After leaving the camp with the statues, they followed the path over a small pass in the mountains. The more they travelled up the mountain, the less orange dust they found. Trident, Theodore, Samuel, and Melinda made their way over the pass. The weather got colder the higher they went, but it was never too cold. The snow returned for a few hours and then the sun came out. It felt as if the worst of their journey was finally over.

It was difficult to think that Theodore was going to tie this all up this evening. He had worked his way over the mountain and through the pass. They had survived the frozen guardsmen—they still did not know what caused the freezing, but they’re sure it had something to do with the orange dust. They had not yet located the rest of the children that had been taken over the pass. Theodore thought they were dead. It was a likely scenario: whatever magic was used to turn the guardsmen and their old women into statues was released upon the world and gobbled up the children who had been in the camp waiting to finish their transport over the mountain. The elves would have taken them in but they were too old. That was why they were dying out. The elves never gave birth to anyone; they took in the lost children and raised them as their own.

This had stopped a few years before as the treaty that kept the tent children and delivered them to the elves began to wane. It was the orange dust that made the elves the elves. They were shorter, faster, and more magical. Of course, when the children stopped being delivered, the elves began to die off. It was slow at first, but over the time it sped up. With the elves only living fifty years, it was only a matter of time before it was all over. That was why some of the children that had been delivered to the caves were sent instead into the valley. The elven parents did not want their children to be the last of the elves. They rather they lived and survived with the humans in the valley.

Theodore made it over the pass and arrived at the city. It would take him some time to acclimate himself to the city and learn its ways. Theodore and the rest of the crew made it over the pass and began to work their way into the valley. The city within the valley was like nothing they had ever seen. There were no tents and the air was clean; cleaner even than the mountain air that they had passed when they climbed up through the mountain.

The city itself had no walls. There were no guardsmen at the entrance. It was just row after row of houses where they came down. The people in the streets looked so clean. They stared and pointed a them as they walked across the streets. There were other people with skins similar to their own. They realized that the other people they saw, the clean people, did not have the orange tint to their skin. Their skins were milky white or blue black in color; they were rich direct colors. What they were not was dyed by the orange dust that filled the outside world.

“This valley,” Melinda said. “Is an oasis from the orange dust outside in the tent city and even on the mountains. There is only clean here. I have never seen anything like it. The colors are blinding. They are so varied. And the people, the people are so clean. Even the ones with the orange tint, their clothing does not have the tint.”

“This is truly an amazing place,” Theodore said.

They were greeted by some random people, who thought they looked strange or lost.

“We are not from here,” Theodore said, speaking slower than normal in case they did not understand him. He did not have to worry. They understood his words fine. They spoke the same tongue as he did, and even their accents sounded very similar. They sounded so much more like their own accents that they all knew at once that they were from this place. They were not like the guardsmen and old women who watched them at the tent city.

Word of their arrival spread through the valley quickly. Except for the traders that met the valley people at the overpass road, there were never any visitors from outside the valley. The people that greeted them realized and told them that must be from beyond the valley. But their accents were so much like their own. It was only their skin that was throwing them off.

“Where are you from?” they would ask. And the group did not know how to answer. They described where they had grown up: the farming and the tents; the food and the orange dusted water. They brought them water to drink, and it was the most pure and delicious water they had ever tasted. They were almost afraid to drink it. It did not look safe; they wondered if the people were attempting to poison them, to do away with these strangers from outside their lands.

“There are no strangers from outside our lands,” they assured them. “There are valley people and then there are the outsiders; the outsiders only come to trade and they speak with funny accents. They are always older, old women and old men.”

“Do they have large pikes?” Trident asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact they do,” they answered. And they described the old women and the guardsmen as the traders.

“It is where we get our food,” they explained to them.

“Can you show me your food?” Melinda asked.

They brought over baskets of fruit and vegetables. They were very large and although they had been washed, they still had the orange rind that the dust left on all the product that they had grown outside the valley in the tent city.”

