Completed When in doubt a Tavern will do.

Now, the time had struck. He had built enough courage to toss a coin into this ring and see what he could snoop. Curiousity, more than anything, could be a delightful draw, and what better occasion to practice this bit for the future?

Rae'twyn rose in one, fluid motion, merging with the clustering crowd as they dutifully toasted the commander. He touched his silver pendant with two fingers and whispered gentle words of magical potence. Words of home, in a realm where they didn't belong.

With his whisper, the pendant worked its magic. A slight spell, the most minor of illusions, but enough for his desired effect. It altered him only below his hood, to render his midnight skin a shade more sun-touched, dark and brown, without its alien blue tint. His hair retained its silver, but turned grimier, greyer and grizzled. Wrinkles beyond his dimples added to his cheeks like waves in a dirty river. Likewise, his visible clothes and shining rubies dimmed into a beggar's cloth.

Through this transformation, Rae'twyn walked through the forest of other bodies, altering his stride. Bent and crooked, an old man shambling through, picking up a nearby drained cup as the final panache to his performance, dropping in a single coin.

His disguise complete, he staggered up to Afanas and Feyrith, cup shaking and clattering, as if he'd already made the rounds outside.

"Spare some coin for an old, haggard soul? Just for a night of shelter, out of rain and wind."

He had always wanted to play this part. And what better time to judge the character of this fellow drow and stalwart commander? He attempted to mimic the scripted and weary tones of other vagrants he'd seen similarly beg, and turned, quivering head and rattling cup in their direction, curving like a tilted U.

Despite his best thespian efforts, a mischevious smile crawled involuntarily up the sides of his mouth. His own glee could be worked into the clay of vain hope of a beggar.

"Perhaps you, brave, brave commander? I will sing your praises far and wide."

The cup clinking with a single coin made its rounds towards Feyrith.

"Or perhaps you, daughter of the deep? Ahh, I recognise a wayward drow when I see one." His smile quivered and widened, much like his voice, eyes hidden by the hood. "Only a generous soul would be so far from home."

Though he could hide his appearance, he could not alter his voice - beyond a theatrical croaking of age, but that didn't shroud his unique accent. Those versed in its tones might recognise it.

Afanas
Feyrith

Feyrith
Rae'twyn Suvalissaere

Afanas watched the old man’s crooked advance without moving, as one might watch wind push at a door one has already decided to open. The hood hid a face, but not the voice; the accent slipped through the rags like a bright thread through dull cloth.

Around them, the tavern swelled and ebbed with toasts and laughter, the commander’s name breaking against the rafters like surf.

His eyes, dark as flint, took the measure of the bent shoulders and the rags, and something quick and keen behind them. Slowly, his large hand dug into the pocket of his pants. He retrieved three gold coins. He dropped them in the man’s cup, a gesture followed by the sound of metal clinking against metal.

“I do not require recompense. You seem to need this money more than I.”

A pause. The crowd’s cheer fell to a low wash; somewhere a stool scraped the floor. Afanas’s gaze did not waver.

“I haven’t done much worth singing of. You’d be wasting your breath on my meager accomplishments.”

He straightened, though the weight of years lay in his shoulders, and the corners of his eyes softened, as though he accepted, at least for now, that small kindness might rest between strangers.

Rae'twyn rattled the coins in his cup, pouting his lower lip and tilting his head in surprise.

"Well, I'll be damned." His older voice almost slipped, warbling with Rae'twyn's playful curiousity, before returning to its previous cadence. "Ah! You are most kind, commander. I shall sing your praises far and wide, indeed, in spite of your modesty--" a curled finger (shaking for dramatic effect), once pointed at Afanas, swung like a compass needle towards Feyrith, finding north. A full-blown grin, all impish glee, cracked through his features, and he lowered his hooded head to half-heartedly hide it. "Since this is demand of your enchanting lover here . . . I dare not refuse it!"

Of course, Rae'twyn made sure to belt this last part out loud, involving the whole tavern in his declaration. However absurd the notion might have been, hiding under his cloak of doddering madness, his words were certain to send the rumour mills flying. If Alliria was anything like Zar'ahal, all gossip needed was a spark, sometimes even from a clumsy hand, and it could start a generous fire.

Afanas
Feyrith

Feyrith
Rae'twyn Suvalissaere
Afanas stiffened, as if some small offense had set a blade of ice along his spine. He stared at the beggar. He blinked—once, twice, again—and the line of his mouth went taut. A color like bruise-purple rose under the porcelain of his cheeks, the only confession his face would grant.

“I’ve only just met Feyrith,” he said at last, each word laid down plain. “I’d hardly call her a friend, much less anything so… intimate.”

He let out a short breath that was not quite a laugh. Whatever path of fancy the man had taken to arrive at such a notion, Afanas could not see it, and would not follow.

“I have been a bachelor; I am one; and I’ll likely die one.”

The beggar bowed, hand over heart, rattling cup raised above him like one might carry a torch in a grotesque manner. The bow was different from Allirian courtesy - placing both feet in a line while bowing the spine forward, taking advantage of superior elven balance.

Rae'twyn couldn't help himself. A little tease for his fellow drow.

When he rose, a red wink slipped the illusion below his hood. Perhaps on purpose, perhaps not.

