The Good Chef knew all recipes, from Branchburgers to Kinese Knibblers. But when a black-cloaked fox asked for a Snakesoup, she stood tongue-tied.

Her jaw dropped and all the pans she held between her teeth clattered to the wooden floor of her wagon. Normally, she was a quick red chimpanzee, but not when she was flabbergasted. She didn’t even notice that a pan crushed four plants from her beloved veggie patch.

The desert fox stared at her. “It’s an ancient recipe. A medicine for a grave illness.”

“S-Snakesoup? Never heard of it.”

Chef stumbled to her recipe book, which was close to falling off of the windowsill. Her paws got stuck in the pans as if they were boots. She rapidly leafed through the pages, scanning the recipes, until the fox impatiently placed her paw on the pages.

“We have no time for this. You don’t know it, but I can tell you the ingredients.”

“Impossible. My recipe book knows everything.”

The fox smelled of mud and sweat. The smell clashed with the pleasant flowery scents from her wagon, and another recipe that bubbled and fizzed in the cauldron behind her. As Chef walked passed, she quickly dipped her finger into the liquid and tasted it. Almost done. Perhaps a bit more rosemary.

What was a desert fox doing this far from Floria—this far from desert? The illness must be grave indeed, but she looked healthy as can be. Only her shadow was a bit odd, as if she secretly hid two foxes underneath her cloak.

“Is it a skin disease? Does that cloak protect you against the sun?”

The high, pointy ears of the fox bent down.

“I am Minneka, advisor of a very powerful and important being. He is ill. If you ever hear the bells ring, you’ll know he is dying. Our best healers fear this might already occur within ten days.”

She whispered. “This cloak let me reach you unseen, for this information must stay a secret at all costs.”

Snakesoup, snakesoup, snakesoup. Why didn’t she know it?

She searched her recipe book once more, but it held nothing even close to it. Who could be ill? Surely it wasn’t her king, the leader of the Primas? If he died, chaos would erupt among the ape-like creatures. They were already fighting about every little decision. And the only consequence was that the poorest animals were left without food or drink.

“So why do you need me?” asked Chef.

“The ingredients are … difficult to obtain. And nobody knows how to combine them. That part of the recipe has been lost to the ravages of time.”

Chef’s frayed tail curled and stirred the cauldron behind her, holding a wooden spoon as tall as a young tree. She felt increasingly anxious. You’re a good Chef, she told herself. You can do this. You help everyone who needs food or medicine, no matter how hard it is.

She studied the desert fox from head to toe. Minneka indeed postured royally. Head high, chest forward, and a cloak made of the finest silk she ever laid eyes on.

She asked the question in a scared, squeaky voice. “Is it the king of the Primas? Is he ill?”

“No.” Minneka impatiently tapped the wooden doorframe of Chef’s wagon. “We have little time. They told me you were the best, that you helped all who sought aid. Will you do it or not?”

“Erm, erm, yes, yes, of course.”

Chef waved two gigantic leaves to extinguish the fire below her cauldron. The liquid inside had risen to the edge … but she had just prevented it from boiling over.

A deep sigh escaped. The entire wagon now smelled of what she’d made: a simple vegetable soup to distribute to the poor in Heroeshaven.

When Floria suddenly rose from the sea, everyone fled to the harbor cities. Everyone wanted to visit the desert. Everyone wanted to quickly snatch a piece of land for themselves. But Heroeshaven hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t prepared, which was why thousands of its inhabitants were now without food.

Around the same time, Companions and Demigods disappeared left and right. Because Anniwe, the King of Lions, had never been seen again, the Lion Dynasty was almost extinct. A second reason why thousands of animals were without food.

Chef’s own stomach growled, but that wasn’t important now.

“Can we visit Heroeshaven first? I have to—”

“No!” Minneka yelled. Briefly, she lost her formal and composed speech. “My apologies, that was improper.”

She pulled her cloak tighter and left the wagon. An odd sight in the hot afternoon sun.

“We have until the bells ring. No distraction, no detours.”

Sometimes, dear reader, I am disappointed in my own little beings. If she had just stated WHO was gravely ill, if everyone had been more honest with each other, this story might have ended differently.

Chef’s shortened right paw, with a stump at the end, closed the recipe book. Dust blew into her nostrils and brought a damp smell. She’d never experienced this: the book had always held all the answers, to everything. She was afraid to make a mistake—but she was mostly deadly curious about this unknown, ancient recipe.

“What ingredients do you need?”

“Stalks from the Bumpbaracht. As many seeds as possible from a Dinodear. Leaves from the Turnbacktulip. And, unfortunately, the sap of the Fishfool.”

An odd list. But Chef’s mind, filled with cooking experience, immediately felt the recipe was right. Bumpbarachts were often used to give something a nicer smell or taste. The Dinodear soothed pain and helped heal wounds. The Turnbacktulip turned back viruses and the Fishfool strengthened bodily fluids, such as blood.

It sounded like a good medicine. Unfortunately, all those ingredients were very hard to get.

Minneka stood next to her wagon and looked inside defiantly. “Let me guess, you have to travel by wagon?”

“Of course! Just wait, my sweet Wagoney is much faster than you think!”

Minneka sighed and elegantly jumped back inside through the window. Her paws briefly touched the recipe book, which opened itself, exactly on the page explaining Bumpbarachts. Minneka looked astonished and pulled back as if her paw received a shock.

Chef was used to the weird behavior of her book and shrugged.

She walked to the front wheels and pulled on a wooden stick. The wagon’s brakes disengaged. Because they stood at the start of the Impossible Wall, the road sloped downwards slightly and made the wagon roll on its own. If they continued rolling like this, they’d pass through the Second Throne of Darus, and reach Heroeshaven in a few days.

With pain in her heart, she said goodbye to that plan. All she could do was leave behind the food where she was.

She pulled several brown-red jars from a crate and filled them with her vegetable soup. Minneka was kind enough to place them in the grass along the road, her body hanging halfway out the window, as the wagon sped up.

Chef decided that Minneka wasn’t a bad person—just very scared that they’d be too late to save her very important being.

She studied the pages in her Recipebook.

“Bumpbarachts,” she read aloud. “Can only be found in the Strawberry Forest. Animal-shy. Will pull back when they notice any movement nearby, and therefore prefer to grow in unreachable places.”

The book sketched images next to the description. A dark cave, the foliage of a giant tree, and a monstrous creature who seemed to guard the plants.

Chef wouldn’t stop talking, even when Minneka closed her eyes and rolled into a ball to prepare for sleeping.

“Oh, yes, the Strawberry Forest. You’ll experience some odd events there, you do. Once I had to bake bread for an entire herd of horses. They’d promised to give me one seed per piece of bread, but they ended up having far too little seeds to fulfill that promise!”

Even in deepest dark you knew exactly when you’d reached the forest. The smells became sweet and the air tasted of the juicy droplets inside fresh fruit. It was almost as if you could eat from the air.

“Oh, yes, that reminds me of the time I visited the Innica. They could grow plants in the weirdest places, they could! Even on ground that was completely infertile! They refused to share their secret with me, so I snuck outside in the night and spotted a flock of birds over their corn fields. Their bird poop let the plants grow. They even called it bread from the sky.”

The smell was so deliciously fresh and fruit that Chef almost jumped out of her wagon. Could she—no, she could take no detours, not even to snatch a few strawberries.

Minneka cracked open an eye, as if she could read her mind. Could desert foxes read minds? It was only a recently evolved species, so nobody knew what they could do.

Could her employer be the king of Floria? As far as Chef knew, that barren desert had no king. All animals fled to it because they still had to determine who was boss. And besides, her wagon now drove away from Floria, and Minneka had not protested.

When daylight returned, they reached the Green Path. Ever since the Loveline fell, it continued all the way to Amor, and even deeper into Traferia.

Traferia. The place where she lost her little sister. The place that brought her the best of memories—and the worst. The place where the King of Lions ruled over a good and peaceful rainforest, she assumed. Everyone eagerly awaited the moment they finally received a child who could succede him. Yes, nothing but praise for the Lions.

Just as all animals they passed had nothing but praise for Chef. Rabbits, horses, foxes, dogs, other Primas, they all recognized her wagon and waved. Minneka hid even deeper inside her cloak to draw no attention.

Chef kept her eyes wide open. She searched the surroundings for something that looked like the sketches in her recipe book. A deserted cave. A tall tree. A—

Halfway into the second night, she smelled a new scent. One that did not belong in this part of the world, Origina. A smell she recognized from Floria: Elephants.

Just in time, she slammed on the brakes and dodged the tusks of a gigantic elephant. In the dark, she only saw the shiny white teeth and nothing else. A grey blurry silhouette, five times as tall as her wagon, turned around sheepishly and looked down.

His front paw slid forward and pushed against her wagon until it tilted sideways.

