“ << Little pride, joy of my heart

  Fear not the monsters in the dark

  Brave the tower, in the sky

  Grow your wings so you can fly

  Once the monsters will find you

  Paint the sky in their blood true

  Once you’ve climbed through the peaks

  Nothing will be outside your reach

  So my joy, my life, my pride

  Go to sleep, don’t fear the night.>>”

  A Mother’s Lullaby, from the Shadowreavers elven conclave, Location Unconfirmed.

  The next morning, he woke up invigorated, the hermit may have lost a good chunk of his marbles, but he certainly knew how to keep his belly full.

  Last night, he got a bit carried away with the delicious, fruity wine, but a deluge of meaty dried nuts absorbed his hangover well, and now, fully ready to face the day, Omri started to look out for his host.

  He found the older man already awake, a few branches up, in one of the dozens of nests scattered in the verdant canopy, intent on tending to some young birds that had yet to put on their first plumage.

  “Caw,craaw,crouu,” a low-pitched cackle wove through the air as the boy approached.

  Once he got near, Herbert caught wind of his presence and, popping his head out of the nest, quickly warned him off.

  “Omri, you'd better keep away from the hatchlings, the flock tends to be protective, and I would not count on them trusting you already”.

  The boy took a bleary-eyed look at his surroundings, noticing the various birds' gazes tracking his movements, did not let the advice go to waste, and quickly retraced his steps to the sleeping space, before starting his stretching routines.

  Half an hour later, the man was back with an assortment of fruit in his arms and a cheerful expression splitting his face in half.

  “He does actually seem to care about the flying murder machines like family. Just watch the mad bastard's content expression. Kudos to him, I say,” Omri thought as Herbert approached.

  “Look at that, Kaw, they don't trust easily but are nonetheless creatures with hearts of gold, they even brought fruit for us to have breakfast,” he said as he handed him what looked like a bunch of assorted grapes, smelling sweetly in the fresh air of the morning.

  Giving a side-eyed glance at the giant volatiles, the young hunter's smile turned strained, swiftly recovering with an “Oh, thank the majestic creatures for me then,” tactically said while gratefully accepting the gift.

  “Oh, of course, not a problem”. He turned to his feathered friends and started to caw and cackle while gesturing wildly, his whole upper body twisting and turning, before he reached a sudden stop, at which point one of the birds cawed once and lightly tipped his beak.

  Herbert turned, a somewhat proud expression coloring his face, ruddy from the exercise.

  “Done”.

  He glanced at the man, a lost look in his eyes, slowly processing what had just happened, before biting on the berries and focusing on an actual line of thought.

  “Right, let’s get back to my initial reason for searching him out”.

  The previous night, right as they were going to sleep, Herbert had mentioned a village, and while previously Omri wasn’t in the right condition to better inquire about its location, a good night's sleep had been enough to recenter the young warrior.

  Returning to civilization was not his main goal currently, but the opportunities it offered were more than enticing.

  Better tools than sharpened stones on top of sticks, nails, seeds, spices, and hopefully, normal people.

  His meeting with Herbert had rekindled a social urge the boy did not even know he had, and while the guy himself wasn’t bad, and a very small part of Omri even admired him for his success on the island, a bigger part of him pointed out that his only companion was a raving lunatic.

  Taking the plunge, the young hunter timidly asked his question, wondering if that specific part of the dialogue between them had been just a fruit of his imagination.

  “Herbert, last night you mentioned a village three days by boat from here right? It wasn’t like a wine-induced fever dream, no?”

  The man seemed sad to hear the question, and the boy, feeling a bit guilty, added, “You know, there are certain things I could use here on the island… civilization is the only place I can find them. “ his unlikely companion looked at him, sighed, and then spoke.

  “Yeah, yeah, you didn’t mishear anything, there is a small settlement a couple of days of navigation from there”.

  The conversation lulled, the youngster eagerly waiting for more.

  Nothing came.

  Omri relented first.

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  “Come on, Herb, I still have a lot here to explore, I’ll be back soon. Would you please tell me in which direction the village is located?”

  The other castaway's expression turned into a smile as quickly as it had saddened.

  “Kaw, I don't remember the exact direction, but we sailed south to get here, so I would say going north is the best choice, and our navigator used to count landmasses as landmarks, so I would reckon it is not that far off from the first two in the distance.”

  “I got it, thanks, Herbert,” said Omri, his expression softening in thanks, before he extended his right hand toward him, who accepted it with uncertainty.

  His gaze still on the disheveled man, he decided he had to somehow repay his hospitality.

  “I’ll be gone for a while, and this first trip will probably not be a walk in the park, but if there is anything you need here I can try to bring it from the settlement…and If everything goes well, maybe I can get you to humanity once I come back.”

  An awkward silence fell at the offer, broken by the hermit's answer coming after a long couple of minutes.

  “Thank you, my friend, but my place is here, and I… I don’t think I would feel right abandoning my family, even if we are not the same at all…”

  A sad note hung in the air for a second, quickly waved away as his quirky host spoke again

  “That said, I would also like a variety of seeds, maybe something like heavy-duty scissors? Oh, ropes, ropes are important, needles, some spools of sturdy threads, my cloak is fraying at the seams you know? And water canteens, we will need them and maybe…”

  The previous mood was instantly forgotten, and a smile made way on Omri’s face as he listened to the litany coming from his unlikely friend.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Herbert. For now, I’ll need to make my way back to camp, I don’t want to waste precious sunlight. Be safe and stay happy, we will see each other soon!”

