‘Excuse me, Mister Snake, can I go home yet?‘

Aldin stopped, a chill going the length of his body, right to the tip of it. He almost shivered. The feeling was so unfamiliar that he wasn’t sure if he had felt it before. Just as he was about to start moving again, he felt a small nudging inside his stomach, and the voice came again, muffled, but definitely there.

‘I have some people waiting for me … so I need to go home soon. Is it night time yet?‘

Aldin tensed his body and continued moving along, making extra noise in the forest and lashing his tail a little more than normal. But no matter how much noise he made, no matter how long he slithered around, he could still hear that little voice in his stomach politely asking to go home. It took two days of sleepless nights and being unable to eat anything else before Aldin finally spewed up his last meal.

She tumbled out more chaotically than she had come down, drawing large breaths as she wiped her face clean of his digestive juices. She coughed and spluttered a little before wobbling upright and turning around to smile at him. ‘Phew,’ she laughed as she beamed up at him. ‘I need to go home now. Playing with you was fun … but I didn’t make food for the forest. I hope they’re not upset.’

Aldin shrank, all the way down to human for where he stood above her as what other humans might regard as a teenager, black hair with silver streaks waving behind him in the breeze like slightly curly silk. A loose black skirt or fabric waved around his legs, presenting him modestly befor her. His eyes were still just as bright yellow as before, but instead of running away from them, she stumbled towards him, her jaw hanging and her little legs tired from him trying to digest her for so long.

‘Oh, you can morph?’ She huffed and puffed in front of him, stopping to sit down before her legs dropper her. ‘I can’t morph yet. I might in the next thousand years.’

Aldin crossed his arms and frowned. ‘You mustn’t be an ordinary witch,’ he murmured. ‘What coven are you from?’

She continued to try and wipe her face. ‘Um … I can’t remember.’ She patted her head. ‘It’s written in my hat … but I don’t know where I left it.’

Aldin glanced around the forest. It was empty, anything alive and with sentience having rushed off, warned by the amount of noise he had been making that the terror of the forest was not in a good mood. He leant down and pulled her up by the back of her clothed, holding her up to take a good look at her face.

‘Oh, hi Mister Snake,’ she giggled.

He couldn’t see any familiarity, convincing him that she wasn’t from a coven that he knew. ‘The name isn’t “Mister Snake”,’ he muttered. ‘It’s Aldin.’

Despite the extra hiss he’d added, she didn’t seem to recognise his name as anything sinister. She stared up at him, delighted. ‘I’m Billow,’ she responded.

Aldin dropped her and she landed with an oof, smacking her face against the ground. As she pushed herself upright, she rubbed her nose, her eyes watering as she tried to blink the pain away. He could she was trying to remain polite but was upset by what he’d done. As cold and cruel as the mortals described him, he knew enough about emotion to recognise it.

‘Where are your parents?’ He felt a strange sensation building in his chest. Not too long ago, he had eaten her for her magical energy, not having really thought about the fact that she was a tiny child. She only came up to his knee.

‘Parents?’ She thought about it for a moment or two. ‘I only have a mama … but mama went away for a while … She’ll come home soon.’

Aldin knew fading hope when he saw it, just as well as he knew hope. He crouched in front of her, pressing sharp teeth into his lips as he wrestled with his body and mind thinking about what to do with her.

‘Even if you’re a witch, you should have been eaten …’ he murmured.

She laughed. ‘Oh … I’m sorry.’

It made him laugh, though he didn’t mean to. He straightened up and heaved a heavy sigh. ‘Are you not scared of giant snakes?’

‘No,’ she answered as she worked her way back up to her feet. ‘There are many people scared of me … and so I try not to be scared of others … because it doesn’t feel good.’

She smiled up at him and he returned to his snake form to gauge her honesty. She neither squirmed nor screamed at the sight of him. She had an admiration for his real form that he had not seen without greed in millennia. Too many times had he been tricked into losing a scale or two when he had been a much younger snake.

‘For a witch, you must be late into your first century,’ he said as he studied her. ‘Even my mother stayed around longer than that.’