Chef grabbed her windowsill to prevent falling over. Minneka was too late and landed inside the cauldron.

“Hmm. Strange piece of wood. Heavy.” The elephant pushed the wagon back onto four wheels, but only to push it even further to the other side. “Suspicious.”

Minneka had freed herself and elegantly climbed to the roof.

“Go away, monster! This forest belongs to everyone!”

“You shall not pass.”

Minneka drew two sharp daggers from the folds of her cloaks. Chef didn’t even know she carried weapons. She must be a really, really important person.

“Then feel the wrath of—”

The elephant laughed at her as his front paw arced through the sky. Minneka jumped up and landed on the paw, allowing her to climb further, towards his face. The elephant did not like that. He shook his head wildly and stomped the dirt, mere centimeters from the wagon.

“Please be careful with my wagon! My roof!” Chef yelled upward, as she checked if her plants survived. Including the one she invented recently and still hadn’t revealed what it was.

She wanted to join the fight, but knew it was useless. Her front paws had never fully grown, just like her frayed tail.

“This is private terrain,” the elephant grumbled. “Nobody passes, or we’ll take you prisoner.”

He shook again. Minneka could not hold on. She twisted through the air and landed inside a tree so far away that Chef lost sight of her. The elephant raised his paw to destroy the wagon.

Chef jumped outside.

The elephant froze and stopped trumpetting.

“CHEF! What are you doing here? Traveling with a … filthy fennec?”

The elephant said her name with such volume that she was blown backward. Laying on her back, in the dirt next to her wagon, she looked inside two happy elephant eyes.

An annoyed Minneka trudged past her, twigs and leaves stuck in her fur as if she had a hundred tentacles. “Call my species filthy again and you will feel the wrath of—”

“Yes yes, bla bla, wrath and revenge.” His trunk lifted Chef from the floor. “Chef may pass, not you.”

Finally, Chef remembered his name. He’d only been a small baby then. She’d helped his mother grow extra trees in Floria. After an exhausting search, they’d found a plant seed that would survive in the desert and didn’t need that much water. She saw Olm’s muscles, and his giant body, and knew it had been a success.

“It is fine, Olm. She’s with me. We have an urgent mission and need Bumpbarachts.”

“Hmm. We don’t like giving those away, but for you, yes, we’ll make an exception.”

She followed Olm deeper into the forest, as the sun rose once more. Chef hoped the next location would be further away so she could sleep. She would have to teach Minneka how to steer the wagon, though.

A stone wall appeared, taller than the surrounding trees. They walked straight at it. The wall had not grown there, of course, it had been built. Chef guessed it was the city wall of Fruitgard, the first city inside the Strawberry Forest.

She had to laugh at the idea that Olm was going to climb over it. Of course he did not. He took a sudden left, and turned left again, until he suddenly walked through a tree that hugged the wall.

Minneka and Chef looked at each other.

“I will not be made a fool and walk straight into a solid tree.”

“Oh come on,” Chef said. “It’s an illusion. They stole that from the pyramid builders, who also feel you by pretending their pyramids have no entrance.”

Chef close her eyes, also walked into the tree, and discovered it was indeed nothing more than a convincing painting.

Two heartbeats later, all scents had changed to fresh flowers and running water. She stood inside a fenced-off field overflowing with Bumpbarachts, also hiding a waterfall that crested the Fruitgard city wall and ended here.

The Bumpbaracht looked more like a mushroom. It had a very short stalk, with a red ball on top that was covered in bumps. Like a broken umbrella that it tried to unfold. The older the plant, the more numerous its bumps. If they really feared an animal, they could fold so quickly they launched themselves like a flare. And if you were lucky, one of the bumps popped and seeds rolled out.

Chef had always wanted her own little collection of Bumpbarachts in her veggie patch.

Every step from Olm made more Bumpbarachts close their umbrella. Some even sunk deeper into the dirt, until they weren’t much more than a tiny blade of grass. But they were used to Olm—and he was too fast for some of them.

His trunk rapidly grabbed a handful of stalks.

“The mayor of Fruitgard created this place. These forests still contain a lot of Wilderness areas, lacking protection from the city. She found it too dangerous for the smallest prey animals, such as rabbits.”

Minneka impatiently tapped the floor and mumbled. “Always they give preference to prey. Exactly why we made the gods disappear.” Then she laughed. “And then? The rabbits use these plants as weapons to defend themselves?”

Olm and Chef laughed as well, as she received the odd plants in the palm of her little hand.

“A fox can only track a rabbit from far away by smelling them. These plants obscure scent. By covering yourself with these, or placing them behind you, nobody will ever smell you.”

Chef was familiar with the idea. It was also an old trick from Paraat to force their children to eat awful—but very healthy—food.

Minneka turned around. “We must move on.”

“Thank you, Olm,” Chef said. He came down to tap his trunk against her nose. “I’d stay longer, but—”

“We must move on!”

Minneka hastily jumped towards the tree through which they entered.

She hit a solid piece of wood, hard. A red bump appeared on her forehead and her mouth twisted, then she fell to the floor.

“The exit is not the same as the entrance,” Olm said with a smile. “Another trick from the pyramid builders.”

Chef and Minneka rested against the walls of the wagon, exhausted. Chef’s fur was covered in dirt. She’d immediately planted a few seeds and carefully removed the stalks from the Bumpbarachts.

Minneka had washed herself immediately and looked pristine: fresh and beautiful.

“You must learn to fight,” said the desert fox. “This could’ve gone terribly wrong.”

“You must learn to steer this wagon,” Chef said yawning. “It’s very simple. You pull on that thing in front of the brakes. See that round circle? It’s called a steering wheel. An invention from my species.”

“I know what a steering wheel is.”

“Then show me.”

Minneka placed her snout on top of the wooden wheel. “Of course. Simple.”

She had an odd definition of simple.

As soon as the brake disengaged, the wagon shook wildly and startled Minneka. She tried to grab the steering wheel, but the wagon had already gained too much speed. Hastily, she pushed her snout into the wheel, but used too much force and turned it five times.

The wagon turned and left the Green Path. It took some other path that nobody had traveled before. Minneka yelled in a panic as she tried to dodge the trees coming at them.

Chef reached for the wheel, but her arms were too short, her stump unable to grab it.

Their front wheel hit a large stone, which launched them into the air for a good ten seconds.

When they landed, they were back on a road. Chef was happy to be out of the woods, but recognized this as the first road to Amor, built out of unpolished stones and nothing else.

It was not made for wagons.

Every second, their wheel hit a new stone. Animals looked over their shoulder and fled from the incoming danger. Chef tried to talk, but her body shook up and down, up and down, up and down.

“The idea,” she yelled over the din of wood crunching and grinding against stone, “is that you don’t drive over loose cobblestones.”

Minneka had climbed on top of the wheel and wrapped her entire fox body around it. This gave her more control, but the damage had been done.

The right front wheel broke in two. The wagon slanted, like an exhausted horse that sinks through its legs. Their speed helped them continue for a while, off the road again, until reaching the border around Amor.

The city of Seven Hills, and the front of her wagon now bumped against the first one.

Chef pulled herself to her foot using the heavy recipe book, which had not moved at all during the chaos.

“Well, I call that a success.”

“Success? Success!? We can’t continue without a wheel!”

“I’ve never arrived at Amor this quickly!”

Minneka kicked open the door. The entire area around the wagon was deserted, all animals on the Green Path too afraid or surprised.

She studied the wheel. “Hopeless. Even I can’t repair this.”

“Oh well, I’ll make a new wheel in a few days. There are kind creatures everywhere to help—”

“What is wrong with you?” Minneka yelled.

“Erm, sorry?”

“You pretend this is a vacation! All the time in the world! Your plants are more important than the death of the King of Lions!”

Minneka sighed and smoothed her black cloak. “My apologies, that was improper again.”

“The … the King of Lions? That’s whom the medicine is for?”

The fox ran away from the wagon towards the gates of Amor.

“I’ll be purchasing a new wheel so we can continue by nightfall.”

Only once the fennec had vanished, an entire herd of animals approached Chef.

A deer spoke first. “The King of Lions is dying?”

“Terrible news, dreadful news,” spoke an old rabbit with gray fur.

“Erm, well, yes, but we are making a medicine!” said Chef as cheerfully as possible.

If the King of Lions dies, before having a successor, then it’s chaos again. Nobody will accept the wolves. We’ll be thrown back into a Second Conflict, the peace in these woods broken.

A group of badgers approached her with wooden planks between their teeth. Slowly, they placed them in a circle, while the rabbits found some plants to tie them together.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Chef, as she entered her wagon.

“We’ll do anything for the Good Chef,” she heard the deer say.

“If she makes the medicine,” another mumbled, “then the king will surely survive. All will be well.”

Chef herself leaned on her recipe book, almost hiding from the animals. All those expectations. In a few days, all of Origina would know the King of Lions was fatally ill and Chef was supposed to save him.

