Over the crescent bobbed a little head—not necessarily little, but by its distance it seemed small—that was soon shown to be accompanied by two other little heads. Sticking the blade in the stump, Kjeld Jens shifted his weight onto his father’s old axe, straining his eyes to see past the poinsettian rays tiptoeing over the tops and through the branches of thinning-leaved trees lining the horizon. To his left sat his small wooden abode, adorned with two happy circular windows with oaken shutters he had fashioned himself; to his right ran the Long Road, along which the proprietors of the little bobbing heads were traveling. He adjusted the brim of his straw hat, but doing so only knocked a clump of hair down over his face, which both rendered his eyes useless and tickled his nose. By the time he had the hair tucked behind his ear and back beneath the hat, the strangers were within recognizable distance; Kjeld took a step back and wheezed as Mogs Ortalla tackled him with a shoulder straight to the stomach, landing hard on top; the hat sailed off, ending up near the stump.
    Kjeld was a young man, needless to say. He commonly wore a straw hat, and due to a recent bask in the sun had a distinct margin between face and forehead. It was bad enough that he had taken the day off, but now his father even had proof. His jaw was square, his nose big, and his ears small; his hair was thick and dark, chin-length, which he usually kept up under the hat. Across the shoulders he was broad but a tad bent-in; his chest and down were no different than any other seventeen-year-old farmer’s. In contrast to his primarily masculine features, south of his nostrils was a set of not-wholly-puffy lips that none of the women in Riverhill hadn’t commented on yet. Also deceiving to the eye was his measurable fragility. Mogs—a head shorter than Kjeld, and small framed at that—had absolutely no problem getting the last scone on even his giddiest of days.
    “Hey, now! I’ve got an axe here, and I’ve swung it a time or two.” Kjeld puffed out between coughs and guffaws. Mogs and his two brothers, Piet and Hask, were on their way back from town, their two horses loaded down with so many tools and supplies that their eggshell-furred bodies were almost completely hidden. Piet and Hask were laughing, patting the horses on the head as they brought them to a halt. “Who is named Mogs, anyway?”
     “You know my mother,” Mogs chuckled. His mother, Lietu Ortalla, was the daughter of Pieta, daughter of Hrica, and so on. The family was known throughout Crae for being a lineage of odd names. No one was ever sure if the odd names were a result of general strangeness or wrath for each mother being given an odd name in the first place. It was commonplace to associate strangely humorous events with a chiming of Ortalla.
     The Ortallas lived beyond Kjeld’s farm, in the second ring of farmland surrounding Riverhill. It was a bit of a trek from their land into town, perhaps a two hours’ walk; in fact, they were closer to Foranh (which lied east of Riverhill), but the supplies in Riverhill were more abundant and of better quality; and if not for restocking there, Mogs would not see Kjeld except on festival days (which there were quite a few of, as any local would be quick to mention: Riverhillers loved to celebrate). Kjeld dusted himself off, hobbling up onto his feet. He noticed that he needed a new pair of shoes. He would have to get those when he went into town, he supposed. A few blades of grass stuck up between his big and second toe.
     “Dearest father will be wonderin’ what’s takin’ us so long, so we best be on our way,” called Piet. His horse shook its head, as if in counterpoint. Mogs gave Kjeld a hard smack on the arm, running back towards his brothers as Kjeld withdrew the axe from the stump and started chasing him, screaming.
     “Kjeld!” a voice bellowed out from the window of the house, “you can kill the rat when you come back from town.” Kjeld and the brothers laughed. The voice belonged to Haldor Jens, who was Kjeld’s father.
     “A pleasure, as always, mister Jens.” Mogs said as he took a deep bow, drawing off his woven hat and sweeping it widely underneath him. The two had had an exaggerated rivalry since Mogs was old enough to speak: it all started when Mogs tripped and spilled a bucket of milk straight into Haldor. This wouldn’t have been so terrible a mishap should Haldor not have been amongst a large group of folks and he alone weren’t to get the entirety of the liquid after Mogs swirled and dodged around all others in the crowd, and Mogs weren’t to let the bucket fall direct into the man’s knee as well.
     “Go eat something,” Kjeld’s father replied, “your father will burn you for firewood if you don’t show ‘im there’s more to you than bones.” Mogs gave Kjeld his farewells, and walked back to his brothers. They were soon three little bobbing heads on the horizon again; the sun was almost down at that point.
     Mogs’ father and Kjeld’s father had been friends from childhood. They had grown together in a distant town which men called Dwarfhouse, or properly Þírmhun. Both of the fathers were Halfelven, which made the two of them stand out—literally—in a crowd of short bearded men. Since settling on Riverhill, neither had returned to Þírmhun.
