Before they even entered The Goblin’s Harp Mythril could hear the chatter and clamour from inside. Oddly, over the sound of the cries from a man’s voice, and the noise of a dozen or more conversations, came the whimsical music of a flute.

Jumin pushed the door open to a scene very much like Mythril had imagined. The inn was as large as it looked, the lower part of it one vast room. Upon its walls were sconces, flames blazing from the torches that were held inside. Across the right side of the inn was a long bar, behind it a number of goblins shuffled and busied themselves with preparing food and drink that was then being carried out and placed at long tables.

Three of these were positioned in the room, two long and slender ones on either side of a large sturdy dark wood table in the middle. He scanned his eyes around the room, looking for Selrah. She was sat towards the back of the room, her hands nimbly working over something. He could see even from this distance the expressionless look on her face, not one of concentration, but one of a quiet fury.

“You better go make yourself known to Sindre,” Jumin said, before disappearing inside and took his place at the bar. It wasn’t long before a tankard was being placed in front of him, and his eyes were back upon Mythril.

A crash came from the left table, and Mythril turned to see a dryad. Her bark like skin glowed amber beneath a torch, and long dark green tendrils of ivy draped over her face as she leaned towards the table, hands pushed down on the wood. She looked just as Selrah did, angry, but unable to do much other than bite her tongue and continue where she had failed.

Mythril bit his own lip, scanned the room, looking for any sign of someone that might be Sindre. His eyes fell upon a masked face, the bandana still pulled across what he could now see was a woman’s mouth. Her eyes met his, she gave a brief nod, before turning back to her conversation with an elf and another human. He noticed that these three sat apart from the others. Not part of the same guild, he wondered.

“Mythril!”

The voice was low, not deep, but definitely male. Mythril turned his eyes towards the middle table. At the very end of it stood a human, his shoulders broader than the others he had seen, decked in pauldrons of plate with the design of a crescent moon upon them.

“Sindre,” he muttered and lifted his hand in greeting. He felt another’s eyes upon him and glanced over to where he knew Selrah sat. He expected to see anger in her eyes, but instead he saw only a relief that made him feel guilty he had ever ventured to Buckberry Farm.

“You finally join us,” Sindre continued, drawing his attention back to the guild leader.

As Mythril approached he could see that although the man was smiling, it did not reach his eyes. He saw that Sindre was younger than he had imagined. Something about him being a guild leader left him expecting an aging man, with greying hair and a long winding beard, although he was not entirely sure why he expected this and began to wonder if part of him had expected a wizard.

This was certainly not a wizard. That is, unless wizards now wore bulking plate chest armour and greaves and carried giant one-handed swords and shields.

Knowing that there was no reason to have his weapons out Mythril saw this for what it was, a mark of power. Sindre, he expected, was going to be the kind of guild leader who would scream down the microphone at you if you pulled the whelps and dock a week’s guild points off you for it, too. Only, here it really would be in your ear that he would be shouting without the benefit of a padded headset to act as your own shield against it.

Mythril felt tempted to equip his own sword, but no sooner had he thought this did Sindre bring attention to his gear.

“Why are you dressed like this?” Sindre asked, the smile now faded from his lips, and some of the paranoia of which Jumin had spoken playing across his black eyes. Mythril noticed the scar on Sindre’s face, across his cheek, the remains of a sword wound. He wondered at the player who had created this character.

“Mythril?” Sindre continue, drawing himself up taller in front of him. “Is this your idea of a joke? That the day before the most important raid of our guild’s existence, the raid that will rank us not only as the top guild in the faction, but in this world, you decide to leave your Chosen despite knowing the calamity that the Noxiri Knights have placed us in. You do this to vanish for hours while dressed as a lunatic. Are you trying to portray us as weak?”

Mythril refrained from answering, unsure of what to say. He couldn’t equip what Sindre would expect him to be wearing because he had no idea what that would be. He was scrambling for an answer when he heard Selrah speak.

“It is my doing, Sindre,” she said, standing from her work to address him. “I have enchanted his armour for the battle tomorrow. I told him to leave it at home lest any damage be done to it that a smith can’t fix in time. I am sorry.”

It was the first he had seen Selrah act submissive, and something about seeing a woman who looked like his fiancée feel the need to act this way for anyone caused his chest to burn as a hatred began to form towards Sindre.

“Selrah was preparing me for our great battle,” he said, reiterating her words. “I placed on the weakest armour I had, knowing that it would not be needed for tomorrow. I was gone because I sought any clue to what the Noxiri Knights might have planned.”

