1:28 The dim lights of the dying day.

As soon as Mi'ishaen and Aleksei has gone to catch food, I got up to begin looking for firewood.  Bahlzair merely looked toward the ruins of the cavern, which were still issuing puffing clouds of dust into the afternoon sky.  It was not until I had returned, cut a circle into the earth with a katar, and began searching for flint that he spoke again.  As I am no expert at the Undercommon hand talking, so I had to reply that he was using a few words with which I wasn't familiar.  He nodded, then signed slowly, checking for comprehension.  When he came upon words that left me bewildered, prestidigitation cut the Common meaning of the word into the dirt.  So it was that after a few minutes, I understood his first question.

"This horned thing is a new mistress, is she not?"

When I finally did understand, I laughed.  "She does not wish to be a friend to me," I replied out loud in Common, signing what few words of the sentence I did know.  "She prefers that I hold my head up beside her, as though I were equal."

"But in doing so, you obey her, and your obedience is the obedience of a slave," Bahlzair signed carefully and slowly.  All the words were familiar to me, and he did not have to translate.

"I know," I signed simply.  "But slavery is-" I foundered for an adjective strong enough for Mi'ishaen's aversion to the practice.

"Abhorrent," Bahlzair supplied, signing the word first, then writing it.  "Detestable.  She does not understand slaves who wish to serve, knowing only those who have been forced to do so.  She will not take kindly to being made a mistress."

"But what if she were a different type of friend, one who did not harm me?  Just because she holds my chains does not mean she has to rattle them.  I would do anything she asked, if she only asked me-"

Bahlzair held up his hand to stop my poor and emotional signing with a simple hand.  "Did she ask you to carry on the charade of being dominated all that time?  Or was that a decision you made yourself?" he signed slowly.

I did not answer.
And Bahlzair allowed a smirk to pull at one side of his face.

"Then truly you will do all she asks, for you will teach yourself to stop thinking like a slave.  Go forward in this way of acting.  Do not think of yourself as a separate creature, that only does as it is commanded.  Think of yourself, instead, as the other half of her, seeing what she cannot, doing as she has not yet thought to command.  In so doing, you will find a most protective and caring mistress- and perhaps much more."

He turned back to the mountain, and I left him alone so that I could find stones to strike.  When I had done so, and had finally encouraged the sparks to rise in flame, I sat next to him in the dying twilight.

"What will you do without your friend?" I signed carefully.

"There will never be another like her," he signed.  "I do not wish to serve anymore."

"Your grief strikes me," I said, not able to sign the sentiment appropriately.

Bahlzair nodded, and turned his eyes back to the destroyed cavern.

1:27 Small talk about how we talk.

Thankfully, the wind didn't blow Aleksei's scent toward us, although we probably would have moved on a little faster, if it had.   As it was, we sat down and began to try to figure out where we would go.

"Before, I am on my way to mountain city," Aleksei shrugged.  "I am hearing that it is good town, with laws that are helping everyone equally, so I am thinking that I will be guardsman there."

"Whoever told you that was a good bard," Silveredge frowned.  "Every statute, every bylaw, has its price- if you have enough money, you can really get away with murder."

"Or if you just move fast enough," I reminded her with an arched eyebrow.  She shook her head at me.

"That was an accident.  I knew a woman who was a nobleman's friend, and he nearly killed her in the street with no fear of reprimand, because the she dared to hint that she may soon be getting married."  She looked at her clothes, which had been tied together in knots in the places where Syjenge had cut them.  "These were hers.  I switched with her in an alleyway, with the help of some nosy wives, so that she could get away.  I don't know if her friend ever caught up with her, but I hope he didn't."

"This is not a good friend," Aleksei ventured, his face a mask of scaled confusion.

Bahlzair poked at Aleksei, and after looking at each other for a few moments, dark disgust settled on the Dragonborn.  "That is not a friend at all, Bahlzair.  I am not speaking good Common, but I know that is not 'friend.' "

"It's what she calls it, can we just skip over that?" I sighed, crossing my arms.  "We all know what she means, and some of us know better than others."

Everyone looked at Bahlzair, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.