But she didn’t know this whole recipe! And the next plant was just as impossible to get. What if she didn’t succeed? Would she be banished too, like the thieves from Heroeshaven? Like … almost anyone these days? If she couldn’t travel freely with her wagon … hand out food to animals who need it … what would she even do?

She read the recipe book.

Dinodear, sometimes called Dinosweetie or Dinodarling. Animals say that Donte invented this plant, but that is not true. It was the demigoddess Nisah who, in her grief, kissed a fern and thus invented this medicinal plant. Little is known about what the plant looks like or how it works. All stories merely say that the plant changes itself based on the being that tries to pluck it.

That’s where the recipe book ended. The dinosaurs used to live everywhere, but they originated from the Saursea and the Mouth of Din. Those were on the path to Traferia, so that’s where they’d go.

Her wagon shook. Somebody hammered against it. She leaned over the windowsill and saw that another Primas had come to attach the new wheel. An apelike creature who did have fully grown arms and hands, and could therefore use the hammer with power and precision.

Thumbs—what an invention by nature.

The wheel wasn’t perfectly round. If Minneka chose another stone path, it would probably break again. But it was enough for now.

Her veggie patch had survived well. By now, she’d garnered so many plants that there was barely space for walking inside her wagon. Everything grew through each other, even grabbing or circling one another for support. Vines curled around vertical twigs she’d placed in the dirt. Her wagon wasn’t tall enough to grow a full-size grain stalk, so she’d been trying for years to design seeds for a smaller stalk.

Each summer, she only kept the seeds from the smallest versions she had. Only those were planted again, not any of the others. She’d been doing so for ten years, and by now the grain had stopped growing so tall that it broke through her roof and left behind holes. Continue for a few years, and she should have created a new type of grain. One that produced less food, but could also grow in tiny spaces like her wagon.

But away from everything, safely inside its own flower pot, stood her new plant. She had discovered it using the same process. Only plant seeds with specific properties, only combine seeds that seemed to work well together.

The problem, however, was that the plant did not look like anything that she knew. It seemed better than other plants in all ways: stronger, faster, fuller, thicker. Fruit had started to grow underneath some leaves. It simultaneously smelled of delicious roses and stuffy old paper.

But what did her new plant do?

The hammering stopped; the wheel was attached. She thanked everyone and carefully rolled her wagon towards the gates of Amor.

Chef had always found Amor busy and overwhelming, for her snout suddenly had to process a hundred different scents. All around her, stalls baked and boiled and roasted food. Up ahead, the Main Road was littered with stalls and shops that displayed their wealth of breads and fruit. And even if this didn’t upset your nose, you’d meet the smell of wet cloth and sweat. Mostly because of the rows of clothing that hung from washing lines overhead.

But she loved it.

Time and again, she wanted to leave her wagon to talk with somebody cooking a tasty recipe. Learn their recipes. Chat with that parrot she once helped roast his nuts for easier digestion.

But she didn’t want to upset Minneka even more. And now that she knew it was about the King of Lions, she also knew how little time they had to reach the point furthest south in Traferia.

She found Minneka in a grim alley, negotiating with a skunk about the price.

“Fifty Soliduri? For a wheel that is clearly second-paw!?”

“Minneka!”

Her startled jump into the wall revealed she hadn’t heard Chef approach at all.

“You …” Minneka sighed. “Of course you already have a wheel. Let me guess, you just happened to know a dragon in the neighborhood who happened to have a wheel lying around for you?”

Chef giggled. “You’re funnier than I thought. Buy the wheel anyway, as a reserve. I assume,” she said in-between giggles, “that the advisor of the King of Lions has no trouble paying fifty golden pieces.”

“Stop saying that name!” Minneka hissed. She nonchalantly threw roughly fifty Soliduri at the skunk and took the wheel.

Chef was glad to leave the dark alley and return to the decorated and colorfully lit Main Road. There was something beautiful about living among trees and plants, but also something wondrous about being in such a lively city. Perhaps that was why she traveled: she liked all locations equally much and wouldn’t want to stay at just one of them.

“And now?” Minneka said gruffly.

“My book does not sketch an image for what the Dinodear looks like. Only that it shapeshifts and adapts to whoever tries to pluck it. So I’m following my instinct.”

“Great.”

“May I ask how you even acquired this ancient recipe?”

Minneka narrowed her eyes. “You may ask. I will not satisfy you with a response.”

They had to go up a hill. Chef grabbed a second wheel and had to keep turning, turning, turning, to make the wagon move forward. It took immense effort, but she was used to it. She refused to let other animals pull her wagon, even though she knew this was normal in other cultures. She’d built the car herself, when she was still young and living among the apes. Although she had a lot of help in designing the thing from the best Primas inventors.

“Who so secretive? If everyone knows, then everyone can help find the ingredients for the medicine.”

Minneka gritted her teeth. “You are naïve, Chef. Kings make enemies. If enemies knew everything about the king, they could more easily harm him. We must keep secrets. If we discover something new, we must not tell everyone. Otherwise we lose our favorable position.”

“Not the King of Lions. Everyone loves him. He brings peace and solidarity!”

“Because you are banished if you say something else.”

Chef didn’t believe her; she didn’t dare say it to Minneka’s grumpy face.

They left Amor. The terrain sloped downward again as they rode down the Seventh Hill. Chef could stop turning the wheels herself: gravity would pull the wagon along for some time.

“I was just a tiny baby, I was,” Chef started, cautiously, “when Anniwe disappeared. My family lived in Traferia. Happy, healthy, well-fed. But with his disappearance the Companionship was pretty much over—and so was our peace. Without our King of Lions, it took no more than a month before all the food ran out and everyone attacked each other.”

Chef held up her short arms. Half the length they were supposed to be. Her hands were stumps; she had trained for years to be able to prepare any recipes with those malformed fingers.

“Because I couldn’t eat enough, my body never grew as it should have. You have no idea of the pain I endured, all those years. You have no idea how many animals, across all of Somnia, suffer from food shortage, they do.”

She looked to the side. Minneka looked away.

Chef’s voice grew in volume and emotion.

“I’ve been everywhere, and everywhere there were too many animals who had to live in pain. Because they couldn’t find enough food, or enough water. Because a few animals hoarded all the food and let the others die. I will make enough food for everyone, whatever it takes. So that nobody has to experience wat my sister … my young little sister …”

Tears appeared in her eyes. Minneka sunk further into her cloak.

“That’s why I help everyone, I do. And that’s why there should always be a King of Lions in Traferia. I swear I will not let the last one die, not if I can help it, I can.”

“I know,” said Minneka softly. “I chose you for a reason—the Good Chef.”

She stayed silent while Chef’s thoughts couldn’t help returning to her sweet little sister who had not survived the food shortages.

Minneka was the first to speak. “How did you survive all that time?”

“A few years later, the Primas came and took us back to their territory, near Baroke. They had more food for me. They taught me how to cook and collect plants. They taught me how to build wagons like these.”

Minneka nodded and took off her cloak for the first time. She nudged Chef aside and took over the steering wheel.

Chef fell asleep at once.

Chef immediately knew she had slept for too long. She woke up surrounded by completely different smells than before. A kind of freshness in the air, as if she could taste Spring approaching. The scent of wet earth mixed with the sound of tall ferns tapping against the wagon as it passes.

“Ferns!” she yelled.

Chef’s sudden cry startled Minneka again, causing her to almost veer off the road again.

“I understand your interest in plants, but ferns are not exactly—”

“The Dinodear is a fern that was kissed by demigoddess Nisah.”

“Hold your breath—all these ferns are Dinodears? And you said it would be hard.”

“No, no. We must figure out which are normal ferns and which are—”

Chef stopped talking. She intensely enjoyed the rays of sunlight on her skin, then grabbed a rope that Minneka had never even noticed.

She pulled on the rope, and the roof of her wagon opened up. Like a pirate who eagerly throws the lid off a treasure chest.

“You can take off the roof? Why did we not do this before?”

“The Strawberry Forest is too overgrown. It barely lets any sunlight through, but it does produce a lot of garbage, like twigs falling down.” Chef pointed at the clear blue sky, without either a cloud or foliage. “Here we have clear sun and nothing else. Or, well, if we’re lucky, maybe some bread from the sky.”

“Bread from the—you know what, I will not even ask.” Minneka put on her cloak, but didn’t notice that several objects fell out of it. She stepped outside the wagon. “How do I differentiate the Dinodear from a regular fern?”

“Erm, well, if it feels … godly?”

To her surprise, this was enough instruction for Minneka. She walked through the endless fields of ferns as if she had dropped something and wanted to find it. Sometimes she suddenly dove onto a fern and sniffed it for a minute.

Chef looked on with satisfaction. With some more training, this royal fox could become a great cook!

