impossible. If by some miracle she could actually communicate with the giants, then maybe, just maybe we had a chance to… negotiate for peace?

  I suppose if anyone could do it, it would be an otter like her. Until then, back to work.

  When the sky began to darken with the coming twilight, there was still no sign of Frie’s return. The silence felt so unusual without her here. I waited and waited until I feared for the worst.

  It wasn’t until well past dark after I had retired inside for the night that I heard spshing water again. I recognized the sound of her swimming, but something about it was different. The otter surfacing from my lodge’s underwater entrance was faster now, even frantic. “Oh my god, oh my god!” Frie cried, hugging me while gasping for breath. “Beaver, it’s awful! Something has gone horribly wrong!”

  Well, there goes our only chance for peace… “Calm down and take deep breaths,” I said. “You’re safe now. Tell me what happened when you’re ready.”

  Frie sniffled, taking a while to catch her breath. “There were so many people down in that vilge, but I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying! There’s not supposed to be a nguage barrier like this! And then… and then I got spotted, and someone started shouting and… they almost caught me. Oh god, I’m too young to go like this! I barely made it back in one piece! This is the worst starting zone ever—we have to run away, like right NOW!”

  My heart sank. “We can’t.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I’ve already spent so long here building this home. I can’t just give up now. That’s not the worst of it, though: we can’t move somewhere else and rebuild because we’re running out of time. Winter is coming.”

  Frie shivered. “Oh, right. Can’t we just dig a hole and sleep until spring?”

  “No, we don’t do that. But not all hope is lost. There’s one st thing we can do… Frie?”

  “Yes, Beaver?”

  “We’re going to need a bigger dam.”

  ***

  It was a race against time. The pns I had for my ultimate dream home, our sanctuary, grew even bigger. We could no longer afford to be subtle; except for the rgest trees—and the pines with their disgusting sap—I started chewing down everything around our ke to expand my dam as fast as possible.

  Frie felt the same urgency. Instead of pying around in the water, she offered to assist me in any way she could. Even when the air turned chillier with the coming cold, the otter helped drag sticks and branches over near the dam. While she cked the expertise of a master to fit them in pce, we could build almost twice as fast this way.

  With every new twig, branch and log added on top, the dam rose taller and taller, and the once humble creek around our ‘castle’ swelled wider and wider. The forest around us shrank, but the new growing ke would be our protection from the giants. It wasn’t long until I had to start venturing farther and farther away to find new trees to expand the dam.

  “Beaver, let me come with you!” Frie said, following after me one day. “I was wondering, do you have a different name? A real one?”

  “I suppose so, but ‘Beaver’ is close enough. It’s not like there are any others around here. Except my sister.”

  “Wait… you have a sister!? Can we ask her for help?”

  “No. She doesn’t like otters.”

  “Hmph!” Frie pouted. “That figures. Sometimes, the hero must overcome discrimination…” We continued onward in silence for a while, save for the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze or the distant chatter of birds. Suddenly, Frie came to a stop. “Beaver, look!”

  Ahead of us stood a young deer with tawny brown fur speckled with white spots. The fawn stretched its neck up to the low-hanging branch of a towering oak, happily munching on leaves while wagging its short, fluffy tail.

  “It won’t bother us,” I said.

  “Isn’t it adorable, though?” Frie asked. “That’s the cutest little deer I’ve ever seen in my life—or the st one! Wait… I have an idea!”

  “You know what happened the st time you had an idea.”

  “Hey, this is different! Maybe in this world, the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to start with humans. You can find quests from the unlikeliest characters!” The otter raised her head a little higher. “Hello, cute deer over there? Bambi?”

  The fawn perked up its ears and turned to face Frie—only to freeze when a long stick flew through its neck with a sharp, pointy rock at one end and feathers at the other. The deer fell over to the ground before a giant came stomping toward it.

  “NOOOO!” Frie cried.

  “Keep your voice down and run!” I whispered.

  We turned around and hurried back to the ke as fast as our legs would carry us. After we returned to safety, Frie had tears in her eyes. “Beaver, they… they one-shot Bambi!” she struggled to say through teary gasps. “It was innocent! This means war.”

  “Well, that happens here. You should’ve seen the time when a wolf tried to fight a bear. But you know, sometimes nature has a way of bancing things out.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do? We could… build traps or something. Like a huge pit they fall into!”

  I shook my head. “How are we going to dig a hole big enough for a giant? The ground will freeze soon, too. Let’s just focus on surviving for now; the dam upgrade isn’t complete yet.”

  “Ugh… It’s not right! Apex predators are overpowered.”

  Frie snuggled a little closer that night, but by the next day she was not satisfied. Even when the first snows began to fall, she tried building something else on her own. First she used extra sticks and arranged them in a tall pile to make what she called a ‘century tower.’ I had my doubts at first, but climbing on top of them gave her a unique vantage point to see much farther than from the ground. It even made itself useful one day.

  “Beaver, enemies incoming!” Frie shouted. “Three o’clock!”

  Somehow, she was able to spot an approaching pack of wolves long before they could threaten us. We retreated to the safety of our ke, and the howling beasts were left to stare at us with hungry eyes from the shore.

  Instead of swimming inside, Frie climbed on top of our ‘castle.’ “Come and take it, you filthy mongrels!” she hollered at them. “Screw you, and you, and you! Go bite a giant and die!”

  The wolves could only bare their fangs and snarl from a distance. They knew it would be nothing else than a waste of energy swimming through frigid waters to a fortress they could never breach.

  “I told you river rats were crazy,” a wolf grunted to another before turning and leaving.

  I joined Frie when they had all gone and the coast was clear. “Frie, it’s not good to taunt them,” I said. “But that was kind of satisfying.”

  The otter stared into my eyes with a new intensity. “Beaver, war is hell. Stay frosty.”

  “I mean, it is getting pretty cold out here.”

  Frie seemed to be suffering from a different kind of delusion now. Perhaps she was more affected by her perilous encounters with the giants than I thought. Regardless, her confidence was oddly reassuring.

  It wasn’t long before our ke’s surface froze over and a thick bnket of snow covered the world around us. Every day grew shorter and colder in winter’s embrace, yet I never stopped felling new trees for the dam. When Frie wasn’t helping me with dragging branches or looking around from one of her towers, she carried a sharp fish bone with her and practiced sneaking around behind trees and under the snow. She said our only chance in combat was this ‘goril warfare.’ Well, she seemed to be having fun with it.

  When the dam was complete, though, we wouldn’t have to worry about dangerous encounters again. I would only have to venture out for food now and then… but that dream was still somewhere out of reach.

  No heroes, no wars, no demon lords… Is such a life possible? We’re going to try, dam it!