Deciding which, between the Withering Weald and the Marsh of Unpleasant Stuff, was the most sinister, vile, terrifying and downright dreary place came down to one thing. Luthiriensis now stood in the Marsh of Unpleasant Stuff and not in the Withering Weald. And, if she twisted the definitions of sinister, vile, terrifying and downright dreary, she could, at a pinch, consider the Withering Weald as, somewhat, pleasant. Ugnth, after all, hadn't eaten them. Which, in Luthiriensis' list of things she did not want to experience, getting eaten by something that resembled a spider after its creator had thought, 'You know what would really make people wet their underwear? Make it bigger! And intelligent!', was one of them.

The hooves of her horse did not so much clop through the mire of the marsh, as not sink in to the putrefying depths too far. Pinto, of course, loved every minute of it and, from the grumbling emerging from under Mott's well-groomed beard, he either hated every single second of it, or he was painfully hungry. They had no path to follow. They had no signs of any habitation. And the low, leafless trees appeared to fight with every ounce of sap they had not to sink into the sodden muck.

The mist, also, added to Luthiriensis' misery. It clung to the undulating landscape until it must have felt everyone was having far too good a time, at which point it appeared to gather and bloat and reach up along legs and bodies, seeming ready to drag them into the stinking quagmire. Everywhere Luthiriensis looked, she saw only blight and decay. The kind of decay that goblins enjoyed in their storm season picnics. She would never understand goblins.

"I suppose it could be worse." Mott gently urged his pony to forge onward, the little mount's legs emerging with a sucking sound from the ground. "Nothing's tried to kill us yet. Or eat us. Or kill us and eat us. Or eat us and then kill us."

"Why, in the name of my gods and yours, did you say that?" Luthiriensis rubbed her forehead and her fingers came back with a dirty, wet sheen to them. She retched at that. "Never, ever, say it could be worse!"

It was a well-known fact that several gods, the malicious ones, the mischievous ones, the eternally bored ones, would often take words like that as a challenge. Haltoren the Pathetically Endowed, so named because his parents, rich as the richest elves in history, had left their son with nothing but a burned down lake cabin infested by fire ants, a broken vase that, were it whole, would have brought him a pretty penny (Literally. A curse upon the vase stated that it could only change hands through death or a sale using a pretty penny. Which was frustrating because everyone had their own ideas about just what pretty really was. Prettiness, after all, depended entirely on individual taste. Or poor eyesight.), and a letter saying it was about time he stood on his own two feet, had once said 'it could be worse' before he inexplicably died through a severe allergic reaction to fire ant bites. Some gods, indeed, had smiled on him that day. Mainly because they had twisted senses of humour and delighted in the suffering of others.

Which was all to say that Mott's words did nothing to ease the tension Luthiriensis felt as they tried to move forward at a pace that leisurely thought far too intense and would everyone just slow down before someone got hurt. To one side, a bubble formed upon the surface of the murky waters, or, more accurately, slime of the marsh. It expanded until it reached its maximum level of surface tension before popping with a sound and a smell that reminded her of her father's afternoon naps, after a big dinner, where her mother would need to open all the windows to enable them to breath. And not die of poisoning.

"It's not so bad. Sometimes the enchantment needs fortifying and sunlight creeps in through the illusion." Pinto looked upward, as though, at that very moment, a ray of light would penetrate the murky skies and bathe her in its warmth and glory. It didn't. "When that happens, the veil of the illusion falls a little and it can look quite pretty."

"So, it doesn't look like a marsh at all?" Now that made Luthiriensis feel marginally better. Not a lot, admittedly, but her despair had reached depths where the bottom of the barrel looked down trying to see what's so good about that kind of depth anyway. "What does it look like without the illusion?"

"Oh, it's still a horrifying marsh, but when the light catches the marsh waters and the bubbles and the crawling creatures in just the right way, you can see colours. Other than the dull browns. And dull greys. And dull, sickly greens. They're the worst." Pinto grinned, her fangs looking even more bitey in the poor light and the mist. She really did think that was an improvement. "At least the Great Giant zombies appear to be quiet today."

Pinto nodded her head, as though she had imparted a great wisdom, rather than dropping, in the most casual and unthinking fashion, that thing about 'Great Giants' into the conversation. Great Giant zombies. That explained the hand, Luthiriensis supposed, reaching out from the filth-ridden soil, twitching as they had carefully crossed its palm, right at the beginning. Luthiriensis had thought it part of the illusion, but now she did not feel quite so certain.

Tales of the Great Giants had passed from whispering mouths to whispering mouths for centuries. Children used those stories to scare their friends and to urge them to do truly stupid things in the name of showing bravery in the face of creatures that they knew, deep down inside, did not exist and had never existed. Parents used similar tales to make sure that precocious children would, finally, after much urging and cajoling and bribery and threats of bodily harm, go to bloody bed or the Great Giants would come to carry them away and eat them. Not much of a threat, considering the kids were clever enough to dismiss the urging, cajoling, bribery and threats of bodily harm as fanciful nonsense.

Great Giants had once strode the world, it was said. Enormous creatures, taller than the tallest trees, able to move mountains, capable of leaving mounds of bodily waste that resembled undulating hills. Then, one day in long-forgotten, hazy mists of history, the Great Giants had simply disappeared. Some said that they had grown so tall, they merely stepped from the world to another. Others that they had all simply turned to slumber, becoming the mountains themselves. Still others just thought they had died out because, after all, what would giants that big even eat and no-one had ever seen a giant cow.