Repeatedly, the desert fox looked back and shook her head. Chef wanted to search the other side, but stumbled over the objects that Minneka had dropped.

Her passport.

Thousand Branchburgers, she was naïve!

She should have asked Minneka for proof that she worked for the King of Lions. She shouldn’t have accepted any mission before verifying her identity!

But fortune seemed to favor good chefs. Or maybe she was rewarded with it. She had once visited Schola, briefly, where they believed in Karma: if you unselfishly helped others, the universe would reward you one way or another. If you did terrible things, the universe would punish you somehow.

So maybe Chef just had good Karma.

The passport was made of parchment that felt expensive and held the pawprint of the King of Lions. Besides it was a sketched face, scratched into it with a nail and then filled with black ink, which looked exactly like Minneka. Although in the sketch, she was laughing. It made her seem younger and more energetic.

She had been honest about her name too … although a part had been scratched out. Her real name was slightly longer. It was hard to read, but fortunately, Chef’s eyes had fully grown.

Her real name was Minnekeria.

Screaming reached her. She immediately jumped through her window and saw Minneka—or whatever her name was—being eaten by a glowing red fern as large as an elephant.

The godly fern waved a yelling desert fox high in the sky. As if it were a balancing scale which couldn’t decide how heavy she was.

Then it spit her out.

Minneka landed among the regular ferns, covered in slime, and rolled against Chef’s paws. “I found one,” she said in a croaky voice. “But the moniker Dinodear was a bad decision.”

The giant fern had vanished. Chef could not remember which one it had been. Minneka took off her cloak: it had protected her, but was now dirty and torn.

“I felt something odd about that fern. When I placed my paw on it, cautiously, it turned into … that monster.”

You’d think animals remembered that. That they’d tell everyone the Dinodear was dangerous, a monstrous thing that ate you. Unless … it always adapted in a different way.

Carefully, Chef stepped into the field. She made sure her paws never stood on a fern, which felt like walking on stilts and losing balance every heartbeat. She studied the floor, a swimming pool of green with rare patches of brown mud.

There.

She knew wat ferns looked like. She knew what every plant looked like, even if they were sick, or not fully grown, or receiving too little water. This fern was a good imitation, but it was wrong. As if someone had tried painting a fern, but lacked enough skill.

Should she grab it, faster than it could respond? Or should she approach kindly and slowly? Could she talk to them?

“Erm, hello, Dinodear. We need you. Can I pluck you? Become, erm, red if I’m not allowed, and green otherwise. No, blue—you’re already green.”

Minneka sighed from behind her back. “Even a Primas wouldn’t understand what you just said.”

The fern turned red.

It didn’t grow into a monster. It did nothing else—but it clearly turned red.

“This one, erm, asks us not to pluck it, that it does.”

Minneka’s jaws opened wide. “You listen to a plant?”

Chef walked onwards. “If you want to pluck it, be my guest.”

What happened was completely expected. Minneka leapt forward, but the fern dodged her. She rapidly swung her tail from the other side, but the fern graciously dodged back into the dirt. With each attack, the fern turned a brighter red, as if it was on fire.

Minneka pulled back and joined Chef, who smiled from ear to ear.

“It’s as if … as if these plants are also demigods. They still have some of their magic. Oh I must have one to study it, I must!”

“Once we’ve caught some of these,” Minneka said in a whisper, afraid all the ferns had ears now. “We lock it in a tight cage. I won’t sleep for a second more with these plants in our wagon.”

“Where do you think I can suddenly get a cage?”

“Oh, you probably happen to know a friendly stork you helped one day, who just happens to have a cage you can borrow.”

Chef laughed loudly. She thought back to the smiling, joyous sketch on her passport. It felt as if that was the real Minneka, before something happened that made her angry and impatient. Was it Anniwe’s abduction? How could she ask her for the truth, without revealing that she nosed around her personal belongings?

She saw another malformed fern. She asked if she could pluck it; the answer was no.

Minneka yelled. She’d accidentally stepped on another fern. The plant grew five more stalks to twist around her ankles and bind her to the ground. The extra fern tentacles slithered around her body like snakes and restricted all her movement.

They rapidly pulled her away from the wagon, towards the abyss that lead into the Saursea.

Chef jumped on Minneka’s back and clawed at the stalks. Her nails cut through them, but for every one that snapped, two new ones appeared.

Minneka bit all around her and managed to keep the largest stalks away from her mouth.

The next fern shapeshifted into a predator bird and circled overhead. Another fern turned into a building, maybe a palace or a pyramid. The final fern before the abyss turned into a statue of one of the original godchildren.

Chef only saw the approach of dizzying depths and had no time to decipher which of the godchildren it was.

“Leave her alone! She means you no harm!”

That wasn’t true, she realized. They came her with the express purpose to pluck some Dinodears. But that could mean the same as killing a plant.

The recipe only said they needed its seeds.

“Stop! We don’t want to pluck you! We merely need your seeds for a medicine!”

Minneka’s head already hung over the edge, a long emptiness below her ears tempting her to fall. The fall was long enough that the wild Saursea seemed a peaceful blue dot in the distance.

The fox shut her fearful eyes, somehow accepting what was about to happen.

All ferns fell to the floor, back to their shape as an innocent green plant. The stalks that held the desert fox down, shrank and retreated back into the earth like worms, until Minneka was free to move around.

A pile of seeds was left behind, spread around Chef’s paws.

She grabbed them all and ran back to her wagon. Once there, she threw the seeds in a jar, joining the Bumpbarachts.

Minneka was eager to follow, unsteady on her feet.

Soon after, Chef turned the wheel to get her wagon moving again, and they fled from the monstrous ferns.

Along the way, Chef collected some water from the Mouth of Din and used it to start a new recipe in her cauldron. She always did that when she was stressed. Her fingers itched and wanted to create food again, always create more food.

As night fell, they had reached a Wilderness territory. With no city nearby, predators were still free to hunt and kill for their own food here. To live in the “old ways”.

Minneka pushed open the door.

“I am going to hunt for food. I am dying of hunger.”

“Don’t busy yourself, eat some fruit.”

The Chef walked around her mandarin tree, which would soon grow too tall to be kept inside her wagon. She could keep her roof open at all times … but no, that would be a disaster once it started raining.

She selected the most ripe mandarin she had.

Minneka didn’t trust the round orange object before her, but took a bite anyway … and kept chewing with a passion.

“I’ve never seen such a huge mandarin! So much juice!” she spoke with a full mouth. “My apologies, that was very improper.”

Chef proudly presented her other fruit trees. “I learned the secret of domestication from the shepherds. Any time I had some new mandarins, I only kept the seeds from the biggest and juiciest among them. I planted those again, and none of the lesser seeds. I’ve been doing it for years. And that’s why I only have seeds left that produce really strong fruit trees and tasty fruits. Less peeling, more content!”

She leaned forward to whisper in Minneka’s ear.

“That’s my motto, it is. I yell it when I try to sell fruit on the market. It’s good, right? Right? What do you think?”

“Less peeling, more content? Fine, I guess. I have no experience in these matters.”

Chef nudged her side. “Oh come on, Minnieminnie, stop being so serious. Tell me about yourself. I’ll bake you a pumpkin cake, very tasty, you should try it, you should.”

Instead, Minneka shut down. “We must continue. The bells could ring at any moment! Figure out the location of the Turnbacktulips.”

She ate the whole mandarin and returned to her warm cloak, draping it over the floor like a blanket. For a brief moment, she seemed to bite at the new plant Chef had discovered, then walked in a big circle around it. Minneka must have also noticed it was a weird, new plant and didn’t trust it.

Chef’s recipe book had already opened itself to exactly the right page, as always.

“Turnbacktulips. They used to be planted everywhere and used for rituals. Now they are banished everywhere because they supposedly bring bad luck and setbacks. Maybe they could still be found in the Wolftunnels or on top of the Impossible Wall. But you’ll have more luck purchasing them from an … illegal trader.”

Illegal trader? Why, in Somnia’s name, would they collect Turnbacktulips? Were they really worth that much?

The Palace of the King was still a long way’s away and she wondered whether the Wolftunnels would be a faster shortcut. These tunnels were built underground during the First Conflict, covering almost the entire rainforest, but were mostly deserted these days.

Chef turned the wheel to send the wagon through Traferia. Once they’d crossed the borders, they’d meet some traders and merchants eventually, illegal or not.

That thought immediately turned to truth.

A little later, in the middle of the night, they hobbled over the row of stones that marked the border. With Gallo the Giant as a beautiful sight on the horizon, somebody knocked on the door.

“Hello? Do I speak with the Good Chef? My my, I have an assignment for you!”

It wasn’t strange that somebody knocked on her wagon door. It was strange that they did so while the wagon was driving, around midnight.

Chef tapped the door ajar using her tail. She already felt Minneka’s eyes on her, always alert.

