The troll's settlement wasn't much to look at. It wasn't much of anything, really. Although... that does depend on the definition. If one considered their material possessions — thrown into several lumps of stuff around a bunch of bonfires — to be a village, Then sure, nothing to write home about. But if one took a look around...
The Hills, the Singing Hills, as their proper name said, waved around the small settlement like an evanescent ocean of greenness. The verdant waves of grassy plains carried wind and song alike, with a faint melody always swirling in the air.
Not even swirling, though. It was too peaceful, to calm to be swirling. It more so... swam, undulated, flowed across the landscape. Yes, 'flowed' was the word. The music flowed with the landscape, and it flowed with the music. There was always at least one tribe at a time singing and that was enough for their voices to be carried by the gentle curves of the region.
They — the Hills — stretched far off until the horizon met with them. On two sides at least, both the phantom menace of the Forest quietly lying in wait for its next visitors on one end, and with spears and spires of up-shooting greyness on the other. For there lay the Singing Hills. The mid-point, the barrier of peace between two homes of chaos. The one some stories told of anyway.
By midday Ganainm and Katsugi had already made their arrangement official with the trolls. The girl was even slightly surprised at the Knight. In a good way. Maybe in a good-yet-very-slightly-patronising way. What made her brain processes halt for but a second's fraction, was the fact that the Knight had not even once reached for his blade.
And yes, she knew he was 'civilised', if a more absurd term had ever come into existence, she didn't exactly expect diplomacy from a person who had spent most of their latest interactions on testing how fast a big knife could dice a very big dog.
"Tell me, if you would," the Knight began, settling himself beside a tall bonfire, "of the beast you have mentioned."
"It, the werewolf," the troll said, handing him a bucket-sized cup of sheep milk, "is a... a mixture. A hybrid. You have fought wolves, in the Realm and also in its proximity. If such a wolf ever passes the grave of a righteous person, that person's spirit, name, identity, is then pulled into the corpse. The body then exits its current residency and, in the form of a black wolf, stalks all prey that comes near its lair."
As the Knight nodded, a loud grunt came from the bonfire's other side. Another troll then spoke:
"My friend, you have confused the definitions! What you have just described is nought but a grim. A fay whose services we once even employed. They sound unpleasant at best," the other troll then turned to Katsugi, "but if you rub them the right way — and I mean that most-literally, go for the neck — they will turn into the big babies they truly are. Of course, they can still eat a soul, but they are really just enormous puppies.
"Now, for a proper definition of a werewolf," the two trolls exchanged glances that — had they possessed such an ability — would have sent a dozen thunderstorms the other's way, "we should examine the word itself. 'Wolf', obviously, means 'wolf'. 'Were', here, refers to 'man'."
"The monster's name is then 'wolfman'?" Katsugi asked.
"Essentially, yes," the troll replied. "I do not know how this one came about, but all my theories have led me to believe either of two options."
"?"
"First, a regular curse. A human wandered into the Forest, met some fairies, suddenly he started howling every night. Second, that human has always been a werewolf and was exiled — either by himself or his neighbours — to live away from a given settlement."
Katsugi nodded and signalled he understood.
"Now, wise warrior," the troll continued, "could you tell us as to how you are planning to dispose of the beast?"
Normally, had this been any other person, they'd struggle to answer. But Katsugi was far from ordinary. Though now of high rank, he had never forgotten his ways as a simple recruit and likewise, had never let go of the memory of how one should deal with — for the moment at least — unanswerable questions. So, he spoke:
"A plan is hatching as we speak. It, however, cannot be fully formulated without my friend's and mine prior survey of the problem we are to deal with. In short: show us the beast and we shall compose a sufficiently complete scheme."
The answer seemed to satisfy the troll. Both he and his friend then nodded wisely in exactly the same manner. Katsugi then visibly relaxed, mostly for show, it was especially his brain muscles that were straining right now, but there was an image to be maintained. Until the trolls were done and helped with, he could not allow himself any slip-up. For the next few days, he was a soldier.
Ganainm's evening was spent much the same. She too talked with the trollfolk of the problem at hand, but after a few rounds of their local drink, the conversation got more interesting. For the trolls at least. The girl sat close to the fire, her bare claves warming in its light and heat, and only half-heartedly listened in to whatever her new hosts were discussing.
At first, she though it weird they'd resort to talking instead of using their telepathy, but not much time passed before it became clear to her. They just loved speaking. The trolls loved words and semantics, and grammar and syntax. But not in the way the fairies did. They didn't use a language's loopholes to trick people into suicide. Instead, despite having a marginally better tool of communication at hand (or head), they just... talked.
They talked with their mouths, made mistakes, switched, added or sometimes fully deleted a few articles from their sentences. And they corrected one another too! Misspeaking happened almost as often as it didn't, setting the jolly folk up for at least a good hour of debate on whether 'an river' was a acceptable expression.
Ganainm kept to herself. She enjoyed how the fire's flaming tongues grazed one another in the air, embers flying off like spores off a mushroom every time contact was made. She then turned her attention to the trolls themselves.
They were a tall people. Broad-shouldered, their head almost entirely sunken into where the neck would've been on a human. They stood at a height almost thrice that of someone of the girl's own species. All limbs and extremities were scaled accordingly. Except for the palms of their hands. Those were exceptionally vast. Perhaps to grab things better. But the more she looked around, the less things there were to be grabbed.
Then she was enlightened. A sleepless sheep — a creature of cloudy fluffiness, with a neck almost as long as Ganainm's whole body was — neared the bonfire. It bleated, beckoning after its carer, but kept onward. When it finally reached the merry circle, and was noticed by one of the trolls, the sheep was promptly picked up and smothered in affection.
The troll's giant hands wrapped perfectly around the animal, whose lengthy neck then encircled its own body as it readied itself to sleep. And then a song ensued. A melody impossible to be put into words, with lyrics so complex yet disturbingly simple Ganainm for a moment doubted them to even be real words.
Real words. What an absurd concept. All words are made up. And yet, the trolls' — the other joined in — performance contained vowels and sounds, and accents and tones the girl had never even imagined to be possible. She then tried, quietly, keeping it to herself, to bend her tongue in such a way that her mind told her to. And she failed. There was no way for her to learn any of the trolls' songs. And that was okay.
Embers danced and swirled in a whirlwind of flame and wind above the bonfire. Song carried the wind and wind carried song, both flowing across and over the gentle Hills. The trolls then lulled themselves to sleep — also by singing — and did not stop performing even when deep in their dreams. Perhaps it was due to the mental link that each of them always was awake enough to keep the song going. Or perhaps it was just magic.