  Greeting both birds and hermit, who was now waving at him with a lucid glint in his eyes, the young warrior climbed down the tree and set off for the cliffsides.

  The jagged peaks towering over the valley cast shadows in his path, breaking the morning heat as the sun screamed above.

  Large flying figures followed him to the ends of the basin, crying and clucking when he finally reached the cave from which he had come.

  Their croaking calls rang out one last time before they dispersed, lost in the air.

  “Are they actually seeing me off?” he thought just to scold himself, his brow furrowed in a grimace.” It's these kinds of thoughts that will end up with me talking to the birds, too”.

  He reached his shelter at noon, stopping to pick up supplies and any surplus materials he thought valuable; if he was going to buy anything from the locals, he had to bring something to the trade table.

  With the bundle ready, he headed for the northern beaches, to the place where everything started, the ground zero of his shipwreck.

  On the way, a few couple hundred yards before the slit of sand, one of his safehouses greeted him, the blocky brown hideout hidden by some branches that he carefully wove together to stave off rain and beasts.

  Inside, lay the boat he had been working on during his two years of training, the hollowed-out trunk of a large tree making up the bulk of the built, with two smaller pieces joining the side to give stability while sailing.

  Shaped like a canoe but wider and flatter, a single small mast stood at its center, and inside the boat, a pair of oars rested, bundled up in the square hide that worked as sails.

  This was the final iteration of one of his crafting projects, the result of many painstaking hours of trial and error, and the first solid enough dugout he made that felt safe in his short trips around the shore's shallow waters.

  The first few times Omri put his rafts in the water, he almost puked, a deep fear seething in his bones right as he stopped feeling the sand beneath his feet, just a stone's throw from the beach.

  Like many other challenges, his trepidation had also been overcome, the sheer repetitiveness of fishing quickly grinding down his nerves in a puddle of boredom.

  But now, a faraway land his objective, some uncertainty crept back in, unease making its way into the young hunter's mind.

  As always, it was not enough to stop him.

  He broke water, the midmorning breeze filling his sails, and the small boat moved swiftly across the blue expanse, aided by the youth's regular rowing.

  His training was fully showcasing its effects, the lithe form of the boy covered in corded, efficient muscles, rippling under his fair skin as his craft cut through the waters.

  Blue eyes fixed in the distance, he looked at the faraway islands that dotted the horizon, as blond hair fell down around his features, the long, messy locks almost reaching his waist.

  Every few hours, he stopped rowing, grabbed some kind of dried fruit held in the coconut shells he secured to the boat’s insides, ate, and started rowing again, his focus unwavering as time flew by in his voyage.

  The first day at sea turned out to be uneventful, and it came to an end when the sun was low in the sky, the dimming rays still unsure about leaving the blue light of the moon to shine through.

  Omri weighed his options and approached one of the many rocky formations that had started popping up from the sea as he got near to what seemed to be a quintet of landmasses, each divided only by a few miles of water.

  Initially, he wanted to camp on a nearby island, not willing to risk travel at night, but once he was closer to the shore, caution stopped him.

  “It's about to get dark, and I have no idea what's lurking around here ... it's too late to seek natural shelter for tonight, and I’ll have to assume that my experience with this archipelago will be mirrored here”.

  A sigh left the boy's lips. “Time to sleep in the boat, I guess.”

  With a grimace of displeasure stapled on his face, Omri silently got to work.

  Crafting an anchor was no problem; there was no shortage of rocks in the shallow waters, but leaving one of his spare ropes soaking in the salty sea for a night did not please him a bit.

  The only small consolation he had as dreams took him in their embrace was the regular rhythm of the waves, which, like a cradle, accompanied him in his sleep.

  The next morning, a loud seagull cry woke him up, as the animal stood proud, pecking with impunity at the field resources, neatly stacked in a corner of his boat, heedless of the human looking at him with murder in his eyes.

  “You eat my breakfast, you become my breakfast ”.

  In a matter of seconds, the young man brought his hand to his side and, in a single fluid motion, drew his trusty sidearm and threw it.

  The bird, intent on gorging itself on his assortment of dry fruits, did not realize the threat to its life until it was too late and the sharp blade found its target, nailing it, not even slowing down as the knife tip met wood.

  Grabbing his new skewer and tucking it near his other provisions, the youngster resumed his voyage, and just a couple hours later, he was approaching the biggest of the islands making up this slice of the archipelago, his attention caught by a small column of what seemed like smoke.

  Getting near to the landmass was enough to confirm his suspicion, satisfaction rising as the grey weaving shadow stood to point him toward society.

  Judging by his position, the smoke source was on the other side of the island, so, mindful of the short hours of travel left before reaching his destination, Omri got to shore, disembarked, and hid his vessel.

  What followed was a hearty seagull meat meal, roasted over an open fire as his main dish, hope for a new day as a side dish, and the warmth of almost found civilization as dessert.

  Finishing his meal, the boy smothered a few remaining embers from the firepit, grabbed his bundle of goods, and started to trudge in the forest, each step bringing him nearer to some well-deserved respite.

  It seemed luck was finally on his side.