A brown-black swine, a peccary, ran next to her wagon. A young one, she could tell from the small back and tusks. When the door opened, he immediately jumped into the wagon and sought support from the walls, panting. The scent of wet earth, and a bit of blood, traveled with him.

“My my, I was afraid I would never catch up to you!”

Peccaries are also not from around here, but from the desert, she thought. Do animals really travel this far just to reach me? She felt that pressure again. Those expectations. Her paws flew to her cauldron, where she lit the fire with the aid of flintstones and added some more ingredients to her recipe.

“You had an assignment for me?”

“Chef,” Minneka hissed at her back. “My assignment is more important. Send him away.”

“Maybe it happens to be on our route,” Chef whispered back. “We can at least hear him out!”

“My name is Perzwa.” He grunted after saying his name. Maybe that was the Swine translation for it. “I am connected to the pyramid builders of Floria. In those pyramids, we want to keep a number of invaluable treasures, which means we want to keep out any burglars. My my, well, what a problem. Until we realized that you might know some invisible poison or plant that made animals go insane.”

“I use my knowledge for food and healing,” Chef said instantly. “Not turning animals insane.”

“My my, I understand, I understand,” Perzwa stammered without pause. “But the pyramids will house food too! We will only use it to keep out criminals, understand?”

Chef frowned and tapped her recipe book with her fingers. It had already overheard the conversation and found a page with a simple toxin.

“Look at it this way,” the swine kept chattering. “Nobody likes fighting and war. Swords are sharp and blood makes me faint. But if someone were to attack me … my my, I’d be very glad if a soldier came to defend me!”

She looked at the bubbly creature before her. There was something adorable about him. Surely it wasn’t too hard to take a slight detour along the Poison Belt? Those waters were still slightly toxic from the Poison Explosion from centuries ago. In small doses, though, it would not be deadly.

Lost in thought, Chef had almost forgotten her cauldron. Just in time she stirred and blew a long breath to change the intensity of the fire. She looked over her shoulder.

“We’ll take a tiny detour past the Poison Belt. Will only take us a few hours, it will, and then—”

“You are truly insane,” Minneka growled, as she kicked open the wagen door and walked away.

“Sorry, erm, she sometimes, erm, has mood swings. I will talk to her,” Chef said, as she stepped into the darkness herself. A short distance away, with Perzwa still inside her wagon, Minneka rapidly turned around.

“We have no time for this.”

“We practically drive right past the Poison Belt on our way to Traferia!”

“You don’t even know the swine! As I said, you’re far too naïve. Trusting anybody who stumbles into your wagon.”

“Just like I trusted you immediately as well? Was that wrong too? Otherwise we would not be here now, we wouldn’t, with half the recipe already gathered.”

Her wagon moved from left to right. Even young swine were quite heavy and didn’t exactly walk with grace. She just hoped Perzwa didn’t destroy anything.

Minneka sighed. “I am advisor to the King of Lions. Maybe the most important creature in all of Traferia! Perzwa is a nobody asking for poison.”

“Is that so … Minnekeria?”

Her ears pricked up and her tail slammed the floor. She opened her mouth wide, but shut it again and sniffed.

“So you studied my passport. Good. You’re learning distrust.”

“That’s not good at all!”

Her wagon door opened. Perzwa hung halfway out of the opening.

“Are you accepting my assignment or not?”

Chef didn’t know what to say. Where to look or whom to disappoint. “Wait, calm down, let me think, I have to—”

The swine screamed and fled her wagon. Behind him, a steaming hot waterfall flowed through the doorway and bent the wooden planks.

Chef’s cauldron had boiled over.

With a mighty jump, she returned to her wagon. She climbed over the walls, away from the hot liquid, until she was able to grab her silk towels. As she tried to save her wagon, she extinguished the fire.

Minneka and Perzwa looked at her with a hint of guilt and shame.

“I will help you both. Because that is what I do.” Chef screamed as if she wanted to wake up all of Esprante. “And we will arrive in Traferia on time. That is my decision, that is, and you’ll just have to live with it!”

Minneka lowered her head. She held a towel between her teeth and used it to dab a few of the soaked spots. “My apologies, my behavior was improper.”

Perzwa breathed a sigh of relief and hopped back inside.

“My my, well, nobody told me that the Good Chef had such a temperament!”

It took an hour before her wagon had been cleaned and dried enough for usage.

Then, Chef found Perzwa studying her beautiful veggie patch. Awed by every bit of it, but surely by the new plant she invented herself.

“How … how do you do this? Mama told me that a goddess of nature lives within the planet, and she makes plants grow. But these are inside a wagon!”

Chef smiled. She missed no opportunity to explain her passion. “Plants only need a few things. Water, sunlight, and a few particles that help. With just those ingredients, they can grow from a tiny seed into a gigantic plant holding fruits and food. It is magic!”

“It is photosynthesis,” Minneka muttered. “A proven process of—”

“Yes, yes, and yet it is magic, it is. Photo means light. Synthesis means to make. Plants make more of themselves out of sunlight! Magic, right?”

The swine mucked around in the dirt. “And the water? And the particles?”

“Plants normally take their water from deep inside the planet. I can’t do that with my wagon, so I have to water the plants myself each day. Those particles, though, are the hardest. Sometimes I’m lucky and a few birds poop on my garden. Otherwise I have to search for plant food myself.”

Perzwa backed away. “My my, maybe the farmerly profession is not meant for me!”

He’d already noticed a new toy: her recipe book. “And this one? Did you write all these pages yourself? They almost seem …”

“No. I received that book when I still lived with the Primas.”

Minneka scampered. “Received? As if they’d ever give away such a valuable object. You stole it, you have to.”

Chef frowned. Minneka was right, though. Once, Chef was a young chimpanzee with a passion for food, and one day she suddenly saw a book that knew all recipes. Of course she secretly took it with her one night, though the Primas still blamed the Wolves.

But how did Minneka know this?

“The book is writing of its own accord!” Perzwa yelled. The page changed back to one about the Turnbacktulips—the next part of their medicine—but added something this time. The location of a trader nearby, like a small blinking dot on the map of Esprante.

In a few hours, they’d pass the dot and also the Poison Belt. Chef couldn’t be in two places at once, though. And yes, she felt like she missed that ability every single day.

“I will go to the Poison Belt. I know a safe way to collect poison. You two meet that trader and buy some Turnbacktulips.”

“I am not going anywhere with that swine,” Minneka stated.

“My my, how friendly.” Perzwa stepped forward. “I’ve been running around the world for a year now to negotiate for the pyramids and everything. I can do it alone just fine.”

“Alone?” Minneka was angry about everything. “Are you going to let him do this important task alone?”

“I have to. We must move on.”

That sentence shut Minneka up.

It was already afternoon when they left the car and walked to the Poison Belt. Minneka carried a bag with empty jars, while Chef followed her nose to find the perfect spot. As she scooped some blue-green water into the jars with her wooden ladle, the desert fox started to talk softly.

“My real name is Minnekeria,” she said. “Because I am a demigod. A daughter of Feria. She bore a child with a desert creature long ago, and those are my ancestors. A bit of her magic still runs through me.”

Chef turned around and almost stumbled into the poisonous water herself. She smiled broadly. “A demigod!? I am traveling with a god?”

“Sssh.” She pressed her paw against Chef’s mouth. “Can you, for once, not scream secret information into the forest?”

“Mhm—so—mm—ry.” Minneka let go. “Why aren’t you proud? What do you even need me for?”

“It is a dangerous time to be a demigod.” She shook her fur with a look of regret. “It is always a dangerous time to be a demigod.”

Chef’s curiosity won and made her ask. “What is your power? I heard all demigods have a bit of their ancestor’s power.”

“That’s the problem. I never discovered it. But as soon as others discover what I am, they won’t hesitate to abduct, banish, or kill me.”

“Oh no, don’t talk like that. Animals love demigods, they do, and—”

“You’re naïve, Chef. The animals killed the godchildren because they didn’t want them to rule Somnia. Then they discovered there were hundreds of demigods and targeted them before they even had the opportunity to use their magic and rule Somnia.”

Minneka gritted her teeth until they sounded near breaking point. “You really think things will end well for the demigods?”

With regret, dear reader, I must admit her fear was not unfounded. It allows me to understand Minneka and tell her story. But it doesn’t justify her attitude against the world. If only I had visited her once, if only I had talked to her once, this story might have ended differently.

They walked back to the wagon in silence. When they arrived, the door was wide open.

Perzwa hopped from left to right. He knocked over the cauldron that was fortunately empty now and tried to discover how the steering wheel functioned.

Chef only had eyes for a bundle of flowers on the windowsill. A white ball with a pointy end, on top of a slithering green stalk covered in thorns.

“Turnbacktulips! You did it!”

“I am a good trader,” Perzwa claimed with pride. “They only cost 500 Soliduri.”