Witches were immense beings of power, but their weakness was how slowly they aged; almost a quarter of a human. They would remain vulnerable for several centuries until they were old enough, although many were protected by their power or their coven. Even with their keener intellectual development than humans, they could understand much but comprehend little. In this instance, Billow understood that Aldin was a large snake that had just spat her out, but didn’t comprehend that he had meant to eat her and end her life.

‘You stink,’ he finally said to her. It horrified her and she sniffed at herself, but it had been so long since she had smelled her own scent. A deep chuckle came from his throat. His appearance had not startled her but his comment had. ‘How odd.’

‘I need to have a bath,’ Billow said as she tried to wring out more of his digestion of her.

‘Come, I shall take you to the Pool of Estari.’

Billow only lasted a few dozen feet before Aldin grew annoyed and had her perch herself on the end of his tail. He tried to block out her giggling, but it was a reminder that she hadn’t fallen off. When the Pool of Estari came into view, with its beautiful shimmering blues and purples, he flicked his tail, sending her straight into it.

He watched her hit the water, watched her submerge and watched her not return. Too large for the pool, Aldin dove in after her in human form, pulling her up from the bottom of the pool and hastily tossing her onto the bank where she coughed up spills of sparkling water.

‘Can you not even swim?’ he snarled as he bent over her.

Her shoulder shook, but when she looked up at him, she put a smile on her face and laughed in between her coughs. ‘Normally I don’t go in so deep,’ she managed.

She crept back to the pool, slowly dipping herself in it and washing all the gunk from his stomach away, as well as absorbing the magical properties of the water. When she was satisfied, she returned to the bank where he was standing, arms followed and eyes narrowed. She blew up her cheeks and the air whipped around her fiercely, like a tiny tornado.

Aldin managed to compose himself before the winds stopped. He knew wind magic when he saw it, but what he was sensing was something different. She started to wander in little circles by him, happy with her clean and dry clothes and the repair of her body.

After her last circle around him, she stopped in front of him. ‘Don’t you have a tail in this body?’

‘No. The point of looking like a human is to blend in.’

‘You don’t look like other humans like this,’ she said as itched her nose. ‘They all look the same … and they’re so small from up on the falls. Like little bugs that wear clothes.’ She laughed. ‘Mama said that mortals only have four different eye colours, to represent the elements they were born under. Blue, green, brown and grey. The darker it is, the closer they are to their elements.’ She paused, waiting for him to respond with something. When he didn’t, she bundled her hands up in front of her and looked down at his feet. ‘And so if you want to pretend to be a human … you have to use one of those eye colours.’

He watched her eyes move around in her skull, from his feet to his knees to the ground. ‘Your mama taught you a lot,’ he said. She turned her head up at him and smiled, and he hoped no one could see him indulding her.

‘Do you have a coven map?’ He’d decided that returning her to where she’d come from would be the quickest way to remove her.

She rubbed the sides of her face. ‘Um … mama told me not to take my clothes off for people …’

Aldin almost smacked her and then himself. ‘You idiot,’ he hissed, ‘just pull up the back of your shirt.’ He grabbed at her coat and she resisted him for the first time, not that it mattered because it was like fighting a puppy, but he soon dropped her and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Fine, we’ll find some other way of doing it.’

She was wearing a dress.

The pair were quiet for a moment before he cleared his throat and asked, ‘Do you at least know what your coven map looks like?’

‘No. Because it looks different from what Mama’s looked like.’

They started walking and she followed him without prompting. ‘Have you really not heard of me?’ he finally asked.

She looked up at him, blinking, and he could see her trying to put memories together in her mind. ‘Aldin …’ She sounded it out a few more times, as if it would help her.

‘I am one of the four guardians of hell.’

Billow cocked her head and giggled. ‘You can’t be. There are only three guardians: the dog, the bird and the rabbit.’

He glared down at her but lost himself for a moment when he realised she was holding on to some of his hair as it flowed by her and she watched the forest around her. ‘How could a snake not be a guardian of hell but a rabbit?’ Though, she was telling the truth.

‘The guardians of hell are not bad people … and even if they were, that doesn’t make all of them bad.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Only beasts have helped me, and so I believe in the good in all of them. Being a little bit bad doesn’t make you evil … just normal.’

Aldin kept walking, silent and thinking of her answer. He contemplated whether it would be safer for him to just kill her and eat her once more.