Off to Seek a Wizard... -11- Lost? by Erin Halfelven

 
"This is like the ending to Lost, isn't it? I've been dead all the time?" I asked Chuck Wood, the marmot.

"I don't know what you're talking about but you're scaring me!" said the rodent, his big soft eyes looking at me sideways.

I giggled. Perhaps incipient hysteria, I thought, so I clamped down on the urge to laugh. "No, I mean... I'm not sure what I mean."

"You still didn't tell me, boon or bane? I rescued you from the mud and... And...." He trailed off with a hiccough.

The poor thing really was scared of me!

"Oh, boon, boon!" I said. "You'll always be stronger than anyone thinks you are." A bell rang somewhere, a single note like a big clock on the far side of town striking one.

Chuck's eyes got enormous and he looked pleased with himself. Though to be honest, it was sort of hard to read a lot of expression into such a hairy face. "Oh, thank you, Princess Stephanie!"

"I...." Well, what harm would it do to let him think I was a fairy princess? "Could I ask another favor? Is there some clean water nearby where I can wash off this mud?"

"Oh, sure," said Chuck. "There's little springs all over this dale."

I blinked. Of course I knew that my other name meant small valley but I had never heard it used that way outside of a song or the Bible.

Chuck started into the thickest part of the greenery and I had to follow closely or be overwhelmed by the shrubbery springing back to block me. Again, his strength impressed me, he simply bulled his way through where even the slenderest twigs seemed much stronger to me than I would have thought just to look at them. Of course, Chuck's legs were as thick as my whole body, so I guess it wasn't too surprising.

He kept calling, "This way," and "Right through here," and a couple of times he waited for me as we crossed tiny clearings. I would have gotten lost if he hadn't made it easy to follow him. We saw a few other animals, something I took for a field mouse, and numerous insects, and there were always birds overhead but nothing else spoke to me. I felt thankful for small favors.

We had climbed a slope for most of the way, then we went down a step bank and were in another little glade like the first one. But the little stream was much bigger here and the pool was lines with stones, so no mud. A second stream emptied the little pool and flowed away down the slope in a kind of gully.

"This is Kendall Spring, the cleanest water on the hill," said Chuck. He trotted right over and lapped up a mouthful like a dog or a cat. "Good stuff," he said.

"It's pretty!" I said, surprised. Pink flowers with blooms as big as my head lined one side of the pond while the side we came up on had grass right down to the stones.

"Thank you," someone said, a voice that was neither Chuck's nor George's.

I turned to look and saw a man standing near the opening of a sort of a burrow. He looked tall, I would have judged him to be over six foot if I were still my original five foot three. He had smooth brown hair and bright blue eyes and a smile with dimples. While his skin looked ordinary flesh color, the joints of his shoulders made me think of a robot, with a visible ball and a tube that turned into his upper arm.

I looked lower and he looked even more like a flesh-colored robot the lower I looked. More visible ball sockets for his hips and nothing at all between his legs except smooth plastic. My gaze jumped back to his face.

He was still smiling and now he looked more familiar. "Oh," I said. "Not Kendall Spring, Ken Doll Spring."