“What?” Minneka was so close to throwing the swine out of the wagon. “That’s all the money I had!”

Perzwa shrugged. “My my, no worries, I will pay you back using some of the pyramid treasures.”

Chef did worry. She carefully placed the jars full of poison in her cupboards and separated the stalks from the Turnbacktulips.

Only the Fishfool now. We’re already in Traferia, closer and closer to the Lion Palace. And I still have no clue how these ingredients should be combined.

In the end, exhaustion won the battle against her worried mind. She fell into a deep sleep.

When she awoke, another day had passed—and her recipe book had been stolen.

Everything else in the wagon was still there. All the content, all the parts. But Perzwa and the recipe book were missing.

Minneka exploded on her. “I told you. I told you, I told you, I told you.”

“Oh well, most recipes are safely in my memory anyway, that they are.”

She felt worse than she appeared, though. That recipe book was her only memory of home. And it surely contained recipes she did not know yet. She felt incomplete without the book, helpless and weak.

And being the victim of a scam … that never felt nice.

“Where’s that Fishfool, Chef? How will we find it now? Without a book that guides us?”

“By following our noses.”

This too was said with more confidence than Chef felt. She didn’t know what the Fishfool smelled like. She remembered it was a blue plant with a fear of water. If you accidentally dropped the plant into the ocean anyway, something big happened. She didn’t remember what. She grew annoyed at her terrible memory—something that would not improve without her recipe book.

“You were right,” said Chef as she stroked her empty windowsill. To make it worse, Perzwa had sent the wagon way off course. In the distance she spotted the Fifty Branchbridges of Slumberland. Where the sloths, well, did nothing all day and slumbered.

Chef’s voice was soft and rough. “I trust too quickly. I want too much at once. We should have driven to Traferia in a straight line and made that medicine.”

Minneka followed her gaze and, to her surprise, smiled. The kingdom of the sloths was beautiful, just like the stories said. It was also all the way in the far corner of Traferia.

If they were to continue from it, they’d reach Mateshaven, the fastest sea route to the island of Madaska. But their destination was all the way on the other side, at the Lion Palace.

“We still have time.”

Chef tilted her head sideways. Her ears picked up a high piercing sound she couldn’t place, and she searched for its origin. A beep. Some ringing. A vague rhythm on the horizon.

A bell that rang.

Chef immediately disengaged the brakes; Minneka pushed them back.

“It’s useless.”

“We can make it! We have … we have a backup wheel, almost all ingredients, a good mood, and—”

“You have a good mood. Leave me out of it.”

Chef looked up. The wagon roof was open, which bathed them both in blinding sunlight. The sloths had even built a few Branchbridges outside of their kingdom: wooden paths high in the sky to connect the treetops.

Because why go through the immense effort of climbing down, when you could also not do that?

“I have an idea. You steer the car, I climb the trees.”

“You know what happened last time!”

“Yes. And it won’t happen again. Maybe your demigod power is steering wooden wagons!”

“Hmm. That would be severely disappointing.”

Chef climbed into the tree and reached a bridge. She placed the sketch of the Fishfool front and center in her mind, then started the search. From here she had a great overview of the ground below. If there was any blue plant there, she’d spot it.

And she was faster. Half the time she could run over bridges, and half the time she swung from branch to branch using thick vines. It quickly gave her a lead over Minneka, who desperately tried to keep the car on something resembling a path.

Blue. Blue blue blue. Was it the shape of a water droplet? Or am I confusing it with the Dawndoris?

She wasn’t a good chef at all. Without her recipe book she was nothing! Why did she have to let Perzwa in? Why did all the other animals look up to her? She wasn’t worth it.

Don’t think about that. Find a Fishfool.

The bells kept ringing. With every jump towards the sound, it became more piercing and annoying. Not a distant ringing, but a reminder, with every hit, that she would be too late.

She felt like she’d jumped and searched for an entire day now. And it felt as if the color blue did not appear at all in the whole of Traferia!

What if that plant didn’t even grow here? Wat if the recipe book would have told Chef that the darned thing only grew on Madaska, or the Nordic Ice Sheets? Then this was useless from the start.

And sure, it started raining. Oh well, rainforest, was to be expected.

Minneka kept losing control of the wagon. The wheels slipped in the dirt pools that appeared and the rain made it hard to look any further than an arm’s length.

“But wait!” said Chef. She froze halfway a swing, which meant she now dangled from her tail high above the ground. “If the Fishfool is afraid of water … then it also tries to avoid rain, won’t it?”

“What did you say?” Minneka yelled at her. As she steered, her tail tried to pull on the rope to close the roof.

She turned away from the path and helplessly drove over the many dead branches that lay scattered on the rainforest floor. The wagon was destined to meet the abyss around the Saursea again. But this time they approached it from the other side, as opposed to when they searched the Dinodear a few days ago.

This was a rainforest, yes. That meant rain was to be expected. If she wanted to find the Fishfool here, she had to look for places that would never receive any raindrops.

Chef swung and ran, but wasn’t able to catch up with the wagon anymore. In times like these, she noticed the advantages of having a weak, ragged tail. Her wagon—containing a demigod—was about to tumble into an abyss, and she felt powerless to stop any of it.

“Jump out of it! Minneka!”

“I can save it!”

She found a new group of Branchbridges, but these had not been made by animal paws. The trees here were so densely packed that their branches had weaved around each other. This wooden hug made horizontal bridges, which felt wide and solid enough to step on.

“Save yourself! Minneka!”

“I can do this!”

Chef grabbed any vines and lianas she passed. The rough plants grew everywhere, like a spiderweb of green-brown ropes to connect everything.

“Wiehaaaa,” screamed Chef. She jumped from the final tree holding at least twenty lianas in her tiny claws.

The front wheels of her wagon dangled over the abyss. Minneka tried to climb out through the window. Even if she freed herself, the ingredients inside the wagon would surely be lost.

Chef could not let it happen.

She landed on the roof; tiles shot away like sparks. The lianas wrapped around the two back wheels. With every rotation of the wheel, the ropes grabbed them tighter and tighter, restricting movement, until the wagon slowed down, and slowed down, and slowed down even more.

The entire wagon teetered on the edge.

Minneka held onto the windowsill as her final hope.

Chef very carefully stepped over the slanted roof.

Far below them, the Saursea raged. Chef enjoyed the fresh water scents that arose from it. Insects buzzed around her and she noticed many exotic flowers, but no Fishfool.

She took another step. The wagon angled further forward, staring into the abyss. Only the handful of lianas kept Chef and Minneka alive.

She reached down with her half-grown paw. It was just enough to grab Minneka tightly. She wanted to pull the fox onto the roof, when she realized the abyss was hollow. The wall of stone and dirt bent backwards the further you went down, like a pyramid turned on its head.

That meant …

Minneka’s voice cracked. “What are you doing?”

Chef curled her tail around the left front wheel. The wagon protested, the wood croaked, but balance remained.

She turned herself upside-down and looked underneath the wagon.

Just as upside-down as she, hidden by the flat layer of stone that supported the entire weight of the wagon now, grew an entire patch of Fishfools.

Her tiny arms reached forward. Too short! She had to lean forward more, and more, and more, until her fingertips finally touched the first Fishfools.

Luck had to run out at some point.

Liana after liana snapped. Minneka tried to reach Chef, but the wagon already started moving again and started its fall. This launched the desert fox until she had to snatch Chef’s tail to save herself.

Chef desperately jumped forward and plucked as many Fishfools as possible. She tried to protect the plants from the drops of rain. Through the open window, she threw them into her wagon.

One got wet anyway and exploded into fifty neatly cut leaves before her eyes.

“You are truly insane,” Minneka yelled, as the wagon descended with them stuck to it.

Her voice was distorted by the fall and the gusts of wind pulling at them. Together they fell, further and further, faster and faster. Minneka held on and held her breath already.

Chef threw down a handful of Fishfools.

When the flowers touched the Saursea, they exploded into a pillar of water and leaves. Minneka, Chef and the wagon dove straight into the heart of that explosion. Chef’s body tingled from the hit against the water surface. For ten heartbeats, maybe many more, she found no air.

Then they were spit out and flew, including the wagon, back into the sky.

Chef landed back onto the stone, a few meters away from the edge. A soaked Minneka landed beside her with a grunt.

“Yes, you are truly insane.” She coughed and spit waterfalls from her mouth. “One might say you are … a Fishfool.”

The wagon rolled past them as if nothing had happened. It creaked and squeaked, and one of the front wheels had broken in two again.

Chef really had luck on her side. She still blamed it on Karma.

Water slowly left her ears and returned her hearing. She could her the bells ring again, and it gave her new determination.

As Minneka attached their backup wheel, Chef checked the inside of her wagon. A few Fishfools had exploded or disappeared anyway. Some of them had landed inside a jar and survived the adventure.

