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"For me?" you ask, pointing at yourself. She nods.
You stroke your beard. Neddle would probably throw a fit if he was privy to this scene. Nonetheless, you take one of the apples and bite into it. To Neddle's credit, it is delicious, just the right concentration of tartness, sweetness, and crunch. It is gone all too quickly (you were perhaps hungrier than you first imagined), but you do not take another when it is offered. You must not forget that these are illicit goods. Once is a gift, but twice constitutes collusion. The girl---whom you've begun to call "Lorna" in your mind, for her paleness, and for a lack of a better appellation---seems disquieted by refusal, and finally she trudges back toward her hovel, her eyes downcast.
You sit meditatively in your cave, looking out into the moonlit expanse which now belongs to you. One decision you have already made: your garden will not lack for beauty. All this emptiness will be populated by peonies, hydrangeas, pansies, delphiniums, and the center-piece shall be something which you have thought upon often, though you've no idea how it will be done. As you unfurl your bedding, you muse on the possibility, however remote, of descending miles into darkness and facing terror and inscrutable danger for the sake of that irreplaceable center-piece (for it can be no other and for you cannot entrust it to anyone else). You cannot quell that pulse of thrill which surges through your veins, the combined inheritance from your father, from your race, and from your youth. Despite your exhaustion, you remain awake and dreaming until you are startled by the phosphorescent semaphore of the Lampyris xylokoponus, the glowing carpenter beetle, more commonly called the "lightning bee". There must be a hive somewhere in the forest nearby, and the thought of honey, and the more sedate labor of its extraction and distillation into spirit, seems to check your foolish blood, and you soon fall fast asleep to half-remembered tastes of melomel and metheglin.
In the morning, after a hearty breakfast of air and the last dregs of your waterskin, you set out for town. The kindly peasant children on the street lead you to the house and smithy of the resident dwarf. They wait in the fringes in bated expectation, as though a meeting of the diminutive races were some guarantee of wonder and adventure.
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