Pash
Pash rubbed his eyes as he was awoken by the cool morning breeze. The last embers of their night time fire still glowed a warm red amongst the grey ash, but Pash still felt a chill.
He used his hand to prop himself up, wrinkling his nose as it came back wet from the morning dew. Looking around their little camp in the middle of the Untamed Forest, he couldn't see his master.
He was not too alarmed by that. They'd spent the last few days wandering aimlessly. Ermos seemed convinced that they would happen upon another ruin just like the Stone Tree if only they looked hard enough. After all, the forest hadn't been visited hardly at all in the last five hundred years and it was certain that most of it was unexplored.
As of yet, they'd found nothing though.
Their little wanderings through the forest were sponsored by the good-will of the Queen of Flowers. It was because of her magic potion that they'd been able to eat as much as they needed.
A ripe pear was hanging just above Pash's head, big and green and juicy. He reached up and plucked it from the branch, taking a large bite as the juices spilt all over his chin. And where there was that pair, there were hundreds more. The potion worked just as the Queen had said, just a single drop, and a withered and leafless tree sprung to life once more, offering them a bounty of delicious fruits.
As Pash munched, he heard something else munching nearby, a good deal louder in its chewing than he was.
He lifted his head to look over the long grass, knowing that it would be their dog who was making such a racket. He always did his hunting himself and would come back with whole deer carcasses, offering some of the meat to his new masters.
Today it seemed to be a bone that he was gnawing on, grinding it on the back of his molars, trying to snap it open so that he could slurp up the delicious marrow inside.
Pash thought that the bone was a little odd compared to what he was used to seeing. It was more yellowy-brown than it was white, as though it had been aged out in the sun for a few decades. In fact, as Pash looked further, he saw that it was not one bone, but two, like the radius and ulna of a human forearm.
He stood up to confirm his suspicions, and there, attached to those two forearm bones, was a human hand, long since dead.
"Bad dog!" Pash said, rushing over, his pear still in hand.
The dog looked at him in surprise and flattened its ears back, before going back to chewing on his bones.
"Let go of it!" Pash said, trying to wrestle it from his grasp, but the dog growled at him threateningly, unwilling to part with it. When it showed its teeth like that, Pash had to step back.
"Now, now, what is it we're fighting over?" Ermos chose that moment to return, revealing himself from amongst the trees.
"It's a human hand master. That was his one rule – don't be killing humans," Pash pointed out.
"Mm, is that right, boy?" Ermos asked, putting on a serious face for once. "Did you really kill someone? Or did you just dig it up?"
The dog looked down at the floor guiltily. Pash felt like it was the hand of a skeleton, something that the dog had dug up, but without proof, he couldn't be sure. They definitely didn't want their companion to make a habit of killing people, for one day it might be Pash's turn.
"Well, I'll take this off him for now," Pash said, reaching out to take the skeletal arm from him. But the hound snapped at him before he could take it away fully. It chomped down hard on the bony fingers and was unwilling to let go.
Pash pulled it a little harder, not wishing to be pushed around too much by the new addition to their team, but the dog's grip was solid, the bones broke before anything else. Pash was left with the arm and the dog was left with two fingers.
It stared at him with its red eyes as it slowly ground those fingers in its mouth to dust.
"Haha!" Where Pash had felt a good amount of tension, his master found humour and he chuckled heartily. "Looks like we've finally found a name for you, boy. Fingers it is!"
The dog wagged its tail this way and that, quite obviously happy with his new name. Whenever Ermos spoke directly to it, no matter what he was saying, the dog was always wagging his tail. It was quite obvious who his favourite was.
"Fingers?" Pash repeated with a frown. It didn't sound good to him at all. Especially not for a dog. Maybe for a middle-aged merchant with a shady past, but not for a dog.
"Yup, Fingers," Ermos confirmed, "see, Fingers likes it." Fingers wagged his tail even faster.
"Okay…" Pash relented, before turning back to the skeletal hand that he was holding. "What about this? Can Fingers show us where he got it from?" Pash realized that he had instinctively called the dog by the name his master had chosen for it, and he instantly regretted it.
"Let's see, can you Fingers? Can you prove your innocence before the court of me and my apprentice? You won't have broken our one law already, would you?" Ermos asked.
Fingers barked in reply and lurched to his feet, padding into the trees, before turning back a moment and barking again, indicating that they should follow.
"It helps that he's clever," Ermos said before following their dog into the trees, leaving their camp behind.
Pash had to agree, even if he had been at odds with the animal. He thought that perhaps Fingers did not respect him as he did his master, since he was nowhere near as strong. It made sense though, after all, no matter his current appearance, Fingers was a monster capable of destroying a whole city with ease.
They wandered through the trees, over dead branches and crunchy leaves, following their floppy-eared Fingers. The dog would bark every once in a while, telling them to hurry up, before it would put its nose back to the ground and retrace its earlier path.