Part 3 - Untitled Novel, Day 18 - Words to Go: 13,671

Part III

Goldie opened her eyes to blinding light and a chilly back. Kiffen was gone from her side. Maybe he was flying over the whole world to look for Floyd!
She heard splashing from the stream. Oh, maybe he's just fishing for breakfast, she thought. Her tummy grumbled. She was glad he hadn't left before breakfast. The sad thing about eating fish all the time is Floyd probably would have loved it!
Now that it was light out, Goldie was able to take a look at her surroundings. She knew there was water nearby but what she hadn't realized was it was actually a rushing river, rather than a stream. Their campsite was a bare spot on top of a hill that looked down over the river. The river was farther away than she expected, too. She could see Kiffen down at the river, looking for fish. He was pretty tiny looking. Goldie wondered why he walked so much. It wasn't like he didn't have perfectly good bat wings to fly around with. Maybe flying wore him out more. Or maybe he didn't know how to fly slow. Maybe when he flies, he goes so fast that he'd basically fly over the top of Goldie in a matter of seconds. Kind of like an airplane.
The river was in a valley. Behind the river, the muddy hillside rose beyond her sight. It was much higher on that ridge than it was on the one she was standing on. Downstream from Kiffen and around a slight curve was an animal, drinking water. She couldn't really tell, it was too far away. It looked kind of like a deer. She turned around to see where they'd been already. Trees. A lot of trees. More trees than she'd realized they'd come through. Oh, one of those animals was walking out from the treeline. It looked like a deer just like the one she'd seen at the river did. But, now that she was seeing it at a much closer distance, she could see at least two differences from the deer she had at home. They were tan and fuzzy with white tails, just like at home, but these deer had a third eye right in between the two that regular deer have. They also had big floppy ears, kind of like rabbit ears. Floppy three-eyed deer. Hmmm.
A few more deer walked out into the open and started grazing in the tall grass. A little yearling fawn bounced around the older deer with its tail sticking up in the air, waving the white flag.
Goldie wanted to pet it, but if they were anything like the deer at home, they weren't tame, so she didn't try. Along the upper edge of her ridgeline, a smattering of colorful dots were mixed into the long grass. Flowers! She bounded over toward the flowers. On her left, some of the deer raised their heads, sensing her presence, but went back to eating. Apparently, they'd decided she wasn't a threat. Interesting. It was true, she'd given up on the deer as soon as she'd seen them. As she approached the flowers, she noticed a swarm of bug-like creatures, maybe bees buzzing from flower to flower, but a half-second later figured out that it was hummingbirds. Silks, or whatever Kiffen had called the hummingbird fairies. The silks ignored Goldie for the most part. She sat down in the tall grass near a couple of the little flowers. Mom told her that this type of flower was called a bachelor's button. They were a lot of colors - blue, purple, pink, and yellow, at least. Oh, and white, too. At first the little silk fairies wouldn't visit the flowers she was sitting closest to, but after a while a sitting very still, a few of the bravest ones ventured close.

"Hi, little Silks," she said, and smiled.

They moved very, very quickly just like hummingbirds, but the more she watched them, the more she noticed their faces. They kind of had little human faces. Their noses were long and pointy. Their little mouths were grinning from ear to ear. They put Goldie in a great mood. She found herself smiling, despite the fact that she was stuck in another world, hadn't seen her mom in a day, was missing a friend. How many more days would they walk before they got to where they needed to be? Did Kiffen know how to find the fairies? He was obviously from this world, but he seemed pretty lost. This must be a part of the neighborhood he'd never been to. Maybe he wasn't lost, she hadn't asked him, she just assumed because they didn't seem to be getting anywhere, hadn't met anybody along the way. Sigh. If only Floyd would find them, instead.
A shadow passed over the flowers and the silks and Goldie was sure she heard one of them exclaim, "Oh, my goodness!" as they all fluttered away. Goldie turned to see Kiffen standing behind her. She stood and turned to face him. She noticed that her shadow stretched out toward Kiffen. Wait, but his shadow was stretching out towards her. She turned back toward the flowers. A shadow of her body was thrown over the tall grass.

"Two shadows!" she called to Kiffen, who was making his way toward their blazing campfire. "Peter Pan would have a cow if he could see this!"

Kiffen was holding about twelve fish in one hand. Kiffen ate a lot of food. And, they were big fish, too! He probably wouldn't be able to cook them all at the same time.
It hadn't occured to her until now that it was odd that he cooked his food. Why not eat the fish whole? He's a big dragon wyvern serpent thingy. Why not?
Goldie trailed Kiffen back to the campfire and tried not to watch as he sliced up the fish. She had to admit, he was very graceful. He just seemed like he'd always been a big monster rather than a tiny one for most of his life.

"Did you eat fish when you were small, Kiffen?" she asked. She'd picked up a stick and drawn a fairy in the dirt on the ground. The smoke from the campfire rose straight up into the sky. The wind didn't have such a big problem making up its mind which direction to blow this morning, apparently.

