“They want me to step up and do something, make peace, redeem the Giant’s lost civilization; I don’t feel like I’m that guy. I’m a journeyman wizard; I stay out of politics, and keep to my own business.” Juan sat with his back against a tree, hat in his lap.

Trevor and Gogmagog had left him a few hours ago. He had ventured deeper into the forest to find Ingrid, his lost lady love. She sat across from him, looking as beautiful as the day he met her. His voice caught in his throat as he talked. He missed her, he longed for her so intensely that it burned in his chest.

Tears came to the corners of his eyes as he gazed into hers. She shimmered in the moonlight, but her sad smile moved him just like it always did. She reached out to hold his hand, which flickered as it passed through.

“You have to do what’s right for you, Juan. If you lose your center and your equilibrium, you’re no good to anyone. Just do the next right thing. It’s all you can do.” Her voice was so soft that even a breeze nearly obscured it.

“Nothing makes sense since you died, Ingrid. I want to be a hermit most of the time, not talk to anyone. But bad things are happening and I have to do something. I thought the Giants were just bullies and gluttons who had gone too far, and needed to listen to reason. Now it seems like I’m going to deliver this boy Bucephalus to the wizards and they’re going to hill him or use him to take more and more from the surviving Giants. I might not be on the right side.” He crumbled the last of his incense; he knew his time with her was short.

“He’s in your pocket dimension now? He’s safe from any Giant killers or trophy hunters?”

“Yeah, no one can breach my Sanctum Sanctorum. He has plenty to eat and drink, and he’s probably still sleeping.”

“Well, you’re doing a good thing for him. If you could find him, someone else could too.”

“How could I never have learned this history of the Giants and Men before? It changes everything I was ever taught.”

“The history was erased, rewritten. The only ones who know the truth are dead, and that’s where we learn it. Most of the Giants don’t know their true history. They feel it, and it survives in their songs, but they couldn’t articulate it.”

“And you never told me, in all the times I’ve come?”

“The spirits share secrets, but we don’t know everything at once. It never was relevant for me to find out until you needed to know.”

“Do you get lonely too, where you are in the land of the Shades?”

She nodded. “My whole family is here. So are my ancestors and the girls I went to school with. But the afterlife isn’t complete without my man.”

With that, the first rays of sunlight broke through the trees and she was gone.