>>5796448You decided that you should understand what exactly is going on before you picked sides… But if you were going to begin by asking what was up, you would first ask the fellow fairy.
“And anyway,” you’d noted pragmatically, “they’re alone, so if they’re hostile, it will be easier to beat one fey than a camp of goblins.”
Nobody argued with your assessment, though it was honestly a guess. There were True Fey who COULD defeat entire armies, after all. They were rare, though, and if you were dealing with such an entity… Well, why would it be waiting at the top of this hill, spying upon goblins, rather than attacking directly?
You all snuck a bit closer before revealing yourselves by tossing a small rock near the crouched and hidden figure. This startled the figure, who began to stand and to shift as if to flee or strike. You quickly summoned up another dim <Faerie Fire> flame, to make yuan d your companions visible. Your father hastily stowed his sword and held up his hands placatingly, while your friend begrudgingly resisted his instinct to strike or to erect further defences.
“Ebrath!” you whispered urgently in your mother-tongue, and then in the Northern Common-tongue: “Friend!”
The figure froze, making no immediate move. You nodded to your companions, who held back a step, except Muffins; Muffins stayed close, his firm and furry side pressed to your outer thigh as if you offer you physical support. You drew closer to the other fey, and cast in the dim and otherworldly light of the fairy-flame, you saw just who and what you were dealing with.
The hunter had a hairless face, without so much as eyebrows, and their head was utterly hairless as well—too smooth, too perfectly clean to be shaven, by your reckoning, with skin the colour of rust and long, thin ears not unlike your mother’s, but tighter to the skull. Her body—for streamlined and compact as she was, this fairy-being had the contours of femininity—was clad all in drab grey-brown cloth, wrapped tight around her frame like bandages. It was her eyes that were strangest and most starkly inhuman, though: slanted and almond-shaped, like those of the few Easterlings you had met but more extreme in their angularity, and without visible pupils or irises, being rather a pure, milky ivory-white colour, and set large in her face.
“Greetings, friend,” you said in Elven. “I am of the children of the sun and the moon, keepers of the forests.”
You smiled. She did not smile back. You gave her your name. She did not respond in kind. So much for fey hospitality, then.
“What are you?” you then asked, cutting to the heart of the matter, “What is your business with the goblins below?”
“What is YOURS, foreigner-from-the-forests?” she demanded, rather rudely. “You are far from home.”
“I asked you first,” you retorted.