"Yep," said Kiffen.

"Were they big fish?"

"No. They were called sardines."

"You have those here, too?" Goldie clapped her hands. "I know what those are! What are those three-eyed deer called?"

"Deer," said Kiffen with a toss of his head.

"Really?" Goldie cried. Such similarities and yet they didn't have people like her here. It was hard to believe. They'd probably be one eyed people. No, wait, one eyed people were called cyclops, weren't they? A cyclops is a monster. At home a cyclops is a monster. Of course, at home a three eyed deer might be a monster, too.

As Kiffen was placing his wrapped fillets of fish on the rock in the center of the fire, a silk fairy buzzed around Goldie's head.
A little voice whispered in her ear, high pitched and wracked with giggles. "Somebody's watching you," it giggled. It flew rapidly to her other ear and repeated the phrase and giggled as it flew away in a zig-zag pattern toward the forest. Goldie watched it fly up toward the tree tops and disappear. She pressed her lips together and looked at Kiffen.

"Kiffen?" she said.

He growled.

"What are those hummingbird fairies called? Silks?"

"Sylphs," he grumbled, still packing as many fillets on the rock as he could. He breathed some fire, blowing it toward the base of the rock stove, like a blow torch to try to speed up the cooking process.

"Do they talk?" she asked.

"Mostly lies," he muttered between fire breaths. When he was done torching around the entire rock, he flipped all of the fillets over and sat down on his tail to watch them cook.

"Are you going to fly around and look for Floyd, today?"

"I said I would, didn't I?"

Goldie sighed. "Yes," she said. She pressed her palms together and laid them in her lap. If sylphs spoke mostly lies, that must mean that they sometimes tell the truth. She checked the forest for any movement, but she didn't see anything. Maybe the sylph just meant that the sylphs were watching. They seemed like they'd find watching people from afar a good pasttime. They were probably easily entertained. She liked their faces. Why didn't they talk to her while she was watching them play in the flowers?
Goldie turned back to a fish fillet being pressed into her hand.
"What's wrong with you?" Kiffen asked. "You seem preoccupied."

"Thank you," Goldie looked at the fish and lifted it in the air, indicating she was thanking him for the fish, not for what he said. "I was just looking at the forest. I thought I saw something moving out there," she said.

"Probably one of those deer. They like to get most of their grazing in early in the day." Kiffen nodded toward the deer still just walking around with their noses to the ground.

I wonder if that grass tastes any good? Goldie unwrapped her fish. She ate it quickly. The fish here were much more fishy than the fish she'd had at home, but Kiffen had said the leaf helped with the flavor. Goldie's guess was that meant that it soaked up most of the bad flavors. It could be worse, she was sure. Floyd would definitely love it, though. Cats love fish.
Next time she saw Floyd, she really wanted to know whether he was from this world or if he was from back in her world, because it was interesting that he didn't have any strange developmental atrocities like many of the other creatures around here seemed to have. Three eyes on a deer. Wouldn't that just mess up your vision? Maybe? She still really hoped that he had wings tucked away, just waiting to pop out at the moment they're needed most, like while he's falling off a cliff. That'd be the perfect time to have wings. After she swallowed her last bite of fish, she started craving something sweet. What she wouldn't do for an orange. Suddenly in a flutter of wings and buzz of giggles, about a dozen orange-like fruits fell on top of Goldie's head.

"Hey!" she called up at the sylphs, mischievous creatures. Kiffen barely noticed the activity, he was so involved in his meal. How'd they know she wanted fruit?

She picked one of the round, orange fruits up from the ground.

"Kiffen?" She held it out toward him. "Are these edible fruits?"

He nodded his head and pointed his hand at the fruit and went back to eating.

"I'm gonna take that as a yes," Goldie said as she peeled the soft citrus-like peeling off of the fruit. The rind, instead of white, was black. She could smell it - a mix of banana, vanilla, and grapefruit. It was a sectioned fruit, just like an orange, so probably a citrus, just not one she'd ever met before. In the center of each section was a tiny black seed. She ignored them and took a bite.
Mmmm, heaven.
The most perfect strange fruit she'd ever tried. She'd tried starfruit and dragon fruit and she'd tried coffee berries. The coffee berries were the weirdest out of all of those and they didn't even taste very good. Kiwi fruit was another strange fruit she'd tried. Hairy and brown on the outside, bright green on the inside. Peaches were fuzzy, but they weren't ugly like kiwis.
This new strange fruit was like a banana and an orange and even a little bit of an apple flavor all mixed together. Mom had said that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden probably wasn't an apple, like all the pictures portray. It could have been anything. It could have been this fruit right here. That kind of scared her a little bit, but she forgot about it before long, the fruit was too great to be forbidden. After she was done eating the last section of the first half, she put it down on the leaf that her fish had been on. It was highly saccharine. She needed something to drink.

5,056 words total on day 18!