<div dir="ltr">Part 3. __________________ Conversation sputtered sporadically on the journey to and through the Keep to Balrog’s room, but once the three were seated around the modest table that was the only piece of furniture in the man’s main room it began to move again. The large man left to fetch the ale, and ended up bringing back two kegs on his return. It ended up that the one had been filled with water will in advance of their arrival, so the three of them would be able to dilute their drinks to taste as they talked around the table. While Lois sat gingerly and Paula slumped slightly to get comfortable, Balrog outright collapsed into his chair, dropping his mazer, which he had already prepared, with a splash onto the table. Lois took a little of the ale straight for his pain before drawing his own cup full, but he mumbled something to himself about a good Scotch, whatever that was. Paula settled her glass, filled mostly with water and barely touch with ale, on the table before her, having taken a few good drinks already. “So, Balrog, how is it that the two of you are previously acquainted?” she asked. The man turned to Lois with a mischievous look on his face. “Say, captain, how is my ear looking?” Paula squinted add the odd question, but Lois chuckled slightly to himself before steadying his painful ribs with one of his paws. He turned back to Paula after receiving a confirming nod from Balrog. “We worked together after my time as an assassin. We called ourselves bounty hunters…” The large man across the table huffed indignantly. “Most of the time we were glorified pest control. Good pay, though. And good ale.” Lois gave him a longsuffering glance before turning back to Paula again. “I was the commander of the party, and Balrog was my… enforcer.” “I made our team’s points for us. A show of force in the right place can convince a farmer to toss a few coins in your hat to keep his crops and livestock safe.” Balrog stopped when he saw Lois’ withering glare. “What?” “Stop interrupting.” “Stop leaving things half said! If you didn’t want me to explain it, you should have done it yourself!” He laughed to assure his guests that he meant the words in good humor, but his gruff voice made it seem far more serious than it was. Lois continued to stare at the man for a few moments before turning his resigned gaze to Paula’s waiting face. “Our numbers changed from time to time, but Balrog and I remained together from the beginning of the venture until the end of it. It lasted a few years I believe, and it paid the bills handily for as long as we were active.” He turned back to look at Balrog for a moment to the man’s immediate indignation. “I haven’t said a thing!” he protested. Lois rolled his eyes and pulled a finger back from the front of his ear to the back, causing him to flick it in annoyance. Paula thought it was odd, but quickly realized that it was meant for Balrog when the ermine did it again with an insistent look on his face. Balrog waved him on. “Well, even the best-built illusions do not last forever,” he commented. He smiled impishly when the phrase had the desired, confusing effect on Paula. “You see, there was one evening when we were all making camp that I was awake alongside Balrog and a few of our companions, before the first watch. I began to notice something odd about Balrog’s ear. The rest of the men were too tired or drunk to pay it very much attention, but it bothered me too much to leave it be. I called him aside into a tent where no one could see us, and I told him ‘Your ear is showing.’” Paula was completely lost by this point, and she turned to Balrog for help. He shrugged innocently and turned back to listen to the ermine, who had paused for effect while Paula tried to decipher the odd sentence he had left her with. “It was a small flaw in an otherwise flawless illusion,” Lois finally continued. “Perhaps the spell had been weakened somehow, or perhaps Balrog had simply forgotten to recharge it on the appropriate schedule. Whatever the cause, his illusion no longer covered his right ear. He certainly tried to play it off for a few moments, but at the end there was only one way for him to fix the illusion, and that was for him to remove it completely.” Lois then turned to look towards Balrog expectantly, and Paula followed his eyes. The large man had reached down and fished out a talisman from where it had been hidden underneath his jerkin, and as Lois finished he pulled it over his head. The change that overcame his form left Paula’s mind reeling. The scars that crisscrossed the top of his head seemed to melt and slide. Some were still evidently scars, while others joined together, twisted and danced about each other until they lay in a unified, arcane pattern that snaked over the man’s bald head, down his neck, and continued along the necklace of the talisman in flawlessly patterned runes. They glowed briefly, an impossibly white light against the man’s tanned skin, until the spell was completely dissolved and the illusion