"I vote that you get a writing tablet or something, so you can quit casting spells on the ground or on the walls," I grunted.  "Or just staring at people- that's creepy.  And how many languages do you really know?"

With a halfhearted shrug, Bahlzair put up three fingers.  Slowly, he used his other hand to take one finger down, then pointed to himself.  He put another finger down and made a circle in the air, then his put down the last finger and jabbed his thumb back toward the mountain cave that we'd left.

"Flouncy Elf language or regular Elf language?" I asked, not quite sure of the last indicator.

Bahlzair allowed his lips to bend into a smug smirk, and lifted his nose into the air with a sniff.

"Okay, flouncy Elf, got it.  A wonder why you learned that one and not the other.  And how on earth do you even speak your own language without being able to-"

Bahlzair put up his hand to tell me to hold that thought, then began an intricate pattern of hand movements that stunned me with their speed.  Silveredge smiled and made a few slow hand motions of her own, and Bahlzair reached over to fix her positioning on some of them.

"So number one, dark Elves have their own hand signing language, and number two, you were sitting around down there in the Underdark long enough to learn some of it.  That jerk really owed quite the debt, didn't he?"

Silveredge turned to look at me, but her eyes in some far-away memory for the briefest of moments.

"The Underdark was... not unlike home, and the people there were more similar to my own than all the stories would have led me to believe.  The Drow know what it is to have to carve survival out of every crevice possible- to have to piece your existence together from a world that would love nothing more than to crush you."

The silence that reigned in the camp after that statement could have choked an Orc to death.

Aleksei got up and pulled his two swords out of the ground.

"Unless you have food with you, we will have to hunt, and find something to burn.  You two can watch this place for threats, since you have more magic and poison between you than is in a Turathi bazaar."

"You're right about that," I smirked.  "On its best days, the market didn't have a lot of teleportation tomes to spare.  Do you... breathe fire?"

"When I am drinking good liquor, sometimes it feels like it," Aleksei laughed.  "But my people are not having fire breath, no.  There is too much ice in our bodies; we are too far north.  I have frost breath, instead.  So, we will have to get flint rocks, too."

"No, I think I can handle that," I smiled.  "And I guess I know how we're going to put the fire out too, I suppose."

1:26 Dark elf arcane tricksters are a mean sort.

Syjenge could not reply to me.  I was no longer in the world he saw.

His eye color darkened as though he would shortly become close kin to those down in the Nine Hells.  His skin lost all color, making him look as though he had contracted a blighting infection.  I wondered if his blood would simply dry up and turn to dust in his veins.

And then he began speaking.  He began telling his high Elven bride- who had not only ceased to care for him for whatever reason, but was also quite dead- of the rolling hills and the sparkling waters of his ancestral home in the Feywild.  Apparently, not many generations ago, his family was true nobility, instead of the money grubbing, dishonorable husk that it had become.  Not long after he bemoaned this fate, he slid from Common into the language that came naturally to him, filled with rasps at the back of the throat and lilting tones that could suddenly rush from moaning to roaring at any moment.

I walked back toward Silveredge with a shiver.  The sound of his voice was unnerving- the sort of sound you wouldn't want to turn your back on.

"We're going to have to boil these or something," I whispered to Silveredge, handing her the katars.  She sniffed at them, recoiled, then smiled. 

And Syjen continued speaking to Ylyssa, or perhaps his ancestors- or someone who could understand him, anyway.  The kobolds shifted from foot to foot like the cowards that they were, some itching unrest passing between them.  Aleksei's face was a mask of cautious intensity, staring holes through Syjen as though doing so could somehow suck understanding, or time, or something out of him.

Some minutes after the kobolds started to get extra twitchy, Syjen fell silent.

His eyes quickly darkened further, until they were almost wholly black.
With the grievous leg wounds that were still oozing dark rivulets of blood, he managed to stand.
Various kobolds screeched in terror, and I wasn't too far off from doing that myself.
He stared down from the dais, directly at me, for an entire minute.
And when he spoke again, it was not his language.
It was mine.

