After twelve days on Trail of Woe, the journey came to an abrupt halt. A chasm that opened deep into the desert floor split the trail in two. There was no way to cross it - in either direction - for as far as the trio could see. The far edge of the chasm was a good twenty feet away and five or six feet higher than the edge they stood on.

"How can we possibly get there, now?" Kazbo squeaked in what the Tauren had learned was his frustrated voice.

"Well, unless you know some sort of flying spell, we can't cross," Sanja said. "We have no choice but to go around."

"Which way?" Jorga asked.

His sister studied the ground. "There's no sign of prints going east. Not a whole lot of prints going west, but it looks like the few people who have come this way all walked into the setting sun."

She looked at the others. "It's probably a bad idea to forge a new path without a map, so let's go west."

---

They followed the crack west for four days before encountering the oasis. It was so large, so impossibly huge, that Sanja and Jorga actually smelled it a full day before they were actually close enough to see it. They came over a rise, and there it was, stretching from one horizon to the other.

The trio stood in silence for a long minute before Sanja could gasp, "Wow."

She turned to Kazbo. "I had heard the stories about the archdruids trying to make Desolace lush once more, but I never really thought they could manage it."

"You didn't?" the Gnome asked.

"Well how could they? I could imagine a spell powerful enough to turn a sand dune lush, but that's huge! It's like a whole country."

She lowered her voice reverently, "They say that not even the ancients could do such a thing..."

---

The oasis was more than just a green island within a sea of rock and sand. It was a true swamp with oppressive humidity, vines that blocked the trail, and more stretches that had to be waded than those that could be hiked.

Kazbo slapped at his arm for the twentieth time and screamed. He looked to the Tauren with misery evident on his face. Large, red welts stood out sharply from his pink skin. "Aren't they biting you?"

The siblings looked at each other and shook their heads.

"They must be Horde mosquitoes!" Jorga laughed.

Sanja covered the boy's mouth and looked apologetic. "You look terrible!"

She rushed to a clump of grasses that were nearly as tall as herself. "See if you can find some flat rocks that we can use as a mortar and pestle," she instructed the boys.

Sanja used the knife and digging tool to cut down a thick clump of sweet-smelling lemon grass. Then she crushed it into an oily goop with the rocks that Jorga carried.

"This will keep the bites from itching?" The Gnome looked hopeful.

"Perhaps a little," she said, "but it will keep the bugs away, so at least you won't get bitten any more that you already are."

Kazbo removed his shirt and Jorga whistled at just how many welts covered his back. "They love you!"

"I better crush some more," Sanja said. "You're going to need a lot."

---

Apart from the bugs, life in the swamp was even easier than it was in the desert. The land teemed with edible berries, mushrooms, and small creatures. It rained regularly, and instead of searching for water, they spent their days setting up shelters and searching for dry places to camp.

There was no dry firewood to be found, of course, but the little man's magic managed to set even the wettest wood ablaze.

"No... owa... halii!" the boys chanted in unison. Jorga reached over the vine he had strung between two trees and pushed the Gnome unceremoniously down on his rear end. He didn't even need to step over the vine to claim victory.

"Aw, come on. You're not even trying."

"I do not think rope wrestling is my sport," Kazbo muttered from where he sat. "And besides, I have not even had my blackroot this morning. I am barely awake as it is."

"What if I only use one hand?" Jorga suggested.

"Hey, be nice to Kazbo," Sanja said without getting up. "He's like twenty times older than Dad!"

"I am not old," he said with exaggerated emphasis. "I am just not as strong as your brother. He has muscles..."

"Like a bull?" Sanja offered with a smile.

"What are you doing, anyhow?" he asked. "I do not understand why you even kept all of those nasty jackrabbit pelts."

The pelts were pretty crude and stiff. She had scraped all of the meat from the hides to keep them from rotting. She had even treated the insides with a paste made of brain meats and urine. But to truly tan each hide, she would have needed to work the leather over a rope for hours.

She had yet to weave a rope, and Sanja couldn't spare the time it would take to do this right. If they were going to hike, hunt, and set up camp every day, then something had to give. As it was, she hated how much time she had invested into cutting a needle from bone and turning the rabbit intestines into string.

Sadly, Kazbo didn't appear to have any practical skills at all. Her brother knew a little more, but he was still just a child. He had the same attention span shared by every calf in their first summer.

"Making clothes, of course," she said, as if it were obvious. "I really wish we could hunt larger prey. It's going to take an awful lot of rabbits to keep us covered... all the way back to Mulgore."

She gave him a meaningful look and the Gnome nodded. Winter coats, Kazbo inferred. In a year's time, he figured that Jorga would be larger than Sanja was now, and that she would be even larger still.

The pair looked over to Jorga, but the boy was too busy watching ants to have picked up on her coded message.

"Are you two almost ready to head out?"

