小嫂子的味道

"It seems you don\'t have an answer," the man said while he moved to a corner of the cave where a set of clay utensils were kept.

"... Where is this place?" I asked, trying to change the subject to more important matters rather than philosophical ones.

"Have you heard of the Devil\'s Mountains?" the man inquired as he cut the mushrooms into pieces with a knife.

"I have. Who doesn\'t know about them?"

"These are exceptions to everything. You\'d be surprised to know how much you don\'t know about this world," he transferred the pieces into a claw blow along with water, spices, and a few other things.

"Right now you\'re in this old man\'s cave that is in one of the mountains," he lit up a fire in a pit that was already due with an iron stand above it. He then placed the bowl on the stand and let the fire do its work.

Then he wiped his hands in the robe he was wearing and turned to face me. "Surprised?" he appealed.

"Not really. I\'d expected this much after falling off a dragon," I said.

We waited in silence, only the sound of dripping water and the crackling of wood as it burned kept the dead stillness of the moment at bay. Then, when it seemed like whatever he was cooking in the bowl was done, the man similarly snapped his fingers and the flame below the utensil vanished.

I hadn\'t seen it before, but it didn\'t matter. I knew what it was, anyone with a little knowledge about the world could tell. He was using magic. Real magic. Storybook magic I\'d only heard about in the tales my mother used to tell me.

The curiosity was too much to digest, I couldn\'t help but ask,

"You can use magic?"

The man shifted the bowl down from the stand and covered it from below in a thick cloth to not burn his hand from the heat. He stood up from the stone he was sitting on and walked up to me, offering the bowl of stew and a wooden spoon.

I thought about it for a while, and then after a moment\'s hesitation, I took the stew from him. As a kid, I was not thinking that he could\'ve added poison to it or any other chemical. I was more worried about how he got these mushrooms on the Devil\'s Mountains and how they would taste like.

He motioned me to sit while resting himself on the ground, I looked around the ground and then sat cross-legged on the piece of cloth I\'d woken up on.

"I can do many things," he admitted. "Magic just happens to be one of them."

I stirred the stew, took a spoonful, and blew air at it before taking a bite. As for the taste…it was edible if I\'m not exaggerating and okay if I\'m not trying to be disrespectful.

He watched me as I ate, but it was not a glare that made me uncomfortable; it was as if he was watching through me.

"What\'s your name? You haven\'t told me yet,"

"Neither have you."

"They call me Kei," I said. It was not the same my parents gave me after birth, just something the people in the village had come to call me since it was short and easy in the mouth, unlike my real name.

"What are you called?" I asked as I took another spoonful of stew. I was hungry…quite hungry. But I was restraining myself from eating like an animal; my mother had taught me good manners.

"I have been called by many names, it varied according to the place and time I was in. But as for you, you can call me Reshi," he said, the last words coming out in a soft tone.

I don\'t know how to explain this to you, as you haven\'t seen him. But the name suited his profile; it was as if it was made for him. However, this was what I thought at that moment, since I was unaware of the truth.

It was way later in my life when I came to find that \'Reshi\' was a translation of a Seri word—a language used by magicians and spell makers of that time—which meant \'mentor\'. So if you look at it that way, Reshi was not a name. He fooled me utterly. To this day, I don\'t know what his real name was.

Unaware of this face, I finished the stew. Even though I was trying to eat as neatly as my body would allow, I still finished it way faster than a girl my age should.

Though that doesn\'t mean I was focused on stuffing food entirely, something was lingering in my stomach from the time I woke up in this cave. At first, I\'d decided to wait, but now it was getting harder and harder.

In the end, I was not able to hold on any longer. As I put the bowl down on the ground, I finally let out the tension and doubts that were brewing inside of me.

"I\'ve been meaning to ask this for a while now, and… how did you manage to save me after I fell off from that klauth?" I asked.

Reshi\'s eyes shifted a bit when he heard me ask it, but it soon went back as it was and his expression was calm and composed.

"The klauth, huh?" he said under his breath and slowly rose to his feet. He looked at me while dusting the dirt off of his robe. "Follow me," he commanded and gestured to me to pursue him.

His direction was toward one of the four openings that branched out from the main compartment. He headed inside the second one from the right, and I followed him inside.

As we stepped forward into the tunnel, the torches placed on both sides of the walls lit up one by one. Upon entering, I found that the tunnel grew in height and width both as we marched forward, soon it was a cave of its own.

It took us around five minutes to cover the distance, and neither I nor Reshi spoke a word during that time. I could feel an uneasy tension build up inside my chest as we were getting close to wherever we were headed.

Soon the walking was over, and we were on the other side of the tunnel, and what I saw there shook me down to my very bones. There was another section of the same cave, but it was nothing like what I\'d seen before.

The compartment this tunnel had opened up into was so enormous that I was not even able to see the walls or ceiling. Darkness shrouded the whole area, making it pitch black. I felt as if I was standing not inside a cave but under the starless night sky.

Reshi turned his head in my direction, in the shadows I was barely able to see his face. He similarly snapped his fingers, and soon the area which had once been enveloped with darkness was not bathing in light.

Tens of thousands of torches lit up on each of the walls, and since the distance between me and the walls was so much that they looked like a thousand small fireflies to me.

Although what I saw next was even more stunning and groundbreaking, I finally knew why this part of the cave was so big.

There at the center of the compartment lay the skeleton of a dragon. It was so big and humongous that in comparison, Reshi and I looked even smaller than ants.

The bones were miles long, and the whole skeleton looked as if it were a wonder of nature. I hadn\'t been shocked if it was. I mean, the thing was even bigger than your normal mountains in height and wider than an average city in length.

I was in awe and startled at the same time, I didn\'t realize when my jaw dropped, and I was admiring the mightiness and strength of the wonder before me. It was an exhilarating experience to think that once this thing had been alive…

"This is a klauth, what you saw were Wrayons. It wasn\'t your fault that you confused them, many people do the same thing and then claim that they saw a klauth. Wrayons have similar features to the klauth because both dragons have the same bloodline. To explain it in simple words, Wrayons are distant relatives of klauths." Reshi said.

I probably would\'ve asked more about the subject, but that was when it hit me. The awestruck feeling I had taken no time to turn into what you might call fear and wariness. If this thing was a klauth, then it shouldn\'t have been dead.

It was common knowledge in the world. Klauths don\'t die of age, and since their population is so low that you can count them on both of your hands, fighting amongst themselves was a foreign thing for them.

Klauths can only die when they are killed, and to kill a creature this big and powerful…

My eyes turned to Reshi, and my mouth dried up.