They had all the ingredients now. But without a recipe book, how were they supposed to combine them?

They were only halfway along the route to the Lion Palace when the next animals knocked on their door. Two okapi—animals who looked like deer, but with the striped legs of a zebra—asked for help with their sick son. He refused to eat anything and called all food dirty.

Chef had to reject them.

She had to race towards the king, no detours, no pauses, for as long as the bells still rang.

A day’s ride from the palace, a cockatoo knocked. Their habitat in the south of Equator had been hit hard by the constant wars between different religions. They could barely grow any more food and asked Chef for some wondrous seed that made ten times as much grain.

Chef had such a seed. By selecting only the best seeds for years, she was sure that her plants would give them more food.

But she had to reject them too.

She bent over the four ingredients on her workbench: Bumpbaracht, Dinodear, Turnbacktulip and Fishfool. Very little was left of every single ingredient. She could not experiment or waste a single leaf—she had to be right the first time.

Chef’s head dropped in her hands. Exhausted, she sought support from the windowsill. She would disappoint everyone, she would. She was the Bad Chef.

“If only you had a recipe book now,” Minneka said with a grin. “If only you had listened to a wise fox who spoke of—”

“Yes, yes, rub it in.” Chef looked outside. At the setting sun and the red glow it casted on the shiny white palace on the horizon. “I thought I was a better chef. That I could do without it. But that book knew everything … and I apparently knew nothing.”

Minneka frowned. “Wait. You didn’t know? You never realized?”

“What?”

Her cloak fell of her shoulders. “That book is not a recipe book, Chef. You were in the possession of the Book of Meaning! And you placed it on your windowsill, naked and unguarded. You basically invited thieves to come and get it!”

“The Book of … where did I heart that name before?”

“It’s one of the Heavenly Objects! The Book belonged to Bella, goddess of Wisdom. The King of Lions would have paid you a million Soliduri to get that book!”

“What would I have done with a million Soliduri? You can’t eat gold.”

Minneka joined Chef at the window. If you could forget the ringing bells, the palace looked peaceful and magical.

The final red sunray illuminated the many symbols that the gods once scratched into those walls. When they still ruled and walked around Somnia.

“Many legends run through my family,” Minneka said, “told to us by Feria. She mentioned a different planet with life: Dalas. They ate stone there, so who knows.”

“All I want,” said Chef, “is a filled belly for everyone. Tell that to the king. If I can save him—”

“When you have saved him—”

“Tell him I don’t want golden coins or treasure. Makes me uncomfortable, that it does. I want my recipe book back.”

“That might be hard,” Minneka said. “Rumors have been spreading. Rumors that certain groups are still trying to collect all the Heavenly Objects. They follow a prophecy that, once all Heavenmatter is combined, they can also wipe out all the demigods. And you might just have given away the most powerful object of all … like it was nothing.”

Minneka needn’t say any more. Chef just wanted to help and be nice. But now she’d been nice to the wrong person and only caused more suffering.

“The strongest object? It’s just a book that tells you how to bake Pumpkin Cake or make a Liquorice Pullpie. Clever panther if they can attack you with pie.”

Chef tapped her chin. “Although, I did accidentally burn a Kinese Knibbler once, and then they become so hard that you might—oh, that reminds me of the time I was in the Hima mountains near Kina and—”

“The book is what it has to be for the one who reads it. For you, it only contained recipes and plant knowledge. For me, it would have probably contained stories of other demigods. Maybe an answer about where they are, or what power I have.”

“Then we will surely ask the King of Lions to retrieve that book for us.”

Chef realized how odd the theft truly was. Perzwa didn’t have to come back with the Turnbacktulips. He could have stolen much more, or fled with the book before they came back the first time.

Maybe a thief with honor? The book was so valuable that he was fine with helping at first?

Listen to yourself, she thought. Even a thief who steals Heavenmatter still gets praise and good intentions in your mind.

Silence reigned in the jungle. Awful silence. Chef and Minneka grabbed each other’s paws in a panic.

The bells had stopped ringing.

Minneka jumped out. Chef’s vision blurred, her surroundings suddenly ten times as dark, as if Minneka had received ten giant shadows that want to pull her into the ground.

“Help! Help! Come and pull the wagon!”

“Who is there?” a guard answered from the first palace tower.

“The Good Chef! With the medicine!”

The palace gates opened. A herd of Equids—who were called Horses by most these days—galloped outside and surrounded the wagon. Chef improvised ropes, made from vines she grew in her veggie patch, and bound them around their neck.

She was against letting other animals pull her car. But this was an emergency.

With horsepower, she traveled faster than ever. Chef fell backward and was pushed into the back wall. By the time her vision cleared up, they already raced through glimmering gold gates. The white marble of the palace was enchanting, but also great at obstructing all moonlight.

And so the wagon hobbled through a completely darkened hallway. The rare torches on the wall were extinguished by the passing wagon.

Chef felt around her. The ingredients weren’t on the table anymore, but scattered around the wagon.

“Can I get some light?” Her voice echoed against the walls. Somebody freed the horses. The wagon sunk half a meter and came to a standstill.

“Hurry up! Hurry up!” yelled Minneka, but she sounded distant. “How is the king?” she asked a second set of footsteps that entered the hallway.

“I dare not make any statements about his health,” a low and serious voice answered.

Chef blindly reached around herself. Was she holding the Dinodear now? No, these felt like the thorns of the Turnbacktulips. She had to find her flintstones. For light. For heating the cauldron. But where were they?

“It is now or never, Chef!” Minneka yelled, suddenly close. “Please give us your best medicine. Please!”

She felt as if a thick blanket had been thrown over her wagon that choked her. Her heart raced and breathing was foreign to her. Her head screamed two thoughts at once.

You can do this, Chef.

You are going to fail, Chef.

She ignored both and prepared a medicine by touch.

Chef’s hands moved as if possessed by someone else. The rough bumps of the Barachts alternated with the smooth, slippery stalks of the Fishfool. Regularly, she brought her fingers to her nose to smell what she was doing.

No, she thought, this smells wrong. She threw what she had so far into a jar that she found behind her, and started again.

“Please hurry. We need it now!” Minneka yelled from outside the wagon. She pulled at the door, but it wouldn’t open. As if it was locked, but her wagon didn’t even have a lock! Chef’s thoughts kept yelling at her for being naïve and bad, but she tried to banish it.

Seeds. She felt seeds. This felt familiar, as if she’d held it many times before. Then it couldn’t be the Dinodear, which she only recently held for the first time.

This ingredient was also stashed somewhere else, and she started again.

“Almost done!” Chef yelled over her shoulder, as if it mattered where she looked in the pitch-black darkness of her wagon. Her fingers found different seeds, bigger, stronger. She had wasted quite some time and ingredients now, and panic found a home in her heart.

She pulled everything from her cupboards.

She squished several plant stalks and collected the juice that flowed out of them. Shortly after, she dipper her finger inside and smelled the liquid that stuck to it. Yes, she thought. This feels better.

Her cauldron had already warmed up. Strings of hot water jumped over the metal edge and sizzled upon contact with her wooden floor.

Chef collected everything she had prepared and threw it in there. The Dinodear should come first. Seeds take a while to dissolve. Then the Turnbacktulips and Bumpbarachts. The Fishfool should surely come last, as I already extracted its juice.

Minneka was finally able to open the door. Somebody had thrown a wooden beam against it to jam the door.

“Now, Chef. Now!”

“It’s not yet—I don’t know if—maybe I have—”

Light from the hallway illuminated her cauldron. Her recipe, which was hopefully Snakesoup, was a light green pudding of which the solid ingredients started to dissolve. And as that happened, the scent became nicer and the water more translucent.

By the time Minneka emptied the cauldron into a clean jar, the recipe had no color, no smell, and no taste. In her panic, the fox knocked over multiple jars. Her tail swept a mandarin off of its tree and Chef had to dive for it to prevent the unwanted ingredient from entering the Snakesoup too.

“Thank you,” Minneka said as she ran away.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Chef mumbled.

She was left behind in the marble hallway, alone. She left her wagon, but didn’t travel far. Exhausted, she fell down, with her back against her front wheel. If only I made the right medicine, she thought. Please, return with good news about the Lion King’s survival.

Waiting was unbearable. Time and again, she wanted to run from the hallways, look for the king herself, and administer the medicine herself. By the looks of it, though, she was nearer to the stinking stables than wherever the royal bedroom would be.

So she waited. Until the sun rose again and sunlight finally revealed the full beauty of the marble room.

Until sunlight revealed the contents of her wagon.

The jar in which she had stored the poison from the Poison Belt, had fallen, and was completely empty.

Chef hit herself on the head. I added poison to the recipe. I added poison—

A group of Lion Guards stormed into the hallway. Minneka preceded them, looking anxious. Behind her was—Perzwa? What was he doing here? His expression was devilish.

