Where the land just began to bend and dip, going from a broad plain to a stew of valleys and ravines...where the weak road from the Tellurom-Barkneys merged with the broad, brown one from the Gaddack Swamp...there lay the waystation known as the Daffodil.

After three days on the road, it was a welcome sight to Lord Nyx’s crew. It was a building of stone and clay, rising from the sands themselves. Painted with gaudy blue, green, and fuchsia, it announced itself boldly.

Athalie and Ethel lingered a quarter-mile away, in the barest shade of a short dying tree, for a couple of hours. Then they went in.

Oh...faintly disappointing. It was smaller on the inside. Either that, or the bar at the front was just cramped. And it wasn’t nearly as joyful as the title “the Daffodil” would lead one to assume.

Gathered along the barstools at the ice-blue clay counter was a foursome, a very classic adventurer’s party. They were all human, and their roles could be told apart readily by their clothes. That woman in magenta robes was the mage, and the archer was the man in light chain mail with the D-shaped object hanging from his hip. Beside them were the warrior in a sparkling bronze chestplate and the lightly dressed, many-daggered rogue.

And behind them all, an elf waitress, looking like a princess behind parapets, hustled back and forth between their plates. Her hot, steaming pitcher would miss no empty cup. She was fast but looked severely bored.

“...an’ I knocked my whole quiver out!” cried the archer. He pantomimed an explosion so large that he nearly rocked out of his seat.

But no one replied. They were distracted by the two new faces.

In the adventurers’ eyes, they were a dramatically pale and sickly amateur and a stern, exotic protectress. The sickly amateur’s leather armor was generic, confusing—she didn’t wear her job title on her sleeve. She did not draw the same stares as the protectress.

Anyone could tell at a glance that she was an elf. One of them suspected she was half. More importantly than that, though, she clearly wasn’t a local elf. If her very presence here hadn’t given that away, subtle clues in her eyes, face, and hair did.

She read the room in an instant and fired off a pompous self-introduction. “My name is Athalie DiPomme. I would like to eat here. This is Ethel, my fellow fighter and traveling companion. Treat her well.”

She strode over to the far end of the bar and pulled out a barstool with a loud and conspicuous skreek. Then she sat. Ethel followed.

The rogue was next to Athalie. He turned to the prim soldier and grumbled, “We’re not monsters here. Get the stick out of your ass.”

She cast a glance at him, sighed, and looked forward again. She was looking at nothing but the “wash your hands” reminder between the kitchen and the bathroom door, but soon that space would be filled by the waitress, if Athalie would only be patient.

“........so like I was sayin’, I knocked my whole quiver out!” cried the archer, rocking backward.

The rogue turned back to his own party, and the storytelling dissolved into speculation and laughter. Athalie and Ethel listened, silent, eager. Ethel peered around Athalie’s shoulder. Athalie waited for eggs.

“You think it’s a demon?”

“Well, could be.”

“You should be askin’ me,” said the mage. “I have years on you—”

“Ask me, I’m ancient.”

“—and I’ve actually been that way. I took the road a decade back...”

Ethel turned to Athalie a moment—the words sounded eerie to her, suspicious—but she hadn’t budged.

“You didn’t even get your goggles out and see him, Buck?”

“I didn’t because I was throwin’ out all my arrows! How many times do I have to say it!?”

“What use that was,” said the rogue.

“The way he moved—and I know this because I lived on a ship—he looked like a warrior with this thing slung over his back.”

“How would you know? It was too far off and the heat devil’s too thick,” said the rogue between glum sips of tea. “And it’s not a boat.”

“We think,” said the warrior.

“Ship life’s an advantage,” the archer said, slow and deliberate, “because you have to keep a steady eye aboard the waves. You come to realize different ships move differently even when the shape is the same, and it’s not the crew, it’s the waters.”

“Okay,” the mage said, raising her voice. “So if we don’t want to make this waystation our coffin—”

“Hey,” Buck the archer suddenly cried out, “you new people, Athalie and whatever. You seen anything on the road?”

The waitress slipped the two new guests two menus and waters. Then she left.

Athalie reluctantly turned to the adventurers. “Not your road,” she said. We’re coming from the Tellurom-Barkneys.”

“Ahh, alright,” he said. Some hazy fear that the demon and the new guests were all the same group left his mind. “We may need your help...or, at least, your cooperation.”

It smelled to Athalie like—heroism. An unknown silhouette...distant, violent, coming closer like a horror movie villain. She stiffened.

“I’m listening,” she said.