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"That's not true," he said gently, "I'm sorry. I don't even notice when I sound cutting. I'm not disappointed in you, sweetheart. Never in you."

Jessie leaned forward and took her hands away from her face again, to rest his forehead against hers. "You're a bright, intelligent young lady. You have nothing to be ashamed of."

He kissed her. He drew his lips away slightly, then pressed them back in. It would be so easy to just lose himself in those kisses. In her. He had, already. How much time had passed since he came in? Forty five minutes? Maybe more? Did it matter? He would have quite happily spent the night with her. There, on the bed, with her lovely, long limbs and her lips, soft as the inside of a rose. Oh dear.

If only "not thinking" and "overthinking" could be balanced to a nice middle ground - such as "not overthinking." Unfortunately, that was a difficult balance to achieve, and as Evelyn's arms found their way around his neck, Jessie's capacity for any thought at all plummeted like a fuel tank with a very dangerous leak. His hands ran down her neck, sensitive fingers resting for a few wonderful moments on the exposed part of her breasts just above the line of her bodice. Then they moved on, down her sides, over her hips, onto the bare flesh of her thighs. Then back up, to her slender waist.

After a few minutes, he was hit by a sudden intense hatred of the position they were in. And so, much more nimbly than a human man would've managed, he slid out from underneath both of her legs and inserted himself in a much more comfortable position inbetween them. As his lips and tongue did tantaslising things to hers, his hands found the cream fur of her top again - though they desperately wanted what was underneath it. Hit by a sudden urge to just rip the blasted thing off, he managed to subconsciously compromise by placing his fingers in the gap between the material and her flesh and gently working to prise it down...

Jessie broke from Evelyn at the first bang, which startled his sensitive hearing tremendously. When it became clear what was going to happen, he quickly composed himself and bolted into place faster than a racehorse, posing casually beside the wall with his face an utter mask of serenity just as the door opened.

His chest was still rising and falling a little more heavily than normal - he consciously stilled it as Gilroy began to yell. He felt a little hot and flushed, though hopefully no one would notice, being as his skin behaved differently to the pale ones, who blushed a noticeable pink or red. He wouldn't've looked out of place with a glass of whiskey or something in his hand, as if he'd been doing nothing but quietly sipping and chatting the whole time. Wearing a monocle. Well, what would he need glasses for?

"Good evening, Gilroy," he said pleasantly. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean. Is something the matter?"

"Absolutely," he said, wearing his best poker face, with a dash of puzzlement for effect. He had no idea what they were so concerned about. He and the young lady had been having a perfectly innocent time. "I've reccommended a few extra books for her on the subject. I might be bringing a book of translated poetry over in the next day or so."

To Andreas. "I don't know how you could suggest such a thing. I'm her teacher. I wouldn't dream of hurting one of my students. I don't even spar with them directly," he said, taking on a harsher, offended tone. "If it's something to do with my skin, well... then I'm sorry to have fallen foul of yet another bigot."

"Excellent," he said, "Thank you for having me. I appreciate your enthusiasm on the subject."

Oh yes, she'd been very enthusiastic about the things they were discussing. And he'd appreciated it. A lot.

He gave her a little bow, and when he met her eyes again, he smiled a mysterious, conspiratorial smile. "I'll be sure to collect the tickets for the opera next week. Remember - Tuesday at six thirty. I'll meet you here."

He slipped past her, with the briefest brush of his fingers across her arm as he went. I'll be looking forward to it, they seemed to say - both the last reminder of their intimacy, and a hopeful nod towards the future. He scooped up the four swords casually, deftly inside the cloth that had covered them, cradling them in his arms like a person. "Take care of yourselves, won't you?"

And then he floated out of the room like a shadow, leaving no trace of his having ever been there at all - aside from the jewellery boxes lying on the bed, still open, displaying their dazzling, carefully chosen contents.

Jessie sat down at the desk in his shared room with a rough book on his left, and a fresh grimoire on his right. In the left corner of the table, a small stack of reference books, written either by himself or Cressa. This would not be a difficult task. All he had to do was copy out some of the translated poetry. Actually, he could probably do with a smaller grimoire. It shouldn't take more than twenty pages.

