“Are you both saying you could’ve defeated a juvenile male mantioc when you first arrived in Nal Eston?” said the first voice, the one he’d heard when he’d first regained consciousness. “Seems to me I remember you, Curly, pissing your britches the first time you laid eyes on something as mundane as a slimeworm.”

“It was the size of a house!” the second voice protested.

“And I recall Stump here’s first encounter with a blemmon…when he fled screaming and then jammed himself so far into a rigorzard’s tunnel that we had to dig him out with picks.”

Most of what the men were saying was nonsense to Ludo, but one thing had stood out like a flaming beacon: Nal Eston. I made it, he thought. Which meant that these men were poachers, and all these strange creatures they were talking about were the game they hunted.

He risked cracking his eyelids open just enough to see through the cover of his lashes. The three men were seated around a table, cups resting before them. Plates of half-eaten food were piled up at one end of the table, as though they’d been interrupted mid-meal. I interrupted them, Ludo realized. One of the men had an unruly mop of curly red hair atop his head to match the ringlets in his ginger beard. This was “Curly” Ludo assumed. Across from him was a shortish brute whose neck was so short his head seemed to sit right on his chest. He had to be “Stump”. Both men wore pelts harvested from creatures Ludo was unfamiliar with.

The final man sat at the head of the table in a chair with a slightly higher back than the other two, almost reminiscent of a poor man’s throne. Though his face bore youthful features, his hair was a shocking white. His otherwise unblemished skin was marred by a wicked scar running diagonally across his face. The face of a monster sat upon each armored shoulder, scaled snakes with their maws propped open to reveal a set of four fangs. The serpents’ eyes were bright red, like rubies.

The rest of the room was rather mundane, the walls made of red stone, the roof thick cylinders of trees, stripped of bark and painted black, placed side by side until they formed an upside-down ‘V’.

Before the men’s conversation could continue, a cry arose outside the structure. They pushed back their chairs as one, moving without haste and yet efficiently as they exited through a door, which slammed behind them.