Chapter 213: — Elira and Dallin, Properly This Time

They picked the same small tavern as before, tucked two streets back from the main thoroughfare, and this time nobody had anywhere else to be after.

“No rush tonight,” Dallin said, sliding into the booth first. “Elira actually finished her contract early for once.”

“I always finish early. You’re just usually late.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing.”

Arlen sat across from them both, grinning before the drinks had even arrived. It had been a few weeks since the last time, and something about the two of them bickering felt more familiar than it had any right to, given how little time they’d actually spent together compared to everything else in his life.

“So,” Elira said, once the server had come and gone. “Tell us something that isn’t just ‘I took a contract and it went fine.’ You’ve been suspiciously boring lately.”

“I like boring.”

“Everyone keeps saying that like it’s an argument.” She leaned back. “Fine. I’ll go first, then. My party finally cleared the Floor Four goblin problem we’ve been chipping at for a month.”

“The one near the old mining vent?”

“That one. Except it wasn’t goblins holding that stretch anymore by the time we actually got in there.” She said it lightly, but something in her tone shifted, just slightly. “Wolves. A whole pack, denned in territory that was goblin ground three months ago.”

“Wolves push goblins out sometimes,” Arlen said. “Isn’t that normal?”

“Sure, normal enough on its own. What wasn’t normal was the rank.” Elira turned her cup once. “Two of them were pushing higher than anything should sit that shallow. Our healer flagged it to the guild afterward, just to have it on record.”

“Higher how?”

“Higher than Floor Four usually produces. Not dramatically. Just enough that everyone on the team noticed and nobody had a good explanation for it.” She shrugged, already moving past it. “Anyway. We handled it. Good coin, minor scare, nothing worth losing sleep over.”

Dallin nodded along, unbothered. “Same sort of thing happened to a crew I know on Floor Six last month. Something they found further in than it should’ve been. Nobody’s panicking. Just odd.”

“You said that like it’s the third time you’ve mentioned something like it,” Arlen said.

“Has it been three times?” Dallin considered. “Maybe. It’s not exactly gossip anyone’s excited about. Just the kind of thing that comes up when people compare notes.”

Arlen filed it away without much weight attached, the same easy, unbothered way Dallin himself seemed to hold it. It wasn’t his floor. It wasn’t his problem tonight.

“Your turn,” Elira said, pointing at him. “Something real. Not ‘contracts are fine.'”

He thought about it. “I went into Region Three a while back. Solo.”

Elira set her cup down. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“How solo? Solo like you went with a party and got separated, or solo like you genuinely walked down there alone?”

“The second one.”

Dallin whistled low. “That’s not a small thing to just mention halfway through a drink.”

“It didn’t go well,” Arlen admitted. “Ran into something well past what I could handle. Barely made it back.”

“How barely?”

“Barely enough that I’ve been sticking to the upper floors ever since.”

Elira studied him a long moment, something serious replacing the teasing entirely. “You’re all right now, though.”

“I’m all right now.”

“Good.” She exhaled, and some of the lightness came back into her face, though not all of it. “You could lead with that next time, you know. Instead of letting us think you’ve just been taking pest contracts out of boredom.”

“Pest contracts are also true.”

“Sure. But ‘I nearly died in a flooded dungeon region’ is the more interesting version.”

“I don’t love leading with that one.”

“Fair enough.” Dallin raised his cup, a small, genuine gesture. “Glad you’re here to be boring about it, then.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Elira said, and they did, and the conversation eased back into something lighter after that, though Arlen noticed both of them glancing at him a little more carefully for the rest of the evening, the way people do once they’ve been handed something they weren’t expecting to carry.

“You’ve gotten more careful since you got back, I’d guess,” Elira said later, once the subject had drifted safely elsewhere and come circling back on its own. “Is that why the upper-floor work?”

“Part of it. I want to actually be ready, next time I go that deep. Not just capable of surviving it.”

“That’s a good way to think about it.” She said it without any teasing at all, which from Elira counted as high praise. “I’d rather hear you say that than hear you brag about how fast you’re climbing.”

“I’m not big on bragging.”

“No,” Dallin agreed. “You’re big on nearly dying quietly and then not mentioning it for weeks.”

“That’s fair too.”

They laughed, and the evening settled back into its easier rhythm, and it was Elira, a little while later, who finally asked the question Arlen had half-expected sooner.

“How’s Yveth?”

He hadn’t expected it right then, and it must have shown, because Dallin laughed before Arlen had even answered.

“There it is,” Dallin said. “That’s the face.”

“What face?”

“The one that means yes, obviously, and also please don’t make me talk about it.”

“I’m not making that face.”

“You’re making it right now.”

Elira leaned in, delighted. “So it’s real, then. Properly real.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

“You never said anything. That’s the point.” She grinned wider. “Good. I like her. She threw Dallin out of the common room once for arguing with a customer, and I respected that enormously.”

“That was one time,” Dallin said. “And the customer was wrong.”

“You were also wrong.”

“I was less wrong.”

They argued about it for another five minutes, and Arlen let them, content just to sit there and listen, grateful for how easy it was — no weight to it, no secrets he had to manage carefully, just two friends who’d known him long enough now to tease him properly.

The evening wound down slower than either of the previous times, nobody in a hurry to leave, and it was well past dark when they finally settled the bill and stepped out into the cooler night air.

“We should do this more,” Elira said, pulling her cloak tighter. “Not just when one of us happens to remember the others exist.”

“Agreed,” Dallin said.

“Agreed,” Arlen echoed.

“Good. Then it’s decided. Regular thing.” Elira pointed at both of them in turn, mock-serious. “I’ll hold you both to it.”

They parted ways at the corner, Dallin heading toward the guild dormitories, Elira toward whatever she was renting near the training yard, and Arlen toward the Foxglove, the conversation still settling comfortably in his chest as he walked.

He thought, on the way back, about the wolves on Floor Four, about Dallin’s offhand mention of something similar on Floor Six weeks earlier. Small things. Nothing that demanded worry tonight.

He let it go the same way he’d let it go before, and by the time he reached the inn’s front step, his thoughts had already drifted back to easier things — Elira’s teasing, Dallin’s steady warmth, the quiet, ordinary comfort of an evening spent exactly where he wanted to be.