Twenty Eight

After the fire was lit and happily crackling and popping away, Bird made herself a meal. This consisted of something like hard tack and dried meat that she made into a porridge of sorts. She had gathered some wild ramps on her way through the Gulf, and used them to add some variety to an otherwise boring meal.
She used water from the strange bifurcated waterfall that fed the two rivers. Fyndraxis noted the wisdom of this act. Drinking water from the beaver pond or just downstream of it would have no doubt resulted in her spending the next couple of days shitting her brains out and waiting to die. Fortunately this wasn’t her first rodeo around a beaver pond, because that was the last thing that the Daemon Blade wanted to bear witness to.
As the light began to fade, a chorus of tree frogs began to sing. This started slowly, one of the frogs would realize that the time, temperature and humidity were ideal to start a mating ritual, and let out a call. A single call was shrill, as if the frog were being stepped on. This call would alert the tens of thousands of other little frogs in the area that it was spring and they had better get some eggs in the water before they faced an extinction level event. The frogs seemed to have been anticipating a meteor impact or a gamma ray burst, because quickly, their songs rose to a deafening cacophony. This made conversation difficult, but Bird and Fyndraxis managed to yell to each other over the ear splitting din.
The meal, and probably the booze, seemed to put Bird in decent spirits, and she decided to have a bit of a chat with Fyndraxis despite the inherent challenges posed by the frogs.
“So, what are you?” It was a forward and frank question, one that the Daemon Blade didn’t really have a good answer for.
“I am a Daemon Blade as far as I can tell,” this was a lackluster answer, kind of like describing a Knight as Knightly.
“Like a ghost?” Her internal mythos wasn’t equipped with the term Daemon.
“Not really,” he offered, in distinction, “ghosts just hang around in mansions waiting to scare teenagers and their dogs. I on the other hand am a creature of unimaginable power whose soul is bound to a sword.” Bird rolled her eyes at this blatant act of bravado, clearly seeing him as Fyn, the dude she had to carry around for some reason.
“What’s it like in there?” She asked, cocking her head.
“Inside the sword I am the ruler of a vast realm of my own creation,” he continued with the bravado thing, “anything I wish is possible. I live in a castle in the sky, and the very forces of nature are mine to command.”
“Jeez, why the fuck would you hang out here?” She asked, as she poked at the fire.
“Because,” he dropped the bravado, “I know that the world inside me is a dream. It’s not real. At least out here I’m pretty sure everything is real. I’m still kind of struggling with that one.”
“Well, I know I’m real,” she stood up and hunted for another log for the fire.
“Yeah, that’s something an NPC would say,” he called after her.
“NPC?” She asked, when she returned with a suitable log.
“Non-Player Character,” this was an arcane term pulled from the genesis of his being, “it doesn’t matter. You seem very real to me.”
“Do you remember what it was like before? When everything was fine?” Her log had caught fire, and Fyndraxis could see the light reflected in her eyes.
“Not really anything specific,” he told her, as she started digging through her bag for something, “nothing about my life or anything like that. I have a lot of knowledge about technology, so I think I worked with it in some fashion. You know when you wake up from a dream and that reality is just beyond your reach? Like its rules and logic are just barely on the tip of your tongue, but when you go to tell somebody about it, it just disappears.”
“Yeah, I think I get it,” she had been looking for a blanket, she found it and wrapped herself in it.
“I’d love to remember, but I think that part of me is just gone,” he admitted, regretfully.
“In your inner world,” she had become mostly blanket now, with just her pale face exposed to the elements, “can you eat whatever you want? I’m gettin’ pretty sick of dried bear.”
“Yeah, I could eat whatever I want. It feels weird and self indulgent though,” he imagined himself trying to enjoy an opulent meal alone in his keep, it didn’t seem very exciting.
“I’d love to come and visit you in there, and try some old world food,” her hand appeared from inside the blanket, and tried to stifle a yawn.
“If I figure that out someday, I’ll cook you a feast like you’ve never even dreamed of,” this was an utter impossibility, but they were just shooting the breeze around a very nice fire, so it was a perfectly good place to indulge in some fantasy.
“No bear though,” she had grown sick of bear, and deemed it unsuitable for this hypothetical meal.
“No bear for sure,” he agreed.
This Q&A was devolving into some sort of post apocalyptic food fantasy and Fyndraxis went on for a while about how bear really wasn’t a food that was frequently on the menu in the old world. He was about half way through explaining how bears were used more to sell food than actually act as it, when he noticed that she had drifted off to sleep.
For a newly homeless woman with possibly severe radiation poisoning, she was in uncharacteristically high spirits. The Daemon Blade Fyndraxis was really beginning to like her.
With Bird taking a much needed rest from her day’s exertion, Fyndraxis decided to enjoy the evening. He sat there enchanted by the lapping of the water in the beaver pond, and the sound of the distant waterfall. Other than that it was very quiet. No birds in the night calling to distant lovers. No frogs singing their songs to the stars. In fact, he was beginning to think it was too quiet.