But then, that wouldn't really teach her anything, would it? The translations, while pretty enough, couldn't compare to the glittering melodies of the original verse. So, he would include the original text, and the romanisation, on the left hand pages, and the translation on the right. Perhaps she could learn how to recite them in the original tongue herself. But then, a few helpful notes on the structure of the language would be an excellent addition. He could include them at the start. But then, so much of the content and the language hinged on the culture of his people. It was impossible to extract the three - he would include some notes on that, too. Some illustrations would be wonderful, of the underground cities and architecture. He began sketching. Perhaps Evelyn would enjoy some fairytales. Folk stories. Perhaps some songs.

He was going to need a bigger grimoire.

He wanted it to be informative as possible. He checked the number of pages in the new (doubly thick) grimoire, and divided them neatly in half, taking account for a cover page and a closing page. The first half, he decided, would be devoted to information on the language, the culture, his experiences... his home. The second half would be the promised poems, and stories if he had the time. He started to work.

The language of the dark elves in my homeland is not an easy one for outsiders to learn, he wrote. It has no strict pattern of word order, but neither is it a highly inflected language such as Latin. Therefore to the untrained eye it can look chaotic, even senseless. But it is a beautiful-sounding language. The aim when constructing sentences is to make them sound as lovely as possible, whilst retaining structure. Like a piece of music.

He devoted a full page to the alphabet, the beautiful black letters which looked a work of art in themselves, and more to the pronunciation of each one. As a phonetic language, each symbol represented a specific sound, rather than a letter which could represent many, as in Common. For instance, ah and eh, two forms of the letter A in Common, both had their own symbols. And then of course, there were the special sounds, the accents not present in Common, or many human languages at all - ll, the lateral fricative, r, the velar fricative, the throaty sound which was largely responsible for how harsh the language tended to sound to human ears. On the contrary, they didn't have any hard j or g sounds - what was misleading romanised as a j was usually an ee, such as u'jool - oo-ee-ool.

Culture, class, professions, artwork, architecture. He drew a sweeping skyline of an underground city, beautiful spires, fountains, statues, palaces in the distance. He ended up writing about his own experiences, too. Before he truly realised what he was doing, his sister's face appeared on the page, beautiful and kind, faraway, a bit like the Priestess. High cheekbones, her long hair swept up in an elaborate, many-tiered bun. Aunrae appeared next to her, eyes cold and cruel, and then his little brothers and sisters as he remembered them - which was not as clearly as he would've liked. But still, he filled in the gaps. Initially, he tried to gloss over the nastier aspects of his experiences at home, but the truth slowly worked its way through: beatings with the barbed cat o' nine tails, the holy weapon used only by mothers against their children; his baby brother, sacrificed to the Goddess at birth; the gruelling regime his Master set for him; the beatings when he, as a young boy, failed to meet the pace. But he didn't mention anything about the sexual slavery, or the rituals of adulthood. The story of his life got cut off roughly at age 14, therefore... but he couldn't bear for her to know the truth.

Two pages went to religion - to the Goddess. She was, essentially, the reason for their existence and the roots of their society, and so she couldn't be ignored. A border of webs and creeping spiders grew from nothing across the blank page; an intricate swarm, a mass of bloated arachnid bodies and legs. Dew clung to the threads of webbing - was it dew, or blood? He took out a paintbrush and some red ink. It was blood. And then the portrait of Her, bare-breasted, spiders running up and across her skin, a great crown of the writhing bodies piled upon her head. All of his illustrations were beautiful - they popped right off the page. These pages, though, were as terrible as the rest were lovely.

Llolth is a goddess of intricacy and deceit. She pits her worshippers against one another. We do not speak her name except in prayer, for fear of calling her attention to us. We call her the Goddess, the Dark Goddess, the One Who Weaves, the Black Spinner, the Hand Who Moves the Pawn, and other such monikers.

Finally, it was time for what he'd set out to do. A two-page spread became the division between the two halves of the book - literally. A great battle grew across them, with real figures raising lances and swords against figures of mythology and the great bards, who held their lutes and harps poised like swords and shields towards the back. The background was not neglected - a great stone archway with scrolling text beyond it was in sight, a symbol of the portal between one side and the other.

