"Three? Wow, you see - I told you - now I can add to my list meeting a black beast-hound from Hell, who had three moms!" Dwin would have even more to tell the next person she met. "What are they like? I have only one, but she is the best mom in the world. She was a traveller herself, when she was young. And she spun stories and poems with my aunt. She knows a lot of stories and is fun to have around," she was very happy, when she retold this, but at the very end her expression fell, as if she had realized, how far away Maia really was and how at the end of this encounter and this day she would be all alone again. That was even more heartbreaking than musing, whether being adopted meant that she was not a real Blackthorn, but just an imaginary one. 

"Yeah... never mind," she quickly looked away and brushed away, what seemed to be tears welling up in her  eyes. "So - what are your moms like - tell me?" she repeated the question, though some of the previous steam was missing. 

Big bad Dwins did not cry and yet all she could think of was the great things she had had at home. Mom, dad, her annoying, but very much beloved bunch of siblings and cousins, aunties and uncles and how even with all she had seen and experienced, Brecheliant's light seemed to shine brighter and better. This was not, how an explorer should feel. At least not to her knowledge, collected from stories of great adventures and family anecdotes.

The sense of miserableness was so sudden and overwhelming that she hardly heard, what Val told her. About his dead mom, who probably was a ghost or a demon or an angel somewhere (she believed that even in death there was choice). And then about the two very much living ones and she envied him for that - having those two moms so near, while hers was so far away. She had to remind herself that this had been her choice, her parents had not wished to see her go this early. Perhaps they had been right and it was even harder to admit to yourself, when you were in such a hurry to grow up and be an adult. 

"Depends, how you define "lost"," she replied, choosing her words carefully. "If I was supposed to go in one direction, but chose to go in the opposite - does that counts as me being lost?" an explorer should know - she was of opinion that she was not lost, but a second view was very welcome.

"No," Dwin shook her head. Maia and no one else in her family knew, where she was. Only that she was gone. "They saw me off, when I decided to travel and they know that I am on the road. That's about it. Wouldn't..." that steam engine called her mind revved up a little, while her expression was still melancholic. "Wouldn't it be nice to talk to them once in a while? Like have that mirror to look into, call and see their faces and hear their voices. That would be convenient," she mused, her gaze wandering. 

"You do not know, where I live - how can you bring me anywhere? Considering I let you?" she smiled. "No, no - I don't need to be brought anywhere. But food would be nice - come to think of it," she was hungry. Very. Tired too.

Had Dwin known that this young man, who had patiently listened to all her cheerful banter, attempted to keep up and humoured her, had been ready to escort her back, she would have felt flattered. Yes, she had claimed that she was Dwin first and foremost, second - Blackthorn, and only third - a girl, there would have still been a sense of smugness for having a companion. Just imagine Dee's face! Yet this line of thought never materialized, because Val did not attempt to persuade to go home and/or offer his service. 

"The longer I am away from home, the weaker those memories become. The scent is lost and so are the visuals," she explained. "I am also not sure I want to dream about Brecheliant - it does not make me very happy, when I wake up again," she shared in a rare moment of vulnerability. "I am also not sure that they would be happy to have me in their dreams too. They did not want me to go," she explained, raising to her feet and approaching Val to see, what he was about to show. 

"There is life under sand?" she asked, leaning down and turning her head to listen with one ear. 

"Fleas and ticks count - yes? Though they do not live under my skin, but on it. Jay or Aiden told that they can burrow under your skin and crawl there," Dwin told. There was another story. Of the horror genre. About the skin-crawler, who caught you by your foot during the night, skinned you and wore your fur and had a crown of feet of on his head. But with it getting a little late, it was not a tale she wanted to share. She was not particularly afraid, nor did she believe that this particular bogeyman was more real than the rest, but she preferred going to sleep feeling sad for being far away from home than thinking about, how to curl in a ball so that not a single pawpad was left out for the skin-crawler to catch. 

"Why? Are you afraid of the Big Fish?" she asked, recalling a far-away day in spring, when Teya had attempted to teach her fishing. "We had the Big Fish in our lake - our Raven told us to be very careful. And it was very real - I have seen it making huge splashes!" this cautionary tale had had an opposite effect on her. It had made her wish to go in the water and find that rascal even more. "Spiders - no. I had a spider friend. It was big, black and had seven legs and it lived in the bush above my trench," she explained. "Are crabby things like spiders?"

"Like how? Have you ever thought of becoming as small as a beetle and just see the world from its perspective? Or a mole. They have a whole life under the earth that we do not know of. I once tried to follow a tunnel they had made and it was long and then it disappeared somewhere deep and I no longer could dig it up," Dwin had regained some of her earlier chattiness, though her mind was not generating ideas at such speed as it had earlier.

"Well, you have not seen the Big Fish of Brecheliant. If you met him in person, you might think otherwise," Dwin felt that she should defend the honor of their local beast. "The one I saw is huge, it caught a pidgeon once and ate it whole," she referred to the catfish. Teya had not been wrong to warn little Blackthorn about being careful around the area. A small puppy had a perfect lunch size. "What are things that you are afraid of in the ocean?" she asked, since Val had not specified, what kind of monsters spooked and ate locals in this area.

"Oh, my god they look gorgeous!" she exclaimed, when Val had unearthed one of the spiders. She followed it to the water's edge staring at it curiously, but having no instinct on attacking it and eating. It was a foregin dish that she did not know you could eat. 

"Didn't look like a lunch to me," Dwin shrugged and waved a goodbye to the first crab she had met in her life. Being on a mainly mammalian diet - the idea of eating anything else felt exotic and she had her reservations. Plus - this creature really looked too interesting to be eaten. Yet Val insisted that they were edible and, since he was a local and she was very hungry (one step away from hallucinating that her companion was a walking fried chicken on paws), she decid not to argue further. 