They explained that they received the food from those on the outside, the traders with the strange foreign accents. They would cart the food up the mountain a few times a year.

“What did they ask for in exchange?” Samuel asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

“Just basic supplies,” they answered. “They never wanted any payment, at least not valley payment. It was the elves that paid them what they wanted. We always assumed that the elves gave them gold or iron or whatever the outside traders wanted. The exchange would happen on the last day that they were in town. They would disappear into the mouth of the cave, and we would not see them again. They would return the following year. We knew that the elves have multiple exits to their cave, and there is a theory that their caves go all the way through the mountain.”

“That is just silly,” another one said. He was a council member of the human council, and he introduced himself. Theodore did not understand what a council member was, but from the way the rest of the valley people treated him, he assumed it was someone important in the valley. He knew their lives were in the hands of these people, and he tried to make nice and banter with the council member. If they had to impress someone, they might as well impress this man.

“What are elves?” Samuel asked.

There was laughter and snickering in the crowd. “You really are not from around here,” they said. “The elves are the little people. They were the ones who brought the humans to the valley after the last event. They introduced us to the valley and saved us from the orange dust in the outside world beyond the mountains.”

“Saved you from the orange dust?” Melinda asked. “I do not understand. What does the orange dust do to you that you need saving?”

Nobody answered their question. The valley people had so many questions of their own. They thought they had discovered people outside the valley that survived, even if they survived on orange dust.

“I do not understand,” they asked. “You never leave the shadow of the mountain?”

“The old women and the guardsmen would move us to different farmlands,” Theodore explained. “There was talk of attackers, and these moves were designed to protect us. At least that was what they would tell us. We would spend a month moving and resetting up our camp. We did this at least twice a year at different times. But we never moved too far, and we always stayed the same distance away from the mountains that lead to this valley.”

“That is very strange,” they agreed. The human council brought them to their chambers to freshen them up. “You have had a long journey. We have many questions for you, but first we should act as good and respectful hosts and wash you up and give you a chance to relax after your long journey.”

They were brought to an area for refreshing. There were baths drawn up for all of them. They had to be shown how to take baths. They had never seen such clean water in one place. The water was even warm, and once they got over the idea of submerging themselves in water, they spent many hours sitting in the water, even as it grew cold. Their nakedness did not concern them, and they took turns going in and out of the baths. They had spent so much of their lives living in a tent with the other four, that they had seen everything there was to see. There was no need for privacy when you were amongst such close friends. They were closer than any family could ever be.

The council continued to pepper them with questions. It became apparent that they were from the valley even though they did not remember it at all. They did not remember much before they were taken to the tents.

“Why did you leave the tents?” they asked.

“We followed some children that were taken away,” Melinda said. “They were taken up the hill, and while we found the guardsmen and the old women—they were like stone statues at the top the mountain—we never found the children.”

“That is strange,” they said. The human council had never heard of this type of story. They sent messages to the monarch to see what if anything they could make of this. Not all of them believed the four children’s outlandish story. They had clearly lived outside the valley—there were no other explanations for their clothing or dyed skin. But to think that they came from the valley seemed ludicrous. Who took them, and how were they not missed? It did not make sense.

The monarch did not immediately respond to their request. After bathing and being fed, the four children were allowed to sleep. They were given separate rooms, but immediately left the room and all huddled on the same bed. They could not sleep that night; they laid the blankets on the floor and curled up together. They talked long into the night about everything they had seen and the strange people that had taken them in. They did not know what the morning would bring them. But they were ready to meet it.

“Someone will have to pay for this,” Samuel said simply. He did not mean from a monetary perspective. They still had the copper coins that were used for payment in the tent city. They found that the coins were meaningless to the valley dwellers. They showed them papers that were used to represent money. It was an alien concept, but something that it only took them a few days to catch on.

Theodore knew what Samuel meant: they were from the valley, which meant that the rest of the children being held at the tent city were also from the valley. They could not leave them there. Melinda was the first to make this connection and decide for them what must be done. The question of how it was to be done was a more tricky question.

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