On the left hand page, he carefully transcribed the original verse, in their indecipherable, sanskrit-like script, with the romanisation in its own column directly beside it. On the right hand page - the translation, on its own. But he wasn't content to stop there. In his roughbook, he sketched down some designs, recalling the intricate, scrolling patterns servants would paint on the dishware for banquets. They had four or five unused plates for each course, just for the beauty of them, and for each banquet they would be rinsed clean and repainted. No human could have kept up with the demanding pace. It wouldn't have been possible, if elves didn't crank out beautiful art faster than poop.

Then he got even more ambitious. He started to weave text in with the intricate border designs - at first, simply enough. Ussta'dos ke, I love you, in the drow alphabet, next to a stylised heart that took up the bottom right corner. But then it got more and more complicated. He started to weave the text of his favourite love poetry around stems, into flowers, on top of leaves. Love bloomed all over the pages, sometimes visible, but often so small it could be very easily missed. Four entire stanzas looped around and around in a celtic knot. Once, in a fit of utter devilishness, he bordered a poem that particularly made him think of Evelyn with one that was completely different... and utterly erotic. Those two pages with their deceptive facade of innocence were his ultimate guilty pleasure. It seemed he was fast beginning to enjoy the courting game. Sending a hidden dirty message was utterly exciting.

Some of the poem translations rhymed, whilst others didn't. Cressa preferred accurate translations of non-rhyming verse herself, whilst Jessie usually tried to capture the spirit of the rhymes, though the exact scheme could never be replicated.

Lightly from fair to fair she flew,
And loved to plead, lament and woo;
Her pursuit light, and short-lived pain,
For monarchs seldom sigh in vain.

He came to one long lament by a male lover. The object of his affections had chosen another, but as he read it through, he frowned a little. The stanza which worried him was this:

Can you, my life, really be so absent-minded as to put your arms about him? Can you, my life, let him put his arms about you?
Let me tell you, in case you know it not, that that head of his was recently covered by a helmet, and that a sword hung from that side which now is so devoted to you.
His left hand, with the gold ring which fits it so ill, bore a shield; touch his right, and you'll find it bathed with blood.
The man's a murderer! Can you really hold his hand? All that he has, he won at the price of blood. Perhaps if you ask, he will tell you how many throats he has cut.

He very nearly didn't include it - then he played around a little, toying with the verse, then contemplating leaving it out. But in the end, he couldn't bring himself to censor his work. He was probably being oversensitive, anyway... he would just have to hope Evelyn wouldn't notice - or if she did, take - the poet's advice.

Then there were fairy tales - he included no translations for these, just wrote them out in common, with beautiful full-page illustrations, delicately sketched and carefully shaded. Heartbroken Melusine rising from the water to cradle her drowned beloved; Cutu'luhaiine slaying the cerberus with his lacrosse ball, bringing back the stick to hurl it powerfully down its gullet, the hound's eyes mad and staring; six brothers with the mark of a snake's coils around their neck, signalling their eternal servitude to their House. Something about the way he captured them, the expressions, made them pop out of the page, a single moment frozen in time.

For the back page, he reserved his most intricate work - thorns, chains, stone, all of it interlinked dizzyingly, and in their center, a lock holding it in place.

Rome was not built in a single night, however. The work took him days - days, and nights without sleep, though fortunately he didn't need it. That first night, Cressa came home around two in the morning and threw her arms around his neck, having dumped her many bags of shopping in the doorway. "Iessiemawr!~"

"Did you have a good time?" he asked, turning his head to meet her lips as she reached round to peck him on the cheek. A dark ball of energy flew through the door and hugged him, too.

"Thank you thank you thank you SO MUCH!! We had the best day EVER!"

When Gloria pulled away, she found her eyes glistening with tears. "I've never had so many nice things in my life. Thank you so much, Captain."

"I'm glad that you're happy," he smiled, taking her hand for a moment, like a father might his daughter. She went to bed, and Cressa proceeded to parade all that she'd bought for herself. He watched her with a smile as she tried on her favourites again, looking stunningly lovely. He remembered her when she had hair like a waterfall down her back as she stood with her back to him, examining herself in the mirror. Not that her short hair didn't suit her - he was just... remembering.