I was so shocked, all I could do was glare at him- I didn't even think about actually translating what was being said.  The kobolds, sensing something sinister, or at least very dangerous, all turned and bolted in one solid mass.  They tripped over each other and generally caused a ruckus as they left. 

Aleksei took this opportunity to cross the room toward Silveredge and I.

"What is he saying?" he asked, when he was able to talk over the kobolds' noise with less than a full holler.

My mind had to work quickly to translate, as Syjen had an awful accent, but was somehow spitting the words out at a speed worthy of a native speaker. 

"It... doesn't make any sense...''Ash in the wind, spark in the stone, fire in the belly, power in the soul, force from my heart, beat in the walls-"

Silveredge's eyes bolted wide in terror, and she grabbed my arm with a force I couldn't imagine such a slender figure could command.  "The- the walls- the walls!"

I turned over my shoulder just in time to see Syjen's skin literally begin to crack, and peel away from his flesh, like old leather.

Silveredge didn't have to drag me out of there, after that.  I hung on to her as though I'd die without her- and honestly, I thought I would have- and Aleksei took hold of her.  We hustled, single file, down the narrow, jet-black hallways.  Aleksei knew the caverns better than any of us, so even when it felt as though we were descending lower into the caverns, I simply trusted that sooner or later, we would hit the open air.  Below and around us, kobolds screamed at each other in tones higher and more frantic than I think I've ever heard.  The ground began to tremble like a child in the bitter cold- and suddenly, we were outside. 

Uirrigaen met us, with his wings fully spread, right outside the mouth of the place.

Silveredge and Uirrigaen looked at each other briefly, then turned away.  A heartbeat later, Silveredge got close enough to me to embrace me, and we suddenly appeared in the clearing where the kobolds had first attacked Silveredge and I.  Over her shoulder, I saw Bahlzair, with a scowl and crossed arms, whose presence was nigh well inexplicable.  It looked as though he were about to lecture us about being late.

"You- you maybe paid a bit more to your master's spell work than you let on?" I said breathlessly, unable to think of much else. 

Silveredge didn't have time to answer me, as we were suddenly pushed to the ground by a strong wind- or what I thought was a strong wind.  It was instead Uirrigaen, coming in to land with Aleksei, who was making a respectable bit of noise about being carried by someone so much smaller than he.  Uirrigaen let him go, and he thudded to the ground a few feet away from Silveredge and I, rolling an inch or two.  He sat up with his back turned to us, facing the living tomb from which we'd just been freed.

"Is your vengeance complete, dark Elf?  Or is there something else necessary to satiate your anger?" Uirrigaen said simply, slowly folding his wings against his back.

Without saying anything, Silveredge, Aleksei and I all turned our gazes to Bahlzair, who had turned so that he was facing away from the mountain cave. 

"Killing me will not bring her back," Uirrigaen continued, "but it may help you.  It may end this suffering, this years-old mourning.  I... know what that is."

There was silence, so complete and terrible, that it was a great shock when the explosion actually happened.  Everyone except for Bahlzair looked at it, and it seemed as though the crown of the mountain simply disappeared down into itself, accompanied by a roar that even sent a tremor out to where we were.  Oddly enough, I was a bit concerned for Aleksei's kobolds.

Uirrigaen turned away from the clouds of ash that pushed themselves into the sky from the place that he had once called home.  He walked up right behind Bahlzair, who was a full head shorter than he was, and crossed his arms.  "Well?"

Bahlzair simply extended his arm and produced a small vial, allowing it to hang from his hand as if he were a dark skinned, plague-bearing tree.

"I see," Uirrigaen smiled grimly, reaching forward and taking the vial without touching Bahlzair.  "I detest you for forcing the choice, but... respect you, for your loyalty to your past life.  I'm sure your mistress would reward you by sparing your back a few lashes."

And with that, the winged Elf flew off.
Into oblivion or freedom, we could not then guess.

Aleksei planted the tips of the swords he'd taken into the ground, walked over to where Uirrigaen had been standing, and promptly urinated there.  Silveredge clapped both hands to her mouth in shock, but Bahlzair, who had turned over his shoulder just in time to catch the sight, laughed wholeheartedly.

I said nothing at all.