"And so I have. I am now both more enlightened and richer than before." His smile cut like a white cleaver. "An excellent turn of events, I should say."

About to make his leave with his little prize, he noted, glancing over his shoulder, in the airy musings of a philosopher:

"Oh, but there may be more of us wayward souls around . . . last I heard, Lazular had received a devastating blow from Maelfazan. Tut, tut. Nasty business." He allowed the ancient deity's name to linger in the tavern for a spell, like a dark curse. "Who knows when the winds of change might blow to these coasts, mmh?"

With that, he went for his exit and unless stopped in his tracks, would saunter back out into the welcoming darkness.

Feyrith
Afanas

Feyrith
Rae'twyn Suvalissaere

Afanas’s face tightened into a scowl, the expression carving new architecture into that pale, porcelain countenance. Feyrith’s choice of words had been a blade slipped between ribs, clumsy, but it found a tender place all the same. Just because he was unaccustomed to love didn’t mean he found her hideous; his gaze, when it rested on her, held none of the contempt he reserved for beasts. It was the tavern’s air, greased with smoke, sour with old ale, crowded with human heat, that made him speak harder than he intended.

“Lady, you mistake me. That was not my meaning,” he said. “I do not count you hideous—far from it. It is I who am miscast in love’s old masque. Hard praxis has instructed me that constancy is a kingdom I am unfit to rule. That is the truth, and I will not gild it.”

He let the words hang like butchered cuts, steaming in the cold draft that crawled beneath the door. Then his attention slid to the beggar, no, the Drow-thing in beggar’s rags, who watched him with eyes like coins dredged from a well. Afanas regarded the creature with the bored devotion of a man watching paint congeal: patient, unblinking, faintly cruel, as if time itself were a small animal he could starve without effort. The glamour of poverty did not fit the darkling well; seams showed, shadows frayed, and the pretense smelled wrong, like perfume over rot.

“Had you met the Afanas of fifty winters past,” he went on, “you might have been offered wine, supper and a tender embrace of flesh, and he would have paid for it all, with coin and reckless heart alike. But that prince abdicated to ash. You must treat now with his successor, who is, I fear, a creature of reluctance."

Feyrith

He inclined his head, a courtly gesture made strange by the predator’s height and the dark, unblinking cast of his eyes. “I try to be kind, for I wasn’t shown much kindness and would hate to subject another to the same treatment I endured.” The words landed with careful gravity, as if each had been weighed for sharp edges before released.

He showed her to a table. Chairs scraped like old bones. With an old-world consideration, he drew one back for her; the gesture seemed both knightly and faintly funereal, as if he ushered her not merely to rest but to a threshold only they could see. If and when she decided to make herself seated, he took the opposite chair, folding his long frame with a quiet that suggested practiced restraint rather than ease. A glance, cool as a scalpel, slid to the shambling beggar that wasn't a begger at all, and then away, the matter dismissed as one might dismiss a moth from a taper.

“But I’m curious,” he went on, and curiosity in his mouth sounded like a prayer said in the wrong temple. “You are a Drow; what is it that compelled you to flee from the safety of Underrealm to the surface?” His gaze held, steady as a surgeon’s hand. “Speak to me plainly and I shan't judge, just as I promised. I prize honesty above the pretty lies by which men and women make themselves bearable. Give me truth, and you shall find me a gentle host. Give me falsehood, and you may be subjected to a penance that many would consider to be cruel and unusual."

He let the warning breathe a moment, not as threat but as law, personal and inviolate. Around them, the tavern’s warmth rose and fell in waves, bright with rumor and the vinegar of spilled ale; yet at their little table it felt as if the world had constricted to a point, a singular dark star under which truth and falsehood would be dissected with equal care.

Feyrith

Afanas kept quiet.

The tavern noise faded to a low murmur. The air smelled of ale and iron. Candles guttered. He let Feyrith finish and watched the way her small, delicate lips moved with each syllable. His stillness made the room uneasy.

He neither smiled nor scowled. His eyes studied her face, measuring it. The room found its noise again: a chair scraped, someone laughed, a coin flipped and settled.

When she was finished, he opened his mouth, and the dark inside showed, polished, unlit, a cavern.

“Be easy. If any officious snout comes seeking to sniff you out, I'll be delighted to trim it to a humbler length."

"Alliria is vast, vaster than most men’s courage and it holds soil enough to entomb all of your former compatriots, and then some."

Feyrith

Afanas tilted his head at her wryness, a ghost of a sound moving in his throat, half a hum, half a blade testing its edge. The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

He settled back, long frame coiled like a panther at rest, and drummed once on the table with a single clawed finger, tok, a quiet summons to purpose. “There is one more small thing you might do for me, if it offends neither your pride nor your sensibilities.” His eyes were dark lamps, steady, intent. “I mean to harvest emrilite in great weight, barge-loads of the stuff, so our dwarven smiths can beat it into blades and harness for Alliria’s swelling ranks."

He leaned in, voice dropping to a soldier’s confidence, all iron and inevitability. “Your folk are the finest delvers of that mineral under any sky. If you can, see to my miners. Lend them your maps, your methods, your quiet hands in the dark. I ask for neither oaths not banners, only that you lend your craft so our forges don’t cool and our men don’t die for want of a better edge.”