Eventually, she finished and came to sit beside him as he worked. "What's this for?" she asked, leaning forward as if she wanted to rest her head on his shoulder, but didn't want to disturb his arm as he drew.

"It's for Evelyn. I said I'd put together some poems for her."

Cressa giggled. "And I see it's turned into an utterly gigantic project."

"Yes... I went in to apologise," he said, "And I came out with a date for the opera, and a new project. All in all, I've had a very productive day."

She smirked. "How close did you come to deflowering her?"

"Oh Cressa, you cut me to the quick," he said, sounding playfully hurt, "I was nothing but a true gentleman."

"Oh darling, I know, I know," she teased, giving him a little smooch on his cheek. "Only a true gentleman could get away with cornering a young maiden in her room and ravishing her and still come off as utterly polite and morally unquestionable."

He chuckled. "I love you."

"I love you too," Cressa said, nuzzling into his hair. "You monocled, top hat-wearing charlatan."

"My devilish master plan is all coming together."

"I think we've known each other too long."

He put down his pen and gripped her hand in both of his. "No. Not nearly long enough."

"We're going to be old as the hills together," she said dreamily... before descending into madness. "No, we can become hills!"

"Our bodies will slowly start to seize up and calcify after ten thousand years of wreaking havoc on the surface."

"Well, I'm glad I have something to look forward to in my old age. Forget all that 'elven suicide out of sheer boredom.' WE'RE GOING TO BECOME PART OF THE LANDSCAPE."

"I'd calcify to stone any day with you, Cressa."

She grinned at him, a flicker of mischief in her eyes. "Ohh baby, that sounds like an innuendo if ever I heard one. Hmm, maybe we can be like creepy talking statues, guarding the entrance to a tomb. Unsuspecting passersby won't know what hit them."

"Oh dear," he laughed.

"This is my 'creepy talking statue voice,' tell me if it's good. Ahem. WHOOOOOO DISTUUUURBS MY SLUMBEERRRRRR?"

"It's going to be very boring waiting for our bodies to gradually turn to stone. We're going to have to bring some books or board games to keep us occupied in the meantime."

"Oh yes, because we really want passing adventurers to stumble upon our statues with an unfinished game of Scrabble inbetween us!"

He paused, horrified at the prospect. "Now that you've said it like that, I think we'd have to compulsively finish the game first and pack it away neatly."

"Even worse," she said, with awful, gothic drama. "An unfinished game of Jenga."

"Oh my god. Would it ever fall?"

"No. Not ever."

"The anticipation would be far too much. I think we need to abandon this plan."

"I honestly just wish I could experience the conversation that would happen when we finished the board games..."

She put on an exaggeratedly masculine, deep voice. "'WELL CRESSA, I THINK IT'S TIME WE PACKED EVERYTHING AWAY, LAID DOWN AND JUST WAITED FOR MILLENIA TO PASS."

"That is not what I sound like."

Ignoring him, she then proceeded to put on a falsetto... for her own voice. "'I HAVE TO PEE.'" Masculine. "'I TOLD YOU YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE BEFORE WE LEFT HOME. GRUMPY GRUMP GRUMP'"

"'Grumpy grump grump...?'"

"That is what you sound like. GRUMPY GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP"

He shook his head as he laughed. "I'll tell you what you sound like. CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP"

"GRUMPY GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP"

"CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP LIE LIE CRAP CRAP"

"GRUMPY GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP"

"I'm trying to work."

"Mwahhaha~ Sowwy. Grumpy grump grump."

The underworld is a very large place. In fact, that is something of an understatement - it is bigger than the surface world, deeper, and of course, infitely more dangerous. Anyone who travelled in the underworld, in pitch darkness, with giant insectoids and other horrible things lurking just out of sight, needed to know what they were doing. It was easy to fall into a chasm, or fall prey to a predator, or simply get lost - take a wrong turn, and you might find yourself walking on and on, into nowhere, or into a Deep Dragon's lair, or to a place stranger and more twisted and defiant of the laws of reality than anywhere else in the mortal world.

