The road to Cajin wound between cultivated fields and stretches of sparse woods, the mid-morning sun filtering through the leaves and casting shifting patterns on the dirt path. Simon walked beside Corin at a steady, settled pace, his ribs finally almost healed, his mind still a little darkened by the memory of the village head and his ten Shields of cowardice.
They'd walked for most of the morning without running into almost anyone — just a couple of farmers checking their fields, and a distant caravan moving slowly along a side branch of the main path, too far to be anything more than a dark smudge against the horizon. The silence, after the tension of the last few days, had had an almost therapeutic effect on Simon — the sound of his own footsteps on the packed earth, the scattered song of some bird, the rustle of wind through not-quite-ripe wheat. For the first time in days, his thoughts had returned, without effort, to small, mundane things: the hunger starting to make itself felt, the discomfort of a boot wearing a blister into his heel, the lazy curiosity of wondering how much farther before Cajin appeared on the horizon.
It was Corin who noticed them first — three figures advancing in the opposite direction, still distant but already recognizable by their silent gait and dark cloaks that seemed to absorb the morning light instead of reflecting it.
Simon felt her stiffen beside him before he could even clearly see who they were. Her shoulders tensed, her pace slowed slightly, and a look Simon had never seen on her before — something halfway between caution and an old hostility, never fully settled — painted itself across her face.
"Dark Elves," she said, quietly, almost through her teeth.
"And that's a problem?" Simon asked, lowering his own voice too.
"For me, yes," Corin said, without adding anything else, her eyes staying fixed on the three figures approaching along the path.
Simon had no time to ask anything more. The three figures — two men and a woman, all with those thin, sharp features he now recognized at a glance as elvish, but with paler skin and eyes that seemed to catch shadows instead of light — passed them on the narrow path, forcing them to step aside slightly to let them through.
It was right as they passed that one of the men, without even lowering his voice, said something to the other two in a soft, hissing dialect Simon had never heard before — and that, at the same time, he understood with crystalline clarity, as if he'd always known it.
"Even half-blood," the man said, with a contemptuous smirk tossed in passing at Corin, "she's still as disgusting as a full-blooded elf. Some things don't improve by diluting them."
The other two laughed, a low, cruel sound, and continued on without slowing their pace.
Simon stopped dead.
It wasn't a conscious decision — it was more a reflex, that same old inability to stay quiet in the face of something that felt wrong, that made him turn on his heel and respond before his brain could even weigh whether it was wise to do so.
"Strange," he said, out loud, in the same hissing dialect, "that three people only capable of insulting a woman behind her back still feel entitled to talk about purity of blood."
The three figures stopped short, turning in unison with an expression that quickly shifted from surprise to something closer to disbelief.
"How do you know our language?" the woman asked, eyes narrowed, her voice loaded with a suspicion she made no effort to hide.
Simon crossed his arms, a half smile that had nothing friendly about it. "I understand the language of assholes perfectly well, wherever I hear it spoken," he said. "Doesn't take a deep study to recognize it."
Corin, beside him, seemed to snap out of her paralyzed shock only in that moment. She stepped forward, as if to intervene, and attempted — with visible hesitation, her tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables — to say something in the same dialect.
"We... no... war... hot pan," she said, the words coming out broken, almost random, in a clumsy attempt that didn't resemble any coherent sentence.
The three Dark Elves stared at her, baffled, for an instant that seemed to last an eternity.
Simon turned to her, one eyebrow raised. "Did you just lose your mind?" he said, in Italian, unable to keep the bewilderment out of his voice.
Corin visibly blushed, her jaw tightening with embarrassment. "I never really studied it," she muttered, switching to Italian too, quietly. "Just a few words picked up here and there. It's not my language, Simon."
The three Dark Elves exchanged a glance, the initial hostility slowly giving way to something closer to genuine disorientation.
"You," said the man who'd spoken first, his eyes fixed on Simon with a new, more cautious attention. "You speak our dialect like it's your mother tongue. No hesitation, no accent. And earlier, when we passed, I heard the girl address you in Solar Elvish, and you answered her without the slightest hitch. Who are you?"
"Someone who's had a bad week and doesn't feel like putting up with any more bullshit," Simon said, unfazed.
The man studied him for a long moment, eyes narrowing slightly, as if trying to decipher a puzzle he had no intention of letting him solve. The woman beside him exchanged a quick glance with the third member of the group, a quieter man who hadn't said a word yet, but who now watched Simon with an attention that had very little to do with the initial hostility.
"No one learns both dialects without a reason," the woman said finally, her voice lower, almost suspicious. "Are you a merchant? A spy from Estrella, maybe, sent to gather information under a false guise?"
"I'm just a guy trying to get to Cajin without getting insulted along the way," Simon said, unfazed. "If that disappoints you, I'm very sorry for you."
The silence that followed was thick with a tension Simon could almost feel physically, like a taut string ready to snap. Then, without adding anything else, the man who'd spoken first gestured to the other two, and the three resumed their walk down the path, this time without looking back, without any more murmured comments, their pace slightly quicker than it had been at first — as if wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this human they couldn't figure out.
Simon watched them until they disappeared around a bend in the path, then turned to Corin, who had remained strangely silent, arms crossed and eyes lowered.
"Okay," he said. "Now explain to me why you acted so strange? First you stiffened up like a board when you saw them coming, then you tried to say something that sounded more like a failed cooking spell than an actual sentence."
Corin sighed, resuming her walk slowly, her eyes still fixed on the path ahead. "Even though I'm half-elf," she said, "I grew up closer to the solar side than the lunar one. Someone in Estrella taught me a few magic tricks, when I was young, before slamming the door in my face for the rest anyway — I already told you that. What I didn't tell you is that, by extension, I also grew up with some of their distrust toward Dark Elves. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's how it is. Half solar blood, half rage inherited along with it. Against them, I'm half a rival, even though neither side would ever fully accept me as one of their own."
Simon stayed quiet for a moment, digesting that confession with a mix of understanding and a new frustration, directed not so much at her as at an entire world that seemed built specifically to make someone always feel halfway between something, never fully at home anywhere. He thought, for an instant, about how much he himself now felt in a similar condition — not elf, not a human of this world, nothing that had a real slot to be filed into — and wondered if that was why, despite everything, he managed to understand Corin better than she probably expected from