“The king is dead!” he screamed. “And she poisoned him!”

“No, no, no,” Minneka said. “She is good. She has—”

Two guards lifted Chef off the ground. The others pointed through the open door at the overturned poison jar.

Minneka fell silent. She looked at Chef in disbelief.

“I … I … it was an accident,” Chef mumbled, as metal rings pressed against her wrists and they pushed her away from her dear Wagony.

“My my, an accident?” Perzwa grunted loudly. “The Good Chef, the best cook of the continent, poisons someone by accident? I don’t believe a word of it!”

Chef lowered her head as they led her to the palace dungeons. The king is dead, she repeated in her head. And it’s my fault. I’m not as good as they all say. Without my recipe book I am … nothing.

“This is treachery of the highest order! This deserves the punishment of death!” Perzwa yelled. The joyful, interested boy from before had been an act. This was his true personality.

Minneka stomped her foot and silenced Perzwa by throwing her cloak over his head.

“Ridiculous! We are not barbarians! I demand Chef be released and merely banished to Floria.”

“The Lions decide,” a guard growled.

“What lion?” Minneka asked. “There is no successor within the royal family! In the absence of a king, I am in charge. I am officially your queen until we solve this issue.”

The guards froze in place, but did not turn around. Chef’s wrists already burned from the handcuffs as she clung to Minneka in hopes of being saved.

“Our king has died!” a guard yelled. “Our species. I think we decide.”

“No. And you know Sulliwe would have wanted you to follow his laws. That is an order.”

The guards grunted, but dropped Chef. Perzwa climbed into her wagon and came back holding Chef’s new, invented plant. Once a thief, always a thief.

Once everyone had left, Minneka nudged the sad chimpanzee out of the room.

“It was an accident, that it was,” Chef mumbled. Her voice wavered. “You have to believe me. You believe me, right? Right?”

“I believe you,” said Minneka. Chef expected to be led outside. She hoped it. The fox would tell her she was banished, but at least she would be free. If she stayed queen, Chef would even have a powerful friend in Traferia and be safe.

But Minneka took a different pathway that also led to the dungeons.

“Indeed, it had to appear an accident.”

Sitting in a corner of the dark and damp dungeons, Chef had all the time in the world to realize just how naïeve she had been. Minneka and Perzwa worked together. That trader who sold Turnbacktulips obviously hadn’t “fortunately appeared”.

Anniwe—the previous King of Lions—had said for years that all demigods were to be banished. Or their powers taken from them. Most suspected him of abducting a handful of demigod Companions, basically ending the Companionship.

Of course Minneka, a demigod, hated the lions. Of course she wanted to take their power.

She saw a chance to make someone else take the fall. She grabbed that chance with all her elegant fox paws.

The ingredients of the recipe were believable enough to make Chef accept. Minneka played her role perfectly and seemed to really want that medicine. But the Bumpbarachts would hide the small and taste of the poison. The Fishfool would thicken the liquid and make it colorless.

The king stood no chance—and Chef had fallen into their trap with open eyes.

Time was fuzzy underground. She wasn’t sure if three hours had passed, or three days, or three weeks, when the cell door opened.

“I will bring you to your trial,” a lion said. The tears in his eyes had vanished. He even seemed … relieved?

Chef was put in handcuffs again, but not as violently as the last time. Maybe she’d helped this lion in her past too. Maybe he’d help her escape!

No. Escaping would be wrong, because she was guilty. Of poisoning. Of being kind to the wrong creatures. The thought alone made her cry again.

She ended up in te Throne Room, packed with animal species from all over Traferia. Her own invented plant stood next to Perzwa in a big, red flower pot. Judging from the decoration of the room, Perzwa had been stealing plants from others for far longer.

Her paws felt a silk red carpet. It chaotically traveled over marble steps and ended at the throne that held Minneka.

“We can be quick about this,” Minneka said loudly. “Multiple beings have seen how Chef was the only one to touch the medicine. How her wagon contained an empty poison jar. And now we have lost our beloved King of Lions, for the king is—”

“A bit sleepy, otherwise fine,” said a croaky voice that sounded as if it was struggling for air.

Minneka’s head nearly turned an entire circle.

Sulliwe waggled into the throne room, supported by four of his lion guards.

Chef’s eyes lit up. She could kiss that lion, with his grey mane and sleepy eyes.

“You’re alive!” Chef yelled in unison with the entire room.

“Yes, yes, quite an achievement, I know.” He stopped before the throne. “I believe you are sitting on my chair, Minnekeria.”

“But—what—why—sorry, this is improper.” Minneka immediately made room for him. She walked backwards towards the nearest exit. Only now, Chef noticed that all the exits were “accidentally” blocked by a big elephant butt or a group of bored panthers.

“When I told everyone I wasn’t feeling so well, two weeks ago,” Sulliwe started, “I hoped to sleep well and be fine. I had not expected to wake up in a hospital bed, surrounded by animals telling me I was dying.”

Murmurs rose from the audience. Sulliwe scratched his nail against his crown for attention.

“I thought it preposterous. A while later, I woke up again only to hear they had even started to ring the bells! And I heard Minneka had left to retrieve an ancient, magical medicine from the Good Chef.”

Sulliwe looked straight at Chef, then smiled warmly.

“A fitting name. A title you may keep forever. For even in the dark, even betrayed and obstructed and robbed, this chimpanzee … was able to make the right recipe.”

He rose from his throne. Minneka stood next to Perzwa, trying to hide behind Chef’s little tree.

“A solid recipe, that’s true. For a short period, it seemed as if I had died. A certain desert fox was eager to spread the news quickly. But in a short time, it actually healed me completely from whatever ailed me.”

Sulliwe’s sharp nails cut Chef’s handcuffs, setting her free.

“Because you are a good chef.”

The audience clapped, barked, growled, and raised spears at the ceiling. Chef’s heart raced, but for all the right reasons this time. She placed her half-grown paw against her chest, as her tail curled uncontrollably.

“Oh, well, erm, I don’t know if—”

“We do know.” Sulliwe kept smiling at her.

All who were present bowed to her, until she was the only being left who towered over all the others. She smiled ear to ear and shyly looked away.

Minneka had seen enough. She climbed Chef’s tree and tried to reach the roof. Sulliwe wanted to command his guards, until he noticed something green sticking to the fox’s legs.

When Perzwa climbed Chef’s plant too, he received the same green paws. It almost seemed like tiny, glistening droplets that eagerly grabbed your fur and covered more and more of it.

Sulliwe pushed back his guards. His falcons were also ordered to remain on the ground.

“Do not touch them. I don’t know what the green material is, but I don’t trust it.”

Minneka and Perzwa helped each other to a wooden chandelier. Perzwa could not leave his price behind, though. He pulled the plant with him, even if it gave his front paws the same green virus.

“You are truly insane!” Minneka yelled. She broke the glass in the roof dome and climbed outside, followed by the swine. Everyone made for the walls to dodge the rain of glass shards.

The fast footfalls of the two fleeing beasts sounded like hail hammering the roof, until they were gone.

“Gripglass,” said Chef. “I call it Gripglass.”

“Your species has been banished to Floria,” Sulliwe yelled after Minneka. “Ever return to Origina and you will risk the highest possible punishment!”

He returned to his throne, looking as sullen as his name suggested.

“My father Anniwe was right. You can’t trust demigods. If she truly had discovered her magic, we’d probably be long dead.”

He smiled at Chef again.

“Name your reward, girl. Soliduri? A palace of your own? A job as my advisor—a spot just opened up!”

Chef shook her head.

“Be a Good King. Make sure nobody in Traferia is without food and ends up with a malformed body. And please, bear children, so there will always be a King of Lions in Traferia. And … maybe … leave the demigods alone?”

Sulliwe’s belly and manes shook from laughter. “The Good Chef and the Good King. Now that is a story. I do pray you return with some new stories in the future. We’ve repaired your wagon and, who knows, maybe restocked your cupboards until they could take no more.”

Chef wanted to shake his hand, until she realized the Primas were the only species with hands. How did the other animals live? Without being able to grab anything with precision?

“Thanks, your majesty. I will need it on my journey, that I will.”

“To where?”

Chef thought about it. She missed her Recipe Book. But she had found and plucked the Fishfool without it. She had made the correct medicine without it.

Maybe she was something without her magical book.

“I have a world to explore and food to share. If I may ask one last thing …”

“Spit it out, Good Chef.”

“That swine has stolen my Recipe Book. My magical, extremely powerful book. Please send your best soldiers to get back that Heavenmatter.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Heavenmatter?” he whispered, instantly curious.

“And once you’ve stolen it back, oh I don’t know, place it somewhere another young animal might find it and use it to make the world a better place.”

Sulliwe winked and immediately gathered his best soldiers.

Chef turned around and lovingly hugged her Wagony, ready for her next journey.

And so it was that life continued …