But it was not all insanity. Dark elves had their glorious, sweeping cities, which human eyes would never be able to appreciate. Deep dwarves mined the endlessly abundant minerals, oil and ore, building great underground strongholds with their stone and their wealth. Strange eyeless fish-beasts had their... well, nobody really knew, actually. And on the road, there were safehouses. Merchant camps - and small towns of renegades and survivors.

One of these base camps was known far and wide as a place with no allegiance; a place where anyone could go, regardless of colour or creed, and stay for as long as they liked. It had many names - one for every language which passed through it, and so, innumerable names - but we could call it Qu'ya'suut'miir'nau, meaning 'The Place Where No God Has Dominion,' or perhaps simply, as the humans called it, Haven. Its communal spirit made it unique. It also made it prosperous. In addition to impermanent tents and hovels, larger buildings had been established over time - pubs, restaurants, shops, lit by swinging lantern-light. It was the strangest cobbled-together town of eternal evening one had ever seen. Many soldiers worked for them, particularly men who had escaped their enslavement and were happy to work in exchange for their keep. Anything was better than the life they used to have. They also scouted the area, clearing monster infestations and picking up travellers, and otherwise doing a generally good service. One day, two of these mercenary scouts passed the Luurden-log barricades that surrounded Haven's perimeter carrying a body.

Amalthea, the elf who went by a human name, had helped to found the camp many years earlier. Now, she was their unspoken leader. A sorceress, an outcast from her home, her life and aspirations set the tone for the entire establishment. A place where her people, and all others, could trade and live freely. It was to her they brought the wounded man, entering her tent hurriedly, without any announcement.

"Amal'tea," said one of the scouts, "We have an injured boy. He's lost one of his eyes. He is not seriously hurt, but he seems to have been bleeding for quite some time."

Indeed, even as they held him there unconscious, head lolling against his chest, she could see both his face and the front of his torso were covered in blood.

"Quickly, bring him in," she said, "Put him on the bed."

They placed him on top of the covers, where he lay, inert as a corpse. Then, abruptly, he gave a little thrash and a moan. He wasn't dead. But he must've been in agony - perhaps he had passed out with pain. Amalthea touched his head, willing for the wound to cauterise. Then, she took him by his shoulder and tipped his head over the end of the bed, letting the last of the excess blood that had pooled in the socket run onto the floor.

"There. That was not so hard," she said, resting him back on the bed and proceeding to examine the wound carefully. She gave a little wave, and a tray of medical instruments floated towards her from an ornate metal supply cabinet. "I don't suppose you retrieved the eye?"

"We looked around, but there was nothing nearby. We think he may have been attacked. Something might have taken it, or eaten it."

"Yes, the wound looks too clean for an accident. There is not even any damage to the eyelid. Unfortunately, that means there is nothing I can do to save it. My powers are not enough that I can regrow such a complicated organ from nothing." She lowered her voice apologetically. "A nice, clean heal is the best I can do for you, my young friend."

Jessie woke much later as if from an eternity in oblivion. Breathing heavily, he looked around, feeling panicked and strange. He was in a strange place. His shirt was missing. Why couldn't he open his left eye? What had he been dreaming about? How long had he been asleep? He moved to get out of bed, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

"You are awake," said the woman. "How do you feel?"

He turned and looked at her helplessly, his remaining eye wide and incomprehending. She repeated her question.

"I don't understand what you're saying..." he admitted.

"Oh, my apologies. We speak Undercommon here. It has become my habitual tongue," she continued, unconcerned, switching to their native tongue. "I am Amalthea. You may think of me as the matron of this camp. But I am not a cruel mother. We are all outcasts here. Most everyone here has been hurt by their people. I am a sorceress. So have I."

Her explanations washed over Jessie like a tsunami. He couldn't comprehend. "Why are you telling me this?" he said - and then, more frightened, "Why can't I open my eye?!" he cried. He reached up and felt around the area. The left side of his head was covered with bandaging. He hadn't even noticed until he touched it.

"Ssss," she soothed, urging him to lie back and rest. "Be still. You will be able to in time. For now, I have paralysed the area, to block any phantom pain."

The leader looked at him sadly as he felt around his face, and then sighed as she headed over to a chair just opposite the bed. She drew it nearer and sat. "You have wandered quite a way from home. Alone. Therefore I assumed you are an outcast also. Therefore I assumed that you will be joining us. If you have nowhere else to go."

