They helped me in the fight. I’ll invite them to sit at my fire.

“You won’t sling spells at my brother again, will you now?” the half-elf girl said.

“I don’t plan to,” you said, as you slid your knife back into your belt.

If they meant to attack me, they would’ve done so from the cover of the woods.

The girl returned her arrow to one of two quivers on her back; her brother sheathed his dagger.

“Arrows don’t seem to have much of an effect on you, mage,” he commented.

You glanced at your healed thigh.

“It did hurt… a bit,” you conceded.

Focused, he crouched over one of the dead goblins and recovered one of his daggers from its neck, sheathing it back in a strap under his arm. Both of them moved with a grace you attributed to the elf kin, swiftly recuperating their arrows and daggers from the dead fiends.

“Few people would dare travel alone in these parts,” said the girl.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Obviously.”

She glanced at the burnt mark on the trees around you.

“The woods here bear witness to your power.”

“On the other hand,” interjected the boy, “if my sister hadn’t shot that imp, you were done for.”

You looked at the imp’s carcass, already burnt to a crisp in your campfire. Flames licked up on the arrow sticking out of it. You reached and pulled the arrow out.

Exeo, you thought, and the flame died, leaving the arrow mostly intact.

You offered it to the archer.

“I owe you my thanks, then,” you said. “Would you care to join me around my fire?”

The two half-elves cast a quick glance at each other and stepped forward in unison.

“I’m Vess,” said the girl with a velvet voice. “This is my brother Jax.”

They crouched in front of the fire; you sat in front of them.

“You can call me Colden.”

“We were keeping an eye on this little horde,” said Jax, opening his travelpack and taking out an assortment of snacks. “Trying to figure out what they were doing here.”

You took Segora’s duck jerky out of your bag:

“Any lead?” you asked, conversationally.

They both stared at you. After a moment, the boy said:

“We heard them say just now that you might be the one they’re looking for. So… yeah, I’d say that’s a lead.”

A question stared at you from behind that statement; you ignored it, trying to decide how to play this. Jax continued:

“The only reason we intervened was because you didn’t seem to be in consort with them... And because we’ll pick anyone against the fiends.”

“We helped because you were badly outnumbered,” corrected Vess, “and we were impressed with your courage.”

She gave her brother a pointed look. He shrugged.

“At least I was,” she continued. “Very few people would have stood their ground the way you did.”

“Very few people would have the means to,” you said, earnestly.

Her eyes were a dark, iron grey, and pulled you in like magnets.

“What did they want with you?” said the boy.

And there we go…, you thought.

You chewed on a piece of jerky. That was why making friends had always been impossible. Your whole life, you’d had to lie about who and what you were. The friendships you and Segora had made on the road had never lasted more than a few days at most.

But Vess and Jax were half-elves, which complicated things. Elves were attuned to the True Song, from which the preternal gods had bound the plane in which existed the five realms of Eratheal. Any lie stroke them as a dissonant note in a symphony, and they were said to be incapable of lying. Segora had said half-elves also inherited an affinity with the True Song and an acute sensitivity to any deviation from truth. They could lie, like their human heritage, but like their elf ancestors, lies stroke a dissonant note in their soul. They would most likely know if you lied to them.