Jorga shrugged and squished a bug with his thumb.

"I will go refill the water skin," Kazbo volunteered.

Sanja started packing up their possessions and the Gnome hauled the nearly-empty water skin down the trail to the water hole.

The Tauren looked up with a start when they heard the splash. Whatever made that sound was far too large to be a Gnome falling into a water hole.

Sanja grabbed the spear and ran.

---

The siblings found Kazbo gripping a small tree for dear life. His face and arms were ashen, and his lower half was deep within the jaws of a huge crocolisk. He was screaming for help.

The six-legged beast was a dark green and scaly. The trio had seen many of the giants, sunning themselves on muddy banks. They caught glimpses of more just beneath the surface, waiting to ambush the unsuspecting with their huge jaws and countless teeth. At six feet from snout to tail, this was far from one of the largest, but it would be easily big enough to drown and eat the poor Gnome.

Sanja stabbed viciously at the beast with her spear. It jerked in surprise at the attack, but the creature's hide was far thicker than she had realized, and the wound she gave it was more minor than she had hoped.

She raised the spear and jabbed again. Jorga hurled a stone at the croc's head and readied to throw another.

Kazbo was saying something, but over the lizard's grunting and the Tauren's screams, it was lost completely.

She stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. She wanted to try pull the poor man out of its jaws, but had serious doubts that she was even strong enough to pry them apart while the beast still lived.

Sanja lifted the spear far overhead with both hands, and with a mighty grunt, she drove it down into the muddy bank.

The soft breeze blew a small, pink cloud of smoke away from the battle, revealing that the crocolisk was gone. Kazbo was held aloft in the tiny mouth of a white and fluffy sheep.

The sheep looked as confused as Sanja felt. The Gnome fell from its mouth with a thud, and it bleated a perplexed Baa!

Sanja leveled her spear at the wooly mammal, but Kazbo cried out in fright. "Don't! We have to run!"

Without questioning, she scooped the mage up in one arm and started beating her hooves back to camp. Jorga was close behind.

#

Kazbo's eyes were wide and round. He gasped huge breaths for many long minutes as little blooms of crimson started to soak through his clothes.

"Monster" was the only word he could manage.

Sanja rummaged through her pack and waited for him to get his breathing under control. That's when he suddenly realized he was wounded.

"I'm dying!" Kazbo gasped.

"I doubt it," Sanja reassured him. She rolled a few leaves of bruiseweed together. "Here, put this under your tongue. It will help with the pain.

"Why didn't you say that you could turn them into sheep?" she asked. "We could have been having lamb chops for dinner, and I could stitch their pelts instead of hundreds of jackrabbit skins!"

Kazbo shook his head. "No, it would not work. Stabbing them with the spear would break the enchantment."

She nodded. "A shame. Well, lift up your tunic. Let's see how bad he got you."

The wounds were small, but deep. They stretched across the Gnome's belly at an angle and down to his hip. On his back there were a matching set that stretched from his right shoulder to his left buttock.

"Whew, I'm relieved. You are the luckiest little man I have ever seen," Sanja sighed. Jorga looked far less impressed. He made the foulest face, as if he would vomit, but he refused to look away.

"I do not feel lucky," the Gnome grumbled.

"Well you should." Sanja touched his wounded back very gently. "That croc' could have torn you in half, or at least ripped the flesh from your body. But his teeth really didn't tear the skin at all.

"And he sunk one tooth on the left side of your spine and the next tooth on the right side." She nodded her head. "If he had grabbed you only a half an inch farther up or down..." She snapped her fingers. "You would never walk again."

Kazbo turned stiffly around and looked at the kneeling cow eye-to-eye. Some of the color had returned to his normally-pink cheeks.

"That is the good, I'm afraid," she explained. "The bad is that these are puncture wounds, and you have a lot of them. Puncture wounds always get infected."

Kazbo frowned.

"You can still walk now."

"It hurts to move," he interrupted. "A lot."

"It will hurt more tomorrow, and the day after that." She put her hands gently around his arms. "It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

"I'll go collect some herbs. I can make a poultice that will help fight the infection, but by tomorrow we will have to sew these wounds closed. They will heal even slower if we don't."

His face went ashen again. "With the needle and guts you used to sew pelts?" Large enough to hold in her huge, Tauren fingers, the crude instrument seemed more like a weapon of torture than of healing.

"I am afraid so. Unless you know some healing magic, then that is the best we have."

"Arcane magic cannot heal," he explained. "It sounds like I will be holding the two of you back once more..."

Sanja pointed in his face with her wide, primary finger. "Don't say it. Nobody gets left behind."

Kazbo closed his mouth.

"Besides, there is plenty of food and water. We can camp here as long as we need to until you have recovered fully. It's not like we're in a hurry..." Sanja slapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late - Jorga had already heard the words.