It took him a little while to digest this also. "I cannot go home," he blearily replied. It sounded as if he couldn't quite believe it. Like he'd woken up from nothing, into a nightmare.

"Then it was the correct assumption to make," she said. She gave him a few more minutes to compose himself before she spoke any more words of comfort. "Whatever has passed before does not matter. You have a home here now. And you have a friend in me."

No strange woman had ever said anything like this to him before. He felt like he was being given an order. "I have no option..." he said meekly.

"Oh, no, you have many options," she quickly said, "But if you want money, food, shelter, safety... we have all of those things here. You may take advantage of them for as long as you like, any time you like. You are most, most welcome here."

~~~~~~~~~

It had been Jessie's intention to stay at the renegade camp for only a few days - long enough to recover and begin adjusting to life through one eye. But a few days turned into a few weeks. Then by his calculations, the Turn was out. If he hadn't run, his life would be very different now. He didn't make any friends. He didn't want any friends. As stupid as it was, he wanted the life he used to have. He'd accept it readily, because it was all he knew. The thought of moving on and never looking back, now that it was his reality, seemed more impossible than ever. He was... in shock. It had all happened so quickly, and now, eternity stretched out in front of him, meaningless and empty.

Something had to happen to bring him back out of his shell. He couldn't mope forever. It was time to stand back up on his own feet. He started running errands for the merchants - carrying things, lifting heavy boxes, delivering messages, checking weights and measures. He didn't like to stand guard. It left him alone too long with his thoughts. And the other soldiers... he didn't want to go near them. At least back at home, everyone was tied by a common factor - the House they served. They were all in the same boat. Here, the simple loss of that loose allegiance left him afraid. He couldn't trust them. He couldn't gauge their motives. They looked foreign to him, even though they all had the same skin, hair, training. He didn't want the camraderie. Their laughter sounded strange and scary to him. How could it be that they were enjoying life, when his felt so hollow?

At least they left him alone. Everyone left him alone. He wasn't sure anyone even knew his name. They were quite happy to let him fade into the background, nothing special or interesting, just another soul on the road, far away from home. Nobody wanted anything from him, and he didn't have to do anything if he didn't want to. Was this freedom? He didn't know. He felt alone, like the single inhabitant on an alien planet.

Amalthea the sorceress hadn't been exaggerating when she said the camp had everything. Every day, Jessie saw things he'd never seen before. There was no shortage of dwarves, orcs, goblins, and other kinds of people he couldn't name. One day there was even a passing ogre in camp, bigger than a rhinoceros on its hind legs and three times as powerful, great tusks sprouting out of its huge jaw. One of the merchants was a weird, skinny blue troll with a bright red, comical moustache. His fingers were weird and stubby and his feet were like strange, engorged, two-toed stubs, but he had the most jovial laugh Jessie had ever heard in his life, and he told fascinating stories of his tropical homeland. And he could read fortunes with bones. He saw humans in the camp for the first time, too. Well, the first time aside from veiled thralls. A party of them came in carrying talismans of light. Jessie remembered the whiteness, the kind of light he'd never seen before, like burning magnesium to his sight. Amalthea welcomed them into her tent like old friends. They must have been great heroes, to have come this far, and travelled so deep.

He was ruminating one day, sitting on the ground beside the entrance to the ramshackle pub and absently watching the people coming and going, when the dwarf he'd unwittingly been keeping his eye fixed on suddenly barked at him, shocking him out of his reverie. "What're you looking at?"

"Oh, nothing!" he replied, startled. He took a better look at the dwarf. "It's just, I've never seen a woman with such a fine beard before."

The look in her eyes shifted. She smiled beneath her bushy moustache as if no one had ever paid her quite such a compliment before. "You're quite the charmer, pretty-boy elf. Might just be the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me!" she said, breaking into booming laughter. "That's why I like it here. You'd think dwarven guys, useless tossers they are, mind, would appreciate a nice full body of hair, but they ain't got the kinda poeticness to back it up. You elves, you're just all poetry, ain't ya?"

