Kobold Life

Chapter 9: A New Threat

Four days passed before the human woke up and, in that time, I was his sole caretaker, not because Rose was unwilling to help, she had already made it clear she would help regardless of her opinions, but because she was too busy keeping the rest of us fed and protected. We were in a deficit of resources, and had been since Opal and I had arrived, but never so much as to suffer immediately. Now however, we had added another mouth to feed, one provider with a broken arm and one provider to watch over the new person, we couldn't afford to spare another, nor could we afford to waste any Aetherium on good berries, not until we could stock up on more. So, I bided my time inside, practicing my Common, tending his wounds, and weaving our supply of fronds from the river trees into mediocre baskets to help carry and store what the others got.

I was part way through one basket, when I heard him start shifting. It wasn't a uncommon occurrence, but it grabbed my attention nonetheless. I saw him open his eyes for the first time in days, they haphazardly darted around the room as mine had, trying to assess the situation. He tried to speak a moment later but couldn't get out any thing but a hoarse cracked stutter. I approached quickly carrying the a water skin.

"Drink," I said.

The height difference made it difficult to for me to cater to him when he tried to sit up, but not impossible. We hadn't been able to give him much hydration in the time he had been out, Rose had helped me once to stand him up enough and pour a stream into his mouth, but we had to rely only on natural movements to swallow it, which meant there had been a large degree of coughing. Now he drank from the vessel greedily, without concern for what it was or who was giving it to him. When he drained the skin of the nourishing liquid, he tried to face me.

"Where am I?" he managed to say, though his voice still sounded scratchy and hoarse.

"You are safe. You are among friends." I said, using practiced phrasing.

He seemed to take in the surroundings for a while longer before speaking again.

"More water. Please," he asked.

I obliged, grabbing another water-skin and one of the gourd fruits which we had gathered up until now. It was a little past it's date, but it was still edible, and exceptionally sweet. I passed him the water skin, and began cutting into the hard gourd with my claws to get to the soft squishy interior.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He stopped about halfway through the second water-skin.

"Like shit," he responded, "but I'm alive."

I didn't know the common word for "shit", so I was filling in the blanks a little, but I figured that was close enough to his meaning.

"You are lucky to be alive. You were hurt before I found you." I explained, "do you remember what happened?"

"Fucking orcs happened!" He exclaimed, coughing from the exertion a moment later.
"What happened to the one that chased me anyway?"

"I killed it," I said flatly.

I was trying to seem somewhat intimidating. Rose had told me to make sure the human knew I had control of the situation, to avoid him trying anything stupid. However considering the first thing he had seen me doing upon waking was basketweaving and I still wasn't over the thing I was trying to leverage for "bad-assness", I expected it probably wasn't working.

He sat up the rest of the way, with a pained expression, now over twice my height while sitting on the makeshift mattress. Then he looked down.

"You killed that bastard? Bullshit," he said.

"I had help," I admitted, "but I put an arrow through his eye."

"So where's that help now? I have never seen a Kobold on his own like that." He responded casually.