Ok great another scene in Gilba Gilba. This isn’t getting old noooo sirreee nope we’re having a grand old time keeping these things interesting haha yes indeed we are! Let’s keep it movin’ because as we stated at the beginning of this thing we had a hundred scenes ready to go and as we set out we didn’t even think that maybe 400 words wasn’t enough time to even get into the meat of a scene and by the time things were underway it was ready to wrap it up ookkkkaaaay let’s stop the run-on sentences and check in on our old pal HEM SLONNIGUM II.

For Hem indeed was out practicin’ the trails with Bram and Crawley. It was a sunshiny day of sun and shine and despite all this talk of Autumn Storms in the comin’ days they don’t seem to be comin’ these days. But that’s Assol for ya. Cold, yes indeed, cold like the fringes of the Northern Reaches. Just a cold snap. Hem liked it and Bram and Crawley didn’t. They didn’t outwardly complain about it o’ course but he could sense it in the way they related to the world. Just traces of hostility where there weren’t none in the summer.

Tensions were high today. Everyone was just tense and Hem had no reckoning for how to address it. Bram and Crawley had been distant ever since Hem had announced his intentions to explore the wide world more widely as soon as he got out from under his folks’ house.

Why was that? Hem had trouble figurin’ this out and it occupied his thoughts when he figured it shouldn’t, not when they were out practicin’ the trails. The trails were their favorites. Took ‘em round to Heemee’s Woods, on the edge of the Wildness if we’re bein’ honest here, further than most youth o’ Gilba Gilba took to. Hem liked to push the boundaries. Maybe he pushed ‘em too far with Bram and Crawley and they didn’t know how to say no so they said aye.

“How’s the look o’ things?” Hem asked from the front of the line. He was up on a boulder doin’ some surveyin’ of the plains. Wind was quiet for once which truth be told was a mercy on their faces.

“Aye,” Bram answered, blowin’ icy air outta his face, grippin’ their sticks tight so as to lean on ‘em for support. “Slow it down if ya please, we’ven’t got your legs.”

Bram and Crawley were behind, movin’ slow and maybe too slow for Hem’s taste. In the future (maybe say ten years) he would reflect on moments like these with a different sorta perspective, one less tainted by his immediate frustrations and more by the realization that some friendships often don’t last as long as maybe you thought they would.