Word Speaker

Entry 10-21 I’ve never seen anything like what I saw today.   There I was, traveling along the road to Roccaster with Pip, feeling down as the afternoon sun when, out of nowhere, we hear a growl of some kind. Pip figured it was just some kind of woodland creature, so we keep going and out of nowhere, the biggest panther I ever saw comes jumping from the brush and takes Pip’s top half clean off! I started running as fast I could, went straight for a house we saw just a few minutes ago on the side of the road. I could hear the big thing behind me, and I remember thinking “if only Pip were a full-sized human like me, he could’ve preoccupied the damn thing longer!”   So there I was, at the end of my rope, when I see some fancy-dresser at the house down the road. I start waving at him, yelling something or another, and he just smiles back at me and starts walking forward. The crazy sunsmiler! Walks right by me, says “Stop.” and I think “There goes a dead man.” And I got to the house, cowered behind the post and waited for a chomp.   But it never came.   And I turned around and looked, and this happy fool is standing face-to-maw with a panther! What’s wilder, the panther doesn’t seem to move! Almost like it can’t. The well-dressed man starts pacing around the panther. I called out, said “You’d best back off or that big thing will take off your head!” And he looked up at me, looked back to the panther and said with a smile “He doesn’t look so big.”   Just like that, the beast shrank. Not out of fear, but actually shrank! Went from the size of a monster to the size of a house pet! I couldn’t believe my own two eyes. I thought I’d been swept up by Altaír himself until the well-dressed man spoke to me and said “There’s no point to fear as it stands now.” In just a heartbeat, I was calm. I’d never felt anything like it. All I could do was stare and wonder. The man just smiled, patted me on the shoulder and walked along, picking up the cat and heading right down the road.   I’ve been sitting on the porch of this house for hours now. Everything I know is wrong. I don’t know what happened, but the world is different now. I can never look at it the same way again.   -Found in the journal of a wayward traveller