Chapter 189 — Elira and Dallin, Again

Chapter 189: Chapter 189 — Elira and Dallin, Again

The tavern Dallin picked was smaller than the Sundered Rest, tucked two streets back from the guild district’s main thoroughfare, the kind of place regulars claimed rather than tourists.

"Quieter here," he said, sliding into a booth already worn soft with age. "Sundered Rest gets loud enough some nights you can’t hear yourself think, let alone catch up properly."

"You’ve gotten particular," Elira said, settling in across from him. "Since when do you care about hearing yourself think?"

"Since I started actually having thoughts worth hearing."

Arlen laughed, and found the sound came easier than he expected — the first real laugh he’d managed since getting back, loose and unguarded in a way the Foxglove’s warm bustle hadn’t quite drawn out of him yet.

"You’re both still alive," he said. "That’s good. I wasn’t sure, going a month without word."

"We managed," Elira said. "Mostly by not doing anything as reckless as whatever you clearly got up to. You look like someone who spent a month arguing with the inside of a lake."

"Close enough."

Dallin flagged down a server, ordered a round of something dark for himself and Elira, a plain cider for Arlen, and settled back with the easy, unhurried confidence Arlen remembered from their very first cohort session.

"So," Dallin said, once the drinks arrived. "Tell it properly. Not the guild-report version. The actual version."

Arlen told them — Floor 10’s impossible daylight, the flooded stretch of Region III, the slow, deliberate rhythm of underwater combat Ilyana had drilled into him. He left out the abilities themselves, the same careful omission he’d practiced his whole life, but the rest came easily enough, the story shaping itself around the parts that were simply his to tell.

"A whole city, underground," Elira said, turning her cup slowly between her fingers. "I still don’t quite believe that, hearing it secondhand."

"I didn’t either, the first time I saw it."

"And you’re telling me all this happened while I was stuck doing exactly the kind of orientation-adjacent nonsense we finished together." Elira’s tone carried real envy beneath the teasing. "Some of us have been grinding Floor Four with a party that argues more than it fights."

"How’s that going?"

"Slowly. Properly, though. I’m not in any hurry to rush past something just to say I did it faster." She said it with a pointed look that Arlen recognized as her particular brand of competitive affection. "Unlike some people, apparently, who vanish for a month and come back having done an entire region’s worth of growing."

"I had good teachers."

"You had an entire capital team babysitting you through it," Dallin said, grinning. "Rest of us just have each other and a shared willingness to get hurt slightly less stupidly than the week before."

"That’s its own kind of teacher," Arlen said.

"Don’t flatter us. We’ll get insufferable." Dallin took a long pull from his drink, then studied Arlen properly for the first time since they’d sat down. "You’ve changed, though. Not just the stories. Something in how you’re sitting."

"Different realm," Arlen admitted. "Recently."

Elira set her cup down with a soft, deliberate click. "How recently?"

"Two days."

"Two days." She stared at him a moment, something between exasperation and genuine delight crossing her face. "You’ve been Novice for less time than I’ve been arguing with my own party about formation drills, and you’re already telling me about it like it’s nothing."

"It’s not nothing. I just don’t know what else to do with it besides mention it."

"Most people throw a small celebration. Buy a round. Something." She waved a hand at the table, the drinks already sitting there. "This barely counts."

"Consider it a small celebration, then."

"I’ll allow it. Barely." She raised her cup anyway, the gesture genuine beneath the teasing, and Dallin followed, and Arlen found himself raising his own plain cider along with them, the three of them clinking together over a table that had seen considerably rowdier toasts than this one.

They talked a while longer, the conversation drifting easily between guild gossip and old cohort memories, Dallin recounting some minor disaster involving a training-yard mishap that had apparently become legend among the newer arrivals since Arlen had been gone. Elira added her own commentary, sharp and dry, correcting details Dallin exaggerated with the ease of someone who’d heard the story told wrong too many times to let it slide.

It was good, ordinary company, the kind Arlen hadn’t fully realized he’d missed until he was sitting inside it again.

He thought, somewhere in the comfortable lull between one story and the next, of Ilyana — of the promise she’d made at Floor 10, quiet and matter-of-fact, to report what they’d seen through proper channels once they were back. He wondered, briefly, whether she’d already done it. Whether some guild office somewhere already held a record of a face seen three times now, in two different cities, doing nothing anyone could point to and call wrong.

He didn’t know, and understood, turning the thought over once before setting it down, that it wasn’t really his to know. Whatever came of it would come through channels considerably higher than a tavern booth with two friends who had no reason to hear about it from him.

He let the thought go, the way he’d learned to let most unresolved things go, and turned his attention back to Dallin’s story, already three sentences past where Arlen had stopped listening.

"—and that’s when Elira told him the shield wasn’t actually load-bearing," Dallin finished, delighted with himself.

"It was clearly load-bearing," Elira said. "That’s the whole point of the story. He just hadn’t noticed yet."

"Either way, it wasn’t anymore, once he leaned on it."

Arlen laughed again, and found the evening settling into him with the same easy warmth as the cider, comfortable and unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with realms or reports or anything waiting somewhere beyond this small, ordinary table.

"We should do this properly again," Elira said, later, as the evening wound down and the tavern’s crowd thinned toward its quieter hours. "Not just when you happen to resurface from wherever you’ve vanished to. Regularly."

"I’d like that."

"Good. Because next time, I fully intend to have caught up enough that you don’t get to sit there being smug about a realm breakthrough while I nurse the same rank I’ve had for weeks."

"I wasn’t being smug."

"You were being smug in a very quiet, very irritating way," Dallin said. "It’s somehow worse than if you’d just bragged properly."

Arlen didn’t argue the point. He simply smiled, finished the last of his cider, and let the evening close the way most good evenings did — without any particular ceremony, just the quiet, settled satisfaction of people glad to have found their way back to the same table.