"My people don't believe in giants." Mott scratched his beard, curling his bulbous nose in dismissal. "The way we see it, the gods made an enormous mistake in making humans and elves as big as they are, so they perfected the process with dwarves. Stands to reason. There is literally no need to be any taller than a dwarf."

"I beg to differ!" Luthiriensis tried to think of something that required greater height. "What about ... picking apples from trees? You need to be tall for that."

"Nah, you don't." Mott grinned, tiny glimpses of dirty teeth through his mass of beard. He patted the blade of his axe and winked. "If the dwarf can't reach the apple, the apple shall come to the dwarf."

"Oh, giants are real. There's a lovely community in the mountains to the east." Pinto pointed west, but both Mott and Luthiriensis got her point. "Hrrrghrrr, the chieftain makes the most wonderful mud soup. Mummy's tried to get the recipe, but he just gurgles at her. I think it means 'no' when they gurgle like that. Or 'you must be joking'. My skills at speaking giant aren't that good."

"Doubt it." Mott waved away Pinto's first hand experience, his lips curling. "And if, I say 'if', these 'giants' exist, that doesn't mean to say that Great Giants ever existed. That's just nonsense. There'd be evidence of them."

Luthiriensis wasn't quite as certain as Mott. She had spent time in the libraries of Fenestri. She had delved into the history books and, when she had woken up, she had delved into them again. The problems with history books were that they were all written in such dry, boring fashion, filled with numbers and dates and lists of kings and queens and of battles. And, you would think they could write them with a little panache, considering all the murders, the assassinations, the assignations, the adulteries and the illegitimate children. That sort of thing practically screamed for an exciting narrative and the historians had failed, in every way imaginable, to make any of that exciting in the slightest. Thus, like Mott, she knew absolutely nothing about Great Giants, except that the stories her mother had told had never managed to get her to go to bed.

"Evidence?" Pinto seemed to take a deep sniff of the fetid air before nodding toward Mott. "Done! Want to bet on it? I have a pretty penny says you'll get your evidence."

"A pretty penny?" Mott considered that. "Does it have scenes of war on it? Or, perhaps, an anvil?"

"No." Pinto looked almost horrified at Mott's questions. "It's pink. With a rainbow painted on it. It's really pretty!"

Luthiriensis, herself, would have preferred a far more elegant pretty penny. Say, one with delicate scrollwork and an image of a beautiful elf in a dress. Male or female, it didn't matter. It was the dress that made it pretty. As she fell into dreamy thoughts of the most exquisite dresses, Luthiriensis came to a sudden realisation. Not one that she found particularly welcome, as such, but certainly unexpected.

They were talking to each other. Not at each other. Not shouting. Not, in Mott's case, grumbling. Talking. Somewhere along the way, the three of them had started to grow close enough for conversations. Real, though boring, conversations. With a dwarf and a dragon. If she wasn't careful, something like this could degenerate into some form of 'friendship' and nobody wanted that. Bad enough that another elf had seen her in the company of a dwarf, no matter that he didn't consider himself an elf, let alone having to suffer the ignominy of people thinking she was Mott's friend. Not to mention the dragon. And she meant that. She was not, ever, to mention Pinto to anyone. Not unless Pinto was royalty, of course. Or, at a push, upper nobility.

She watched as Pinto and Mott continued through the marsh, side-by-side, debating what, exactly, was the definition of 'pretty' and both getting it utterly wrong. Despite their surroundings, they looked quite happy. A happiness that Luthiriensis could never share under the circumstances. Happiness, for Luthiriensis, came as an inextricable part of several things. Luxury, comfort, the company of the right kind of people, and money. Not necessarily in that order, either. The order could change given the right circumstances.

There was not, in any version of this story, any chance, whatsoever, of her feeling happy until all this had come to an end. She had suffered more than enough adventure for a lifetime and, if the lifespans of her immediate ancestors were anything to go by, that lifetime could number almost half-a-dozen thousands of years. So, it was a lot of adventure. Too much, probably. In fact, if she had the slightest chance, she would dearly love to leave it all up to Pinto and Mott. Especially after a passing glance to the side, seen through the shifting mists, she could swear she had seen a ribcage the size of a large temple.

"Umm. You two? Hello?" She looked again, but the mists and fog had gathered to hide what she had seen. "I think that, possibly, maybe, after a fashion, Pinto might be right. And, if its not too much trouble, I think, perhaps, if you wouldn't mind, we should get out here. I'm thinking now, rather than later."

Luthiriensis felt certain she had seen the ribcage move before the mists had swallowed it. That and she had a vague recollection of an exposed, enormous, beating heart within the ribcage.

"Oh, I'm right, alright." Pinto brought them all to a halt, pointing ahead where the fog had parted and Luthiriensis could see actual daylight. "How's that for evidence?"

"It'll take more than that to get a pretty penny from me, girl!" Mott stood upright in his stirrups, pushing his helmet back from his eyes. "A pink one? With a rainbow, you say?"

What they saw could, in some sense, be considered evidence of Great Giants. Luthiriensis did not want to make sure. Not at the moment. She felt certain she had just seen the fabled Gammer Goodhiding and involuntary shivers hadn't stopped raking up and down her spine.