fell away like curtains being pulled away from a looking glass. For the first time since she had met the man, the real Balrog sat before her. The illusion had exaggerated his height by a few inches and his strength by a little less, but the man who sat before her was still clearly strong. He was also clearly not a human. Paula’s eyes grew wide as the illusion melted to reveal a dark green skin tone underneath. The man’s braided beard was shorter in reality, but the braids were perhaps more complex and ended in strings of dark bone beads. His teeth were more predatory than any humans, although they still managed a passable smile. Tattoos ran the length of each arm, the left arm unique from the right in its patterns. Although Paula had never seen one at so close a distance, she instantly recognized the visage of a lutin when she saw it. She nearly reached for her daggers, but Lois arrested her movement with one glare. “Balrog is a friend,” he insisted. She flinched when she saw that he had his paw on his daggers as well. “It’s alright,” the newly revealed lutin said. He smiled in a somewhat unsettling way, if only because a man’s jaws simply did not quite work that way. “I wasn’t expecting Lois to understand when I revealed it to him, either. We had a standoff that the captain just barely managed to keep from revealing my secret to the entire camp.” Lois nodded. “You were quite convinced that I’d be running you through at any moment.” “As it turned out, your mentor was more than a little interested in learning my language.” He snorted. “A good pupil as humans go. Didn’t know too many words, but what few he knew he perfected.” Lois responded with a short tirade of some lutin dialect, at which Balrog laughed. “I’ll refrain from translating that with children present.” He winked at Paula, who couldn’t help but smile at the disarming statement, even if she did feel somewhat insulted. “Even Lois could never quite get my name right, though.” “Let’s see, that’s one I’m not certain I remember. Ba’al… Ba’al ne th’Niraug?” The ermine licked his muzzle as though the words had tasted odd on the way out. The lutin roared with laughter at Lois’ attempt at pronouncing the phrase. “That’s better than you’ve ever done!” he insisted with a chuckle. “Maybe the Curse did your stiff tongue some good.” Lois flicked him with the end of his tail. “It’s given me a few interesting new tricks,” he confirmed with a smile. Balrog grunted his amusement and returned to their original topic of discussion. “It’s a horrible name, even for my own people,” he said of his lutin name. He rattled it off, also showing an odd reaction to the end of the word. “It’s a blend of different languages; the reference to Ba’al is as adopted as half of the words in our language. The rest is something that my father evidently picked up on his tours in Nasoj’s army, perhaps a year before he also picked up the plague. He claims it is some traditional oath to the Daedra.” His huffing laugh at this made it clear that he harbored no particular respect for the Pantheon. “Regardless of where he found it, no human I’ve ever met has been able to say it correctly. That’s why I coined my human name. It raises eyebrows, but results in far fewer twisted tongues.” Paula was still recovering from the shock of Balrog’s revelation, but she managed to attempt the odd name herself. The lutin raised an eyebrow and nodded, sending his beard bobbing. “Not a bad attempt, you certainly have a good ear. You’re missing the last sound though.” He repeated the name, final grimace and all, and left Paula to attempt it once again. She blinked. “What final sound?” she asked. “I don’t hear anything after what I already said.” Both Lois and Balrog laughed quietly. The ermine spoke first. “The sound is impossible to pronounce without the rest of the word.” He tried the name once again, drawing it out so that she could hear each individual sound. Blinking, the young woman suddenly realized that the odd grimace was intentional. Somehow, it managed to produce a sound that was unique enough to be recognizable. For the first time since the revelation, Paula managed to laugh without feeling remotely awkward. “I think I’ll leave my attempt where it is.” Even though she said this, she caught herself immediately trying to mimic the odd pronunciation, only to shake her head in frustration. Balrog and Lois both chuckled slightly, but offered no further pointers. “Well, as we were saying, Lois made a deal with me. He’d keep me on and keep my secret so long as I agreed to teach him our dialect by bits and pieces. That’s the honest reason for why we were the only two members of the group that stayed on until we dissolved it. I made for the North not long after that. I had hoped that perhaps my tribe had changed its political balance in my absence. As I am now living here, I am certain that you can guess how that went.” Paula nodded. “A lutin in human territory, though? They’ll rip you to pieces if they ever find out.” “Let me say it this way,” Balrog