He heard the knife sing free of its leather sheath, “A Dalklyn? Where?”
“He was just…” Kre glanced around but couldn’t spot the small face in the darkness around them. “Wait, what’s going on?”
“Dalklyns are not friendly creatures,” Kitalia muttered, scanning the darkness around her.
“This one seemed to be,” Kre replied with a shrug that she couldn’t see. “He helped pass the time at least while I was waiting for you. Told me that we’re in a Haven Tree.”
Her hand shot out and grabbed his upper arm, pinching his skin underneath his clothes. “Did you ask it for something?”
“No!” he snapped back, trying to free his arm. He could already tell that he would have a nasty looking bruise on his arm from the pinch. “I mean, he just answered a few questions for me.”
The grip tightened once, eliciting a cry of pain from Kre before she released her grip, though she let her open hand linger on his arm as if to warn him that she could easily pinch him again. “How many questions did you ask it?”
“Two or three?” He replied quickly, hoping that a fast response would keep her from abusing him further. “We started with our names, then he told me about the tree. The last thing that he told me was when you’d be back.”
“Three pieces of information,” she sighed. “I should not have left you alone.”
“I don’t see the problem here. It was helpful.”
“The problem, foolish boy, is that Dalklyns are little bastard trickster sprites.” She muttered something under her breath in what Kre assumed was her language, and she sighed. “I apologize. It is not your fault for not knowing. It is my fault for not checking the tree first for things like this. The problem with Dalklyns is that they like to trade information. You ask for something, then they provide it and take something you know.”
“I did tell it my name,” Kre said, “but I figure that’s just manners since he shared his name.”
“No,” she sighed. “They hardly care about stealing names. They like to take memories. Things that you barely recall now, so as not to be immediately missed, but something impactful on your life.”
“Wait, so you’re saying that thing took my memories?”
“Three of them, yes. One for each piece of information it shared with you.”
“That little bastard,” he muttered.
Kitalia slowly slid her knife back into the leather sheath and shook her head. “No sense worrying about it now. It will be long gone by now, off to find some other dumb traveler too stupid to know not to talk to random creatures in hollowed-out trees.”
“What happened to this being mostly your fault?”
“It was my fault for not checking the tree before I ushered you in, but at the same time I would simply expect anyone with a bit of common sense to think twice before talking to anything that is clearly a magical creature while sitting inside of a magical tree. Look, we should rest up now and we can talk in the morning about what our next step is. Forget about the Dalklyn, there is nothing we can do about it now.”
“So, my memories are gone forever? I can’t get them back?”
Kitalia set her bag near the entry hole and laid her head down up on it, curling up in a half-circle following the tree wall. “It is not impossible to get your memories back,” she said softly, “but it is highly unlikely. You would need to offer the Dalklyn information that it does not already know. As they are creatures of magic, they know quite a bit. Finding a Dalklyn when you want one is equally difficult as they are very fickle creatures.”
Kre set his own bag near her feet, and she gave it a quick kick. “Eww, no. I am not sleeping with your dirty boots in my face. Mirror me.”
He obliged, finding it odd to sleep staring at her face and curled up as he was against the wall, but he was honestly too tired to care much about it. “Good night Kitalia. Thank you for… well, saving me yet again.”
She gave a most unladylike snort in response. “Just save up the gratitude farm-boy, and you can throw me a festival later. I have a feeling this is a full-time job for me.”
Kre yawned, the exhaustion starting to take hold now that he was lying down in the warmth of the hollow. “Kitalia?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m glad the Dalklyn didn’t steal my memory of you.”
“Go to sleep Kre.”