"Did you ever try to talk to them?" she asked, not understanding, why would Val in the face of such a grand scene would prefer to sit and watch from afar. "They must be very intelligent - consider the size of heads of those creatures," she mused, looking over at the vast water thingie hoping that one of those aforementioned beasts were to appear now. "Or - did they try to eat you? Is that's, why you do not like the ocean?" she asked, turning back to Val. "Oh - can they get out of the water and walk the earth too? Or they are bound to that place?" 

Dwin obeyed - while listening to his replies with one ear, she focused on the task at hand. She dug the little mound and came eye to eye with a compatriot of their earlier friend. "Hi!" she greeted the little guy, who waved his arms at her. "What now?" she looked over her shoulder at Val. 

"Well, maybe they tried to walk on earth and that idea went horribly wrong?" Dwin suggested. "My grandma Finley broke her leg, when she had a bet with her brother Colt..." what had that bet been about? Riding a buffalo or flying? She did not remember, she stole a glance at Val, wondering if he would mind a not entirely factually correct tale and then realized that she had been factually incorrect this whole conversation and, where would he find the truth, if both parties involved were long dead. "...that she could jump off a big rock and fly. She did fly for a bit, but then broke her foot." 

"Smash it against sand?" Dwin leaned back and eyed Val incredulously. "How on Earth sand is going to break a material that gulls need heights and rocks to accomplish?" There was a suspicion that the man here was messing with her. She missed the fact that Val had not said anything about rocks. "What if I pick it up, go up there and then drop it?" she beckoned to the cliffs nearby. "Or - can I drown it?" while she was discussing murder, the intended victim had begun its escape towards the water edge. Dwin went after it, pounced and pinned it to the ground with both of her forepaws to prevent it from moving away. 

"Oh - but I have heard about water-wolves. So - there might be some truth in what you are telling me now," Dwin put this thought on a shelf to ruminate about later. "Well - flew - like you hang in the air for a moment and then crush. That's, how she broke her foot. She was very lucky to have just a broken foot. The other option was becoming a mush - then this would mean that I would not be here talking to you and trying to figure out, how to  deal with this," the term "flying" eventually depended on the definition you assigned to it. For Dwin it was any time spent in air, for others - time was an important distinction.

She was still not convinced of the vulnerability of the crab and did not believe that hitting it against the sand would make any difference to its aggregate state. She decided to grab it whole with ther teeth, which she succeeded in - only pincers and tiny legs were left out of the side of her mouth. After letting out a short sigh she crushed her jaws and the creature disintegrated in pieces of meat and bone-like substance in her jaws. She chewed, food trickling down her chin and she swallowed, feeling every bit of the broken exoskeleton scraping against her esophagus on its way down. "I prefer non-shelled things, to be honest," she turned to Val. 

Suddenly Val's demeanor changed from that of a playmate, who humoured her, to that of an older brother, who was intent on teaching his younger sister the survival skills. Dwin had only fragmented memories of her older siblings, for they had dispersed before her birth and their presence had not been constant during her childhood to leave a lasting impression. Other adults had been fun to have around, but there was always this age gap that stood in the way and made the young Blackthorn listen to them less, when they wanted to pass on some great wisdom. 

Val - on the other hand - had proven to be just the right age (not too old to forget, what it meant to be a child, and not too young for Dwin to not take him seriously), therefore she followed him eagerly and soaked up all the valuable details that would help her survive on her own. She memorized the habits of the crabs, the shape, colour and size of the seaweeds and the other good stuff that hid beneath. About the jellyfish too, though... "But they aren't poisonous, are they? Cause many edible things are not very likeable," she cast a glance at the remnants of the crab, "but sometimes you got to eat, what you got to eat, don't you?" 

"I never asked you - have you travelled a lot?" she said. 

"Yeah, but then think of all those pioneers, who tried just the wrong thing and realized that it was not okay, when it was too late? My dad said that all plants are edible - some just once," she shared. Here I - her narrator - have to add that Dwin was not very good, when it came to remembering sources of the facts she used. Therefore the simple algorithm to sort them was to assign all the story and life wisdom related stuff to Maia and all the plant and medical and moral stuff to Eljay. Regardless of whether they had ever said it or not. 

"You have a long history with bears, I see..." Dwin responded, thinking to herself that too bad there was not a real mama dragon to take care of Val's bear problem. The last part of his speech got her thinking. She had never considered that her parents could end before her. In her eyes - not only did they not age, they were constants of her world. It would sure be a lot bleaker, if they weren't there. But then... "If you stay with your family as long as they live and by the time, when you can leave to travel, your time is over too? Road may always be out there, but you might not?" 

Dwin burst out laughing. While she had never asked Eljay, how exactly he had obtained his knowledge about plants and medicine, it was hilarious to think that this kind old soul had his own graveyard of test subjects hidden somewhere. For example, in the lake? He had spent many, many years in caldera after all. "Yeah, I won't do that. If they die, they will get angry at me and come back to haunt me," she replied. "This will cause a whole lot of new problems."

"I want my life to be interesting," was her simple and very honest answer. Dwin had not thought much past that - it turned out that her aspiration to become the next best explorer in the world depended on other people. If there were none to tell about her grand adventures, no one would ever know. "I can't have this, if I spend my life in one place all my life," she had never understood, how her father could be content of never travelling beyond borders, never having that pull of the world outside. Quite the contrary - he disliked it, he feared it. 

"My home is a wonderful place, but there is only so much I can see and learn there," she finished. "It is like this saying... I like it a lot. About... don't stop moving. If you stop - you die. And I don't want to die, before my life has properly begun."