said slowly, taking a sip of his almost-forgotten mazer. “I am entering my twenty-first year, fifteen of which I have lived in human society. Of my clan, only one has lived as long as I have, and that is our matron, curse the—” he trailed off into words too impolite to say at full volume. “I am in the eyes of many of my people reaching old age, yet today I am able to wrestle as easily as I always have. I cannot be beyond my prime years in all honesty. All that just to say, I have lived longer among those who wish me dead than I would have among my own people.” Lois nodded. “Lutins see age differently from humans. Old age is not when their hair turns grey or when they are too feeble to move on their own. It begins from the time they lose their first battle. At that point they are either dead or dying. The society will not give them full time to recover from their injuries, so their first loss signals the beginning of their decline.” Balrog chuckled. “According to my people, I have probably lost about ten battles in my lifetime, but I live among humans. When I am injured they allow me to rest until I am healed, and I return to battle a little the worse for a lack of practice, but not so close to death as a lutin in the North.” “I am truly sorry for your people,” Paula said quietly. “HA!” Balrog’s laugh punctuated the irony he perceived in the sentiment, and not anything he found truly funny. “My people joined forces with Nasoj and his rotten schemes. Our people are predisposed to war, we multiply too quickly and will overpopulate our territory without infighting to cull the progress. Nasoj has used this to turn my people into his personal army. I refuse to feel any pain for them until they realize that they are killing themselves for a war that isn’t their own.” Although they carried a powerful conviction as well, his words showed a true sorrow for his people, and it made Paula feel even more regret for the plight of the lutins. “At least the tide is turning slowly now,” the lutin sighed. “Some lutins have realized that Nasoj is a curse, and they have turned to other alliances in self-preservation. I only seek the day when the leaders of the tribes realize that their combined forces could raze Nasoj’s dark tower despite his magic.” He snorted. “Some dream.” Paula fell silent, and the rest of the table agreed to let that silence stand. The ale was recalled at long last, and they each took several droughts before anyone spoke again. “Thank you for inviting me here and revealing your secret to me,” Paula said at long last. She had finished her mug and set it down. She hoped to be leaving soon. The lutin nodded in acknowledgment. “I trust Lois’ judgment; he’s saved my life too many times for me not to. He told me that you should know; that means you have a rare trust from him.” Lois turned his head away, but the human girl could see some red around the edges of his ears. She smiled and turned back to Balrog. “Unfortunately, I need to return to my home before my father begins to wonder. He is… unpleasant when he does not know what is going on.” The lutin nodded, deftly picking up the talisman and replacing it around his neck. The reintegration of the illusion was disorienting, as the visible runes quickly bled into one another and became recognizable only as scars on a human man’s head. Paula blinked herself out of a mesmerized stare. She stood from the table, nodding to Lois, who seemed to be feeling his wounds again. “Will I see you tomorrow, master?” she said, only partially in jest. The ermine’s glare was enough answer for her. She could not help a grin as she stepped towards the door. She had never seen Lois so badly beaten before, and it was almost pleasant to be assured that he was merely human. She could surpass him yet. Her host saw her out the door with a courteous smile, and she pondered how much like a gentleman the lutin acted. Perhaps it was something to do with his interaction with human society. Regardless, Balrog was more patient and tolerant than many men she had met before. He was certainly doing his part to be as human as possible. Balrog turned back towards the table once she had left, ready to propose that the two remaining men open the ale in earnest. He frowned when he saw his friend gripping the side of his face in clear pain. “Lois?” “I don’t suppose you could see me to the Healer?” * * * Coe was used to working late nights, but he still sighed when the door was knocked. Some undoubtedly well-intentioned men had decided that a pugilism tournament was an appropriate way to help raise funds, and he had been mending the results all day. Still, most of the injuries were easy enough to treat. It was the quantity that truly annoyed him. He disengaged the lock and slid the door open to see a familiar ermine leaning on the shoulder of a larger human. He sighed again when he saw the bruises through the ermine’s white fur, and noticed that the man was holding his jaw. He released it long enough to say a single word. “Coe.” “Lois.” </div>