“And?” Sindre asked, mention of his antagonists drawing his attention away from Mythril’s gear.

“Nothing,” Mythril replied, not allowing his gaze to waver from Sindre’s.

Sindre studied him for a moment, then nodded seemingly satisfied. “At least while you are sat amongst your guild place on some kind of attire that doesn’t embarrass us all. You may speak briefly with your Chosen before our meeting begins. She has been deeply worried.”

Despite himself Mythril let out a sigh of relief as he approached Selrah. Yet seeing her blue eyes watching his every step towards her gave him the feeling he was leaving the fire only to stumble into a volcano.

Selrah took her seat, patting the empty space beside her that had been made as others shuffled out of his way.

“Where were you?” she hissed, keeping her voice quiet so that it wouldn’t be heard above the conversations happening around them.

“I took a wrong turn and stopped to investigate a barn,” he said, deciding the truth was better than trying to deceive her with the little knowledge of the world he had.

“A barn?” she asked, casting him a side glance. “You thought today would be a good day to investigate a barn? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

Mythril stopped himself from replying by asking if she had any idea what he had been through. Those low-level crows were a headache. “I don’t, but my guess is the majority of this inns patrons are our guild.”

“And you’d be right to guess that.” She said, “No sooner had I arrived at the inn, did I find Sindre inside with a small number of us gathered. Fortunately, I was exactly where he needed me to be. He had sent a mail out not long before, requesting all the guild to meet here rather than One Moor’s.”

“One mores?” Mythril asked, thinking he already knew what this was.

“One Moor for the Road.”

He nodded his head, an eyebrow raised at the name. “You sure like your puns around here.”

Selrah wasn’t listening. She cast her glance up from her work and across the table to where another elf, darker than Selrah and with large purple eyes, busied herself with crushing herbs into a mortar with a black pestle. The elf pushed a slim hand through her cropped black hair and sighed.

“All of us enchanters and alchemists have been set to grind out potion after potion, enchant after enchant,” Selrah said, gesturing to the elf across from them. “The Noxiri Knights may have caused us grief, but Sindre has lost it with the amount of preparation he is demanding of us. We already have enough to last us a month’s worth of raids, and he’s demanding double that by tonight.”

“Won’t we be tired out if we continue like this?” Mythril asked.

“Yes,” Selrah said, her voice raising slightly, drawing the attention of a few who sat around them. “We will be too tired. We might be able to regenerate our health, but if we do this into the night, we’ll all land a hefty debuff that is very difficult to remove. Everything will be pointless, but Sindre won’t listen.”

Mythril looked over his shoulder to where Sindre stood. Their guild leader was leaning his hands against the middle table, a smile on his face as he patted a man with a bright red mohawk on the head. The man looked utterly miserable, even more so when Sindre’s hand rested on his shoulder as he leaned down to mutter something to him. When he stood back into an upright position, Mythril noticed that the man was working at an even quicker pace than before. Sindre continued to smile as his eyes scanned across the room. It wasn’t long until they met Mythril’s.

He held his gaze, noticing when Sindre’s smile turned from nothing more than a frozen upturn of his lips, to one of amusement as his eyebrow lifted and eyes appeared to finally have life within them.

“Elder’s Chosen,” Sindre said, his gaze lingering on Mythril for a moment more before once again reaching each and every member of his guild. “You have worked hard, have you not? We break to enjoy the food that has been placed at our tables and drink to wash down our well-earned meals.”

Already Mythril heard the clattering of movement as those around him shuffled and shifted themselves, adjusted their positions to sit beside those they were closer with. He noticed that none rushed to sit beside Selrah, not until Jumin appeared from across the hall to sit on the other side of her where an empty place had been left. He lifted a tankard to greet them, a pale brown liquid sloshing from its sides.

“I expect Bestie will be back to join us soon,” he said, his voice uplifting and pleasant. “Selrah, stop. You can eat now.”

Mythril looked down to see that Selrah’s hands still worked at a leather glove set in front of her. It glowed blue, tiny sparks fluttering from it in waves of ripples. Finally, as the colour faded, Selrah pushed it to the side and in its place pulled forward a plate. She dolled small loaves of bread upon it, and grabbing one of the bowls from a stack, stood to scoop a steaming stew into it.

Mythril was no longer interested in what Selrah was doing, instead his attention was on the food.