     Kjeld briskly made his way to the window, axe slung over his shoulder, feeling dirt and grass filling the space between his toes more with every step. The last fiery arch of the sun had its apex poked up over the trees, but was failing rapidly; the moon was already moving to replace it. There would still be light for another hour or so, and Kjeld wanted to postpone leaving for town until then. Though he loved to see the shops and people, today he felt strangely detached.
     “Go to town,” Haldor commanded gently, “we desperately need new equipment. And get a pair of shoes, too.”
     “But father,” he whined, though that never worked, “let me just finish up on the wood, yeah? It’ll take no more than a half hour, I swear.” Lifting his meaty arm, Haldor extended his finger and stared after it. Kjeld spun around with the assumption that Mogs was coming up for a sneak-attack. The yard up to the road was completely empty, except for the pile of tools, the saddle, and the tree stump.
    Ah: the head of the axe was full-edge in the wood. Kjeld discarded the handle, and turned back to his father.
    “Don’t say it, don’t say it, you would do a good job cuttin’ up that wood with such a shapely axe.”
    “No, I wouldn’t’ve said that at’all,” Haldor grinned in response, “I was going to say you’d do a good job cuttin’ up that Mogs.”

     Inside the aging wooden house, whose every second floorboard cackled like a witch, the two sat at a large oak table beside the door, suitable for no less than six mouths; three chairs, which had been roughly fashioned from branches and spare pieces of lumber, were all that belonged to it. The beds—one in each corner opposite the front door—were of much higher quality, having been built by an old woodsmen from Baradh (at a costly 30 coppers a piece), and showed no signs of age at all. A ladder on the long wall facing north lead up to a cramped attic that served mostly as a storage room, but occasionally Kjeld would go up through the splintery trapdoor to bask on the thickly thatched roof. The trapdoor exited the house on the side facing away from the road; several times Kjeld had thrown vegetables at Mogs from the roof without being caught. While his father worked away, Kjeld was outfitting four saddlebags with some food, coppers and supplies for his journey into the city.
     “There,” Haldor sighed in satisfaction, “fixed.” He handed his son the leather strap for the horse’s saddlebags. Somehow, undoubtedly by being trampled over, the buckle for the strap had become incredibly deformed: the buckle itself was bent half as much as the fingers in a fist, and the locking piece was jammed underneath. After a good few hours of tinkering, while Kjeld broke up wood to be used for an annex to the stable, the strap was ready to haul home a full load. “Now make sure you get new shoes, Kjeld. There’s a lot of work to be done before late autumn, and we don’t need you limpin’ around with sore and blistered feet.”
     “Yeah, father, I’ll make sure. Do you want me to set Pal out in the garden to watch for rabbits?” Kjeld was still looking for any way to delay his trip to the city. His father was on to him, though. He picked up an old shirt and threw it on, aware that his immediate departure was inevitable.
    “No, I’ll do that myself, now.”
    “Well should I–”
    “No, I’ll do that myself, too.” Haldor interrupted with a grin. “And anything else you could possibly ask to do, I’ll do that, too. Now get out of here.” Kjeld blew out his nose at him, then whirled around and strode out the door.

     The sun, invisible now, as it had been for several minutes, cast the sky in the most beautiful hues of violet and orange. The violets were concentrated mostly around a single but mammoth dark cloud towards the south; Kjeld wasn’t concerned, as Riverhill was north-east, and the wooden Jens’ Farm sign swung the opposite direction in a mild breeze. Swinging his arm down, he caught his hat between his digits, threw his head back and plopped the straw down to secure his light brown hair in place. He looped the saddlebags one by one onto the doctored strap, first the large and then the small bags, then fastened the contraption tightly onto Sam’s saddle.
    Sam was a stout workhorse, who could carry as much alone as both of the Ortalla horses. His shoulder muscles were bursting out of his grayish-black skin, his short mane and tail showed that there was nothing fluffy about him; and he was ever obsequious—the more weight you tied to him, the more excited he became. He snorted and shook his head as Kjeld clambered up into the saddle, anxious to get moving. The first streams of darkness cut across the eastern sky, and the shadow of the trees faded as the rest of the environment gradually matched in shade. Looking back to his wooden abode, Kjeld watched his father put a candle in the window.
    “Don’t expect me home tonight,” he called, “half the shops’ll be closed by the time I’m a quarter done. I’ll get Sam tied up at Cobe Haven, spend the night there. I’ll be back by noon, yeah?” Haldor hesitated a moment before replying.
