Maybe Tallie just wasn't cut out for the whole "kick back with a beer" thing. Not if the beers came from this world, anyway.

He'd tried ale first. Then wine. Then something a dwarf had shoved into his hands that tasted like fermented boot leather and burned a line straight down to his stomach. Much to his horror, it had burned on the way out, too. Mead had seemed like the safest option left. Sweet, right? People always said mead was sweet.

People were liars.

He grimaced into his cup and set it down on the sticky bartop. The tavern was loud enough to make his ears ring. Not a figure of speech either. His ears actually rang now. These ridiculous pointed things picked up everything: the crack of dice at the corner table, someone arguing over coin three booths away, the bartender's wheeze on every exhale. All of it piling on top of the smoke and the sweat and the sour stench of whatever was soaking into the floorboards beneath his boots.

Bleh. He missed bars. Normal ones. The kind with bad lighting and worse music and a TV in the corner playing a game nobody was watching. The kind where nobody carried a sword and the most dangerous thing in the room was the guy who'd had one too many jalapeño poppers.

But no. He was here instead. In a tavern. In Elderspire, a damn video game. Nursing mead he didn't like, wearing armor he could barely don, with a quiver of arrows on his back he'd be lucky to fire in the right direction.

Three weeks. It had been three weeks since he'd woken up face-down in a field with longer legs, sharper cheekbones, and ears that wouldn't stop twitching every time someone sneezed. Three weeks of discovering that his own body had been stretched and reshaped into something just familiar enough to be deeply, skin-crawlingly weird. His hands were still his hands. Mostly. A little longer in the fingers, a little too smooth. His face in still water looked like a cousin he'd never met. Close enough to recognize. Far enough to unsettle.

But hey, he couldn't complain about the new six pack. And at this point, he'd mostly stopped misjudging the length of his limbs and consequently tripping over himself. Or the ground. Or furniture. His toes certainly thanked him for it.

If only the worst part was the new-ish body. If only the worst part was that everyone expected him to do something with it. Though that was near the top of the list, to be fair. Apparently, elves were rare here. Elves were magical. Elves were graceful, ancient, wise. He was a twenty-seven-year-old who once threw out his back reaching for the TV remote when it fell behind the couch. The gap between what he was and what this world assumed he should be was so wide he could've parked a truck in it.

No, the worst part was that he'd left his family and friends behind. He didn't know if they thought he'd gone missing, if they'd assumed the worst—

Tallie shook his head and took such a big gulp of mead that some of it went down wrong.

I just need to lay low, he insisted in between coughing and thumping his fist against his chest. Super low. Don't make eye contact, don't get involved. There's gotta be a way back. A portal, a spell, something. I just have to stay alive long enough to find it.

The daggers at his hips were mostly for show. He'd bought them off a merchant who'd looked at him with the particular brand of pity reserved for people who clearly had no idea what they were buying. The bow was marginally better. He'd been practicing. "Practicing" meaning he could now hit a tree trunk from fifteen feet away about six times out of ten if the wind wasn't blowing and nothing was trying to eat him.

Nothing was ever not trying to eat him.

He took another, much smaller sip of mead. Still awful. He drank more anyway because at least holding a tankard gave his hands something to do besides shake.

The table to his left had four adventurers deep in their cups. A weathered bunch. Swords propped against chair legs, travel-stained cloaks, the comfortable loudness of people who'd fought together and lived to brag about it. They hadn't paid him any mind yet. Good. That was exactly how he wanted it.

Just blend in. You're a regular guy having a regular drink in a regular medieval death trap. Nothing to see here.

The door slammed open hard enough to crack against the wall.

Tallie flinched so violently his mead sloshed over his knuckles. Half the tavern turned. The other half already had hands on weapons.

A man stood in the doorway. Young. Barely twenty, if that. Mud caked up to his knees and a gash across his forehead still leaking red down the side of his face. He was doubled over, chest heaving, one hand braced on the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping him vertical.

"Please," he gasped. "Someone—please, I need help."

The tavern didn't exactly rush to respond. A few people exchanged glances. The bartender stopped wiping his glass. One of the adventurers at the corner table leaned back in his chair and squinted.

The young man staggered forward another step. "My siblings and I were on the road from Helvenmere. Monsters—I don't—I didn't get a good look, they came out of the trees so fast. They took my family. They took both of them, they're still out there, please, I can show you where but I can't—" His voice cracked. He pressed the heel of his hand against the gash on his head like he'd only just realized it was there. "I can't do it alone."

Silence held for a long, ugly moment. The kind of silence where everybody waited for somebody else to go first.

Then chair legs scraped against the floor. The four adventurers were already moving. The biggest of them, a broad-shouldered woman with a scar across her jaw, clapped the young man on the shoulder and started asking him questions. How far. How many. What direction. Her companions were pulling on cloaks and checking blades with the ease of routine.

Oh thank fuck, Tallie thought, very deliberately not making eye contact. They've got it handled. Four people is plenty. That's a whole party. A complete, fully staffed, doesn't-need-anyone-else party.

While yes, he fully acknowledged that he was more than a bit of a coward, his relief wasn't purely that. He genuinely didn't think he'd be able to live with himself if he got someone hurt or worse because of his own incompetence. He was barely coping with just the idea of having that kind of responsibility as it was.

But the scarred woman's gaze swept the tavern. Assessing. Counting. Looking for more bodies.

Her eyes landed on him.

On his ears. On the bow over his shoulder. The quiver. The daggers at his hips.

Oh no.

She tilted her chin at him. Not quite a question.

Oh no, no no. Absolutely not.

The man next to her followed her gaze and nodded approvingly. The kind of nod that said yeah, an elf with a bow, that'll do.

Tallie took a long pull from his tankard, pretending not to notice. I am begging you to look at literally anyone else.

"You," the scarred woman called. "We could use another set of eyes in the dark."

Every head in the room turned to him.

Tallie stared back at her with his tankard halfway to his mouth and mead still dripping off his fingers. His ears were doing the thing. The twitching thing. He could feel them. He wanted to melt under the floorboards and die.

Say no. Just say no. It's one word. Two letters. You've been saying it your whole life. This is not your problem. These are not your people. You don't even know where Helvenmere is.

The bloodied traveler looked at him. Wide eyes, shaking hands, the kind of desperate hope that only lived on the faces of people who had no options left.

Ffffff.

Taliesin set down his mead.

He sighed. It came from somewhere deep and defeated, the last breath of a man who'd already lost the argument with himself.

"I...yeah. Okay. My eyes aren't bad with the dark. I can help as a lookout. But I'm—fair warning, I'm still, uh, in training...?"

He stood up and almost knocked the stool over. Caught it. Fumbled the strap of his quiver back onto his shoulder. Wiped the mead off his hand onto his cloak, which was already stained with something he'd never identified and had chosen not to think about.

Six out of ten. From fifteen feet. In no wind. You absolute idiot.

"But if something eats me," he added, pointing at the scarred woman as he crossed the tavern, "I'm haunting every single one of you."

The woman only grunted in response, looking around one more time for any other last-minute additions to their rescue party.