He didn't know quite what to say to this. He murmured something polite, and before he knew it, she'd taken both his arms and hauled him to his feet with the strength of an ox. "Name's Fiona. Nice to meet you, Pretty Boy."

"Sit down," she invited. Somehow, they'd ended up inside the pub. A serving, erm, tentacled person of indeterminate gender placed two tankards of mead down in front of them before they'd even settled. "Have a drink."

"No, thank you," he said politely. "If it's all the same..."

She didn't give a crap. "Eh, you look like a lightweight to me anyway. I bet my axe weighs more'n you. I could pick you up 'n bench press ya."

Fiona knocked back pint after pint of mead, and she never grew any less coherent for it. "Y'see this scar?" she said, tapping the exposed bit of skin under her shoulder guard, "Wrestled a drake. The drake came out worse. You got any scars, Pretty Boy?"

Jessie was beginning to enjoy himself. Fiona was quite happy to rattle on by herself, with the occassional question posed to him, and her eccentricity was fast endearing her to him. It helped, of course, that he'd picked up Undercommon quickly in the months he'd been at the Haven. He reached up and yanked down the material of his tunic that covered his neck. "Somebody tried to slit my throat," he said, "I killed them."

"Nice. Hard. You're not as soft as ya look. How'd ya lose your eye?"

His lie wasn't totally untrue. "I ran into a monster on the trails."

"Yeah, there are lotsa them out there. Hard to get a good look while it was clawin' on your face, I guess." Time passed. She saw someone she knew. "HEY! Bragnox, you old slug! Get over here! I need a drinking partner."

The swarthy male dwarf, heavy and muscular, with a beard even larger and more impressive than Fiona's, came over and sat down. "Bragnox, meet my new friend, Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy, Bragnox."

He looked Jessie up and down. "You've adopted an elf. Them maternal instincts proving too much for ya, you old whore? Better keep your roving eye off my wife, Pretty Boy. We don't play none of your pervy poly games where we come from."

Jessie was shocked. He'd never heard a man address a woman so disrespectfully before. "Your wife is a beautiful lady," he said.

Bragnox had already helped himself to a big tankard, but this made him splutter on his mead. "What, you ********' blind in both eyes? I've seen rear ends prettier'n her!"

"Yeah, like looking in a mirror, isn't it?" she immediately replied.

"Pretty Boy's a sweeter-looking lady than you, babycakes. Then again, that ain't hard. A Deep Octopus' ninth tentacle is prettier than you."

"Then you shoulda gone ahead and married it instead. Woulda been a match made in heaven - two slimy sons of bathwater writhing around together."

"Sweetypie, you know I love you so much I could just punch you in the face all night long."

"I'll hack off your goddamn balls if you come anywhere near my face."

Jessie couldn't tell if this was affectionate banter or if they hated each other's guts. Maybe a bit of both. Then, after roughly his fiftieth pint, Bragnox decided it was time to play Wrestle the Elf.

When Jessie had imagined a life away from home, he hadn't pictured himself writhing on the floor trying to keep a dwarf's flailing fists from giving him permanent brain damage. He could hear a crowd of onlookers cheering on the bar fight.

"Come on, Pretty Boy!" he jeered, "Let's see what you can do! Are you a man, or aren't you?"

Jessie struggled to free himself. If only he could get free, he could fight back. He relied on his speed, not his power. This was not the first time he'd come up a-cropper against a larger, burlier man. Then, in a moment of frustration, he lashed at Bragnox's face, and the dwarf fell back, howling.

When he sat up, he was feeling around his jaw, looking surprised. Then, onto the ground, he spat two teeth, and a great glob of blood.

Jessie really thought he was in for it then. But as it turned out, he had just done something that earned him great respect amongst the dwarves. A trial of manhood, almost. He felt himself lifted up into the air by many hands, tossed up and down, as the dwarves sang their people's equivalent of 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow.' Bragnox clasped his hand and shook it warmly, as if they'd been best friends their entire lives. He'd never seen, nor ever would see again, a man so happy to have had his jaw broken in a fight. Mead was passed around. Shanties were sung.

And that is how Jessie became King of the Dwarves.

By the time Monday morning rolled around, Jessie had worked his way through nine pens, and gotten roughly three quarters of the way through the book. Cressa came up behind him and put both her hands on his shoulders.

"Time for work."

He blew out a little stream of air he'd been unconsciously holding in. "Is it time already?"

