“This is a good spot, I think,” she said, mostly to herself. “We have a wide view of the river here and there looks to be an opening of some kind up there in those rocks.”
“I hope that something isn’t already living in there,” Kre said pessimistically.
“If there is, we will convince them to share,” she said with a cheerful smile back at him.
Kre shook his head and whispered to himself and she darted towards the rocks, “You know, I bet you could convince a bear to share his den with you if you tried.” He pulled the partially soggy blanket around himself a bit more and hurried after her.
The rocks that Kitalia pointed out just a few moments prior were, to Kre’s sleepy eyes at least, a fairly sheer cliffside that rose up about thirty feet from the riverbank. The cliff was in a poor state, as evidenced by the large rocks that had broken free of the dirt around it and fallen to the ground below, most shattering upon impact with the other stones scattered about there. About half-way up the cliffside, some scraggly bushes and a handful of small trees sought to make a vertical home. Just behind one of the trees, where its roots had split the rock face, was their goal, a gap about a foot and a half wide.
“How are we going to fit in there?” Kre asked her softly when they reached the bottom of the vertical climb. “Doesn’t seem like it goes too deep.”
“Burrowing animals, like the gah’azisi or the abanis, like to make their homes in places like that. They start with the small opening, dig back about two feet, and then create a cozy den for themselves. It is mostly dirt back there and easy to dig into.”
Kre barely heard the second half of her response, as he was still stuck on the words she had used at the beginning. “Gah zees? Ah bah nissa?”
“Gah… ah… zees… eh. Remember, that last sound is the exhale, like with the word ‘Aoi’.”
“Yes,” Kre said, agreeing, hoping that he could end his lesson there. He was simply too tired to think straight and learning new Ylveryan words was already a thing not high on his list of priorities for life.
“Correct,” Kitalia responded, genuinely pleased that Kre remembered what ‘Aoi’ had stood for. “As for gah’azisi and abanis, I suppose you would call them rabbits and… eh… winged rats, I think?”
Kre pictured a flying rat and a shudder of revulsion ran down his body. “Do you mean bats?” he asked.
“Perhaps. I have not seen many of them in your lands, so I am unfamiliar with the term.”
“So, we go up there and we either face cute rabbits or diseased bats,” he muttered. “Wonderful.” He glanced back at the river, wondering if crossing the icy water in the dark was a better idea.
Kitalia was already halfway to the opening by the time Kre looked up again and he reluctantly started to reach for the rocks. His mind briefly contemplated whether he should bother putting pants on at this point.
“Just stay there for a moment,” Kitalia called down in a hushed whisper. “I shall check out the den and see if it is suitable or not.”
Kre was about to call up his acknowledgement, but she was already halfway into the rockface and quickly sliding further in. He stamped his feet and tried to push out the cold, hoping that she would hurry, but also that she wasn’t being delayed because she busy evicting the den’s current occupants.
A voice from behind him called out from the moonlit night, “I think that will work well as a hiding place.”