“I just needed to finish that wisdom enchantment,” he could hear Selrah saying as he scrambled for one of the last pieces of bread. “If it failed it would have been a waste of reagents and time.”

“This can’t be what the guild is normally like? Mythril?”

“It is and it isn’t,” Selrah answered in his place. “It depends on the raid. While competing with other guilds to earn the right to summon an Elder we worked hard, really hard. Not like this though, this is insane even for Sindre’s standards. He is going about this all wrong. We are going to lose this battle because of him.”

“Some might say that he wants his guild to achieve more than any other ever has,” a low voice spoke from behind them. “That he wants his guild to be more.”

Selrah dropped the chunk of bread she was holding into her stew and stared ahead of her and into nothing.

Mythril didn’t need to turn to see who stood behind them, instead he reached out his hand to place it on Selrah’s arm to try and calm her. He could see that her breathing had become fast, her chest moving up and down too quickly.

His hand was knocked out of the way. In its place came Sindre’s.

Selrah was dragged up from her seat, drawing the attention of the room and sinking it into silence.

“Tell me, am I wrong in how I am approaching our battle against an Elder? Do you believe that I should go easier on you? That I should believe you are too weak for glory, as this Fey elf does.”

No one spoke, from dwarf to goblin to noxiri to human, all only stared, each as wide-eyed as the next.

Sindre pulled Selrah’s arm higher, causing her to gasp as her sleeve tore. A few others glanced at each other, most only watched.

Mythril went to stand, but a hand kept him down. He turned to see the elf that had been sat opposite them, she shook her head in warning.

Mythril kept his place, rage swelling in his chest, he sat behind Sindre, his knuckles becoming white beneath his gloves as he gripped his hands onto the edge of the bench.

“We allow in a Fey elf, because she is the Chosen one of our champion, and here I come to thank the one to whom she is soulbound, only to hear that she is less than happy with my leadership, less than happy with my graciousness at allowing her to sit within our halls when all others in Elder Moor would have cast her out.”

At this some of the guild called out, all in agreement with what was said.

“Perhaps, Feyborne,” Sindre whispered, low enough that it should slither down Selrah’s ear, but loud enough for those nearby to hear, “Perhaps I should send you back to the Fey Lands, back to a desolate sanctuary of a failed people. Or,” his voice once more raised, causing a dwarf that sat in front of him to topple backwards slightly. “Or perhaps, I should send you to the Deadlands where the rest of the Fey elves attempt to survive.”

Mythril could see that Selrah was trembling now. The arm that Sindre held shook beneath his steel grip, her body, despite her efforts, could not remain still. He could only see the side of her face, but her lips were held tight, her eyes staring straight ahead yet looking at no one.

“Did I not lead us to glory in those very Deadlands?” the guild now cheered, none caring that their leader clutched the plate of his gloves around one of their own’s wrists. “Was I wrong then? Did I not lead us to be the first to take down The Eye of Wrenderwyrd? Did I not lead us to victory against the Labyrinths of Calamity? The Depths of Winter’s Edge? Did I not think our guild strong?” More of the guild cheered now, their eyes no longer in shock watching what Sindre did, but instead looking to him with pride.

“And while you considered them too weak to craft mere potions,” Sindre scoffed the words, and in response, just as Mythril knew he had hoped they would, the guild called out in anger. “While you considered them too weak to even prepare for battle, did I not believe that by the time the sun sets tomorrow each one of them would know more glory, more power, than any other in this land?” Sindre’s words fell in bursts upon the cheers of the guild, some now stood and lifted their tankards to him. Other’s turned their anger upon Selrah, some even laughed as she was strung up by Sindre’s grip in front of them.

“So tell me Fey elf,” Sindre continued, “tell me fool of the dead, what is wrong? My leadership, or the mere fact that your kind were ever allowed into existence, let alone to dine within our halls?”

A rage Mythril had not seen in any before, even in that of the Crow Mother had erupted within the guild. It disgusted him, this weak will to set aside their compassion and become overwhelmed by simple words spoken by a man mad with power. He looked up to Selrah and his heart stopped.

Glancing sideways Selrah watched him, her blue eyes misted over. He could see from how she held her mouth that she refused to cry, from how her shoulders shook that she desperately wanted to. Selrah’s eyes were so similar to his fiancées that everything inside him trembled, that his heart collapsed in shame as he saw that no tears needed to fall for him to know what he saw in those eyes.

He saw heartbreak.

He saw betrayal.

He felt fury.

Sindre lifted his free hand, and Mythril pushed it down with his own.

“Enough.”