"It's looking really good," she said, about the book. "Are you including Duahla'drae of the Sorrows? That one's my favourite."

"I'm running out of pages. But I suppose I could swap that out for one I'd planned, seeing as it's your favourite."

He got up, washed and dressed, and Cressa sat down at his desk and leafed back through the pages he'd completed. She gave a little smile as she noticed what he'd been doing with the borders of the poems. "This is so romantic."

The tone of her voice made Jessie think. Before he left, he took her by the arm and looked into her eyes. "Cressa... do you mind all of this?" he asked gently, "If I'm making you unhappy, just say the word and I'll stop. For you."

She looked at him as if she were surprised he could think such a thing. Of course, she hadn't said in as many words that she supported it. Perhaps he thought she might be secretly jealous, because she hadn't given her outright approval. And no, she wasn't jealous. If she were jealous, the fact that he would immediately jump to making that sacrifice for her would have made her very pleased indeed... instead, she found it sad.

"Am I unhappy that for once, you're doing something that excites you? Something that you're comfortable enough to indulge in?" she said, bringing one hand up to his face. He held the other one as she placed it against his chest. "Absolutely not. Jessie, do you know how young you are? Sometimes you act as if you're five thousand years old, and all of your decisions create an irreparable chasm in the fabric of existence."

"If I were five thousand years old, I'd make a lot fewer mistakes," he sighed, "And maybe hurt a lot less people with my actions."

"Who have you hurt?"

He thought. "Gloria."

"You made her day yesterday," she said, "You don't need to be with her to make her happy. You just have to support her. She's very young... and she hasn't received a lot of kindness in her life. You don't have to love her. All she knows is that you're the first man who's shown her the way to a future in her life, and she's overzealously grateful to you for it."

He searched around for someone else. "I could hurt Evelyn," he said.

"Then don't. You're a wise person. Do what's best for her. And no, that doesn't mean cutting yourself out of the picture. Why do you feel like allowing yourself to get close to someone just inflicts suffering upon them? The way I see it, the only person suffering because of you, is you."

Jessie looked at her as if she really had reached the core this time. Yes, he did push people away, or push himself away from them. Because he thought they would be hurt because of him... it had taken someone with the persistence and willpower of Cressa to break through to him, and someone with the fragility of a snowflake for him to reach out to them. "You really don't mind?"

"I don't mind. I want you to be happy."

She smiled. "And who knows? This could be something really good for you. If you find yourself comfortable enough with her that your issues don't present themselves, then intimacy between us might not be far behind."

"...I hadn't thought of it that way. Thank you, Cressa."

"OF COURSE you hadn't," she teased, "I'm the brains, you're the body and the brawn."

He gave her a squeeze. "Are you sure you're not the body?"

"Ooh~! If you're not careful, I'm going to detain you from your duties, o bold captain."

"I wouldn't mind," he said, kissing her.

"No, but your students might."

~~~~~~~~~~

Cressa came into the room for her private afternoon session somewhere amidst an ocean of black material, just as she often did. Today, however, she came in carrying a large box full of strange items. For Cressa, who usually did very minimal preparation for her lessons, and sometimes just turned up and lectured about whatever happened to be on her mind at the time, this was quite unusual. Not shockingly different, but unusual. It signalled that she had something in mind - a new topic, perhaps. Or a demonstration... or many demonstrations.

The tables in the classroom were arranged into a kind of square-angled U-shape, with space in the middle of two long tables, blocked off at the side opposite the door by a third. This was, unofficially, the teacher's table, and Cressa placed her large box of stuff down on top of it. "Okay, Classydoodles! We're going to be doing something different today. All of you, forget what you were doing - except you, Xei: this will be more like an extension of your current studies."

"But before we begin..." she continued, reaching in amongst the odd assortment of junk in her box - which included at a glance a large chunk of rock; an unenchanted, slightly dirty glass bottle; a stack of very old books; a big lump of grey, damp clay; and a bag of limes. "Let's do a quick head count."

She pulled out from the center a large, glass jar, stoppered by a cork, and placed it - and its contents - in full view of everyone, on the table. "How many of you are afraid of spiders?"