    “I s’pose. You should see if your mother can’t give you a bale to sleep on.” Kjeld had forgotten that his mother was in town, looking after her sick brother. He waved to his father, and poked his heel into the horse’s side. Holding on to the reins with one hand, and patting Sam's neck with the other, they started off at a slow trot towards Riverhill.

     A few stars were sailing now in the east, and the dark cloud to the south, though somewhat difficult to see, was ever growing. The wind had picked up a little, and Kjeld wished he had worn a thicker shirt. The sweat from chopping wood that had absorbed into his clothes gave him a chill, and the sweat still on his forearms chilled him even more. He rubbed his arms against his chest to try to warm up, and curled his fingers to revive the lost circulation.
     This autumn was a relatively cool one already, and it had just started nigh a week past. The red-orange color of the leaves played with the light and set the whole world on fire; the grass was yellow, and it seemed to the eye that all things were aging in harmony with the World. As beautiful as it was, this was how Riverhill looked most every autumn, and Kjeld was more than mindful of this. Naturally, as all young farmers, he had never had the chance to venture out beyond the end of the pastures of the Ortallas. Once, sure, he had been to Foranh, but Foranh was a dwarf to Riverhill (which was a dwarf itself to the cities in the south); and once, when he was younger, he had lost himself in the woods, but he had never left the farming circles of the two towns. Such was agonizing for Kjeld: he lived on the last farm of the Long Road, which rose from the southwest of the World, and ran straight across the continent as far as Riverhill in the northeast, and every glance away from Riverhill was a glance at opportunity, the unknown, the rest of the World. It had been his dream, lo, every child farmer’s dream, to escape the tilled plains and follow the Long Road to its magnificent end, somewhere only described in tales and lore. But alas, farmers had to work the majority of the year, and in the winter most were not the slightest bit willing to travel far from a friendly hearth and mum’s famous muffincakes. Needless to say, every mum’s muffincakes were the best (the same could not be said for Lietu’s muffincakes, which inevitably left the oven blacker than the unfathomest depths of an endless abyss).
    Being a farmer hadn’t alone kept Kjeld from leaving. He had wanted to attend school far south in Baradh, near the borders of Ríven; in fact his parents were ready to send him off when he was six years old.
    Sam’s hoof snapped a twig underfoot. He and Kjeld were passing into Genglyn, the forest between the last stretches of farmland and Riverhill. While it was perhaps only a mile or two from the pasture to the town, Genglyn was actually quite massive. Though it thinned out the further North you trekked, it was always very thickly wooded, and at its widest point in the south it was nearly seven dayes across, assuming you didn’t get swallowed up by the Gengmuck. It was widely feared to travel through Genglyn, as it had once been completely populated by Trolls (or properly Gængr); they were rarely seen, and those that were did not stick around for long. Sam certainly didn’t fear the Trolls: he stomped loudly along the gravel and grass path, keeping his head high and straight. Whether affectation or not, Kjeld certainly bought it, and tried to be more like Sam himself. He started thinking of the World again to make his mind stray from thoughts of Trolls.
    Genglyn was so densely leaved that autumn was half past before any noticeable change could be spotted from the outside; inside, of course, the floor was littered with leaves, and after any quantity of rainfall it became a dangerous place to travel by foot. The mouth of the forest, from Kjeld’s mount, was most unwelcoming. The sun was hard-pressed to strongly illuminate the forest on clear-skied days, and the moon could only accomplish such a task in the absolute dead of winter. As Kjeld approached, the wind blew silently, shaking the looming trees in the most foreboding display he could remember. He dropped his chin to his chest as the first dangling limbs of half-fallen trees curled a few feet overhead.
    A strong gust of wind threw Kjeld into a shiver and brought his arms tightly together; even Sam whinnied as it blew through. Kjeld twisted his head around to look over his shoulder. The slightest bit of light made the mouth of the path squintably visible, if you didn’t look straight at it. Kjeld watched it slowly fade away both from distance and darkness, then stuck Sam with his heel, bringing him up to a slow trot. As the pair lollopped along the path, interspersed beams of silvery moonlight trickled down through the dense foliage, and dripped softly onto the root-blistered ground. Its puddles shifted and disappeared with even the weakest breath of the wind.
    At the thought of breath, Kjeld began imagining to hear whispers. Imagining was what he convinced himself he was doing—halfway between Riverhill and the first ring, the last thing one would seek to encounter was something silent and mysterious (such was probably worse than a wailing man overtly waving an axe above their head, most would agree). Under general circumstances, Kjeld wouldn’t have stalled—he had a thing for imagination and was aware of that—but the whispers he believed he was hearing slithered into his ears just the right way to persuade him to halt. Leaning over and clicking his tongue near Sam’s right ear, the horse issued a coarse breath in acknowledgement. First coming to a sloth’s pace, then a turtle’s, then a snail’s, the couple stood as silent as humanly and equinely possible, dead-centre of the pass. The whispers seemed like shouts now; but after a moment they ceased, and rather quickly when they did. Kjeld stared forward, not wanting to seem like he had noticed anything. However, the instant they stopped, he choked and sucked in an amazingly noisy breath. He cursed himself, then proceeded to curse himself again for cursing himself so loudly the first time. The whispers had not sounded since Kjeld had made his impressive, stealthy stop. “Mogs will never stop laughing after you let him in on this one,” he told himself.
    While he didn’t see it as absolutely necessary, Kjeld remembered packing a butterknife for breakfast in one of the saddlebags. His arm stretched as far down as it could, but fell short of arriving at the pouch. Presumably, the Trolls would wait to see if Kjeld was a threat. Only one option presented itself as apparent.
    “Well, Sam,” Kjeld drawled, his voice as steady as the sea in the most violent of storms, “my legs are just so stiff from riding that I think I’ll hop down and stretch them.” He clumsily swung his limbs to one side of the horse and bounced out of the saddle—he winced in pain as a rock drove straight into his big toe. Otherwise, nothing. No noises wisped through the trees except the quiet song of the wind. He stood still, waiting for some sign of life. A few, partially uprooted trees, that leaned out over the path in a great arch, groaned in the breeze; Sam tapped his hoof twice in aggravation. As calmly and as fluidly as he could force himself to, Kjeld wheeled around (his body completely rigid). He then spread his legs a meter apart, and began crouching and standing up rhythmically, singing to himself, “Oh, what a stretch, I really needed this stretch.” His hands started playing discreetly with the latch on the pouch, and he slid his fingers inside. It was most difficult, fumbling as he was in the dark, to find a small steel object in a big pouch cluttered with various other small objects. “Up, down, up, down,” Kjeld told himself, though he was really trying to tell whomever was in the woods, “you’re just stretching your legs.” He shut his eyes hard as he dug deeper through the leather pouch, his hands now warm from friction and proximity to Sam’s body.
    The whispers began to pick up in the woods again—not at such a volume that it would seem like a regular conversation of well-mannered Riverhillers, though. Kjeld decided that the knife was not in the pouch after all. “That leaves three others to check,” he sighed shakily. The second pouch, fitted underneath the first, was larger, but seemed to have less in it. Anxiously his left hand flitted about the bottom, his heart beginning to race faster with each passing moment; he made contact with a metallic form both with his small and index finger.
    One of the whispers drew nearer; every last hair on his neck stood on end. Kjeld whirled his head around, but disappointedly realized his eyes were almost useless to see the trees bordering the path, let alone beyond the fringe of Genglyn. The whisper died, along with the rest, as soon as Kjeld was looking in its direction; frantically, he grabbed at the pouch-borne object; he nearly lost his breath when he discovered it was actually two objects. “I’m right-handed,” he mused lightly, “one could be the sharpest knife in the world and I’d be no more dangerous than a leaf.” The nearest voice murmured again, only recognizable as speaking this time: he couldn’t shake the image of its flowing softness as foul curses, rolling off the lips of a brooding sorceress, hidden amongst the shadows of fallen trees and vegetation. Sealing his eyes together as hard as he could, Kjeld fumbled the right object into his fingers, hauling it out, swinging his arm in a wide arc to face the voice. The wind gusted again.
    Unbeknownst to Kjeld, who was far too terrified to lift his eyelids the smallest fraction, a single pale beam filtered through a break in the forest’s ceiling, illuminating his make-shift sword.
    The air exploded with sound; the trees shook violently, fallen branches cracked, Sam whinnied, Kjeld screamed (in a most unmanly fashion). Faster than he had ever run from his father’s big, soggy kisses as a child, he was up in the saddle, waving his object behind him threateningly. He jabbed Sam hard in the ribs; he reared before launching forward at full gallop, whisking the straw hat off and away into the murky air of the forest behind him. Kjeld was amazed to realize he had done all of this with his eyes still closed. Opening them, sore from how tight they had been shut, he again made the discovery that they were completely useless. He could only hear his heart and Sam’s hooves now, though he would have sworn the pulsing in his temple was far louder than the latter. Ahead of him, perhaps a hundred paces more, Genglyn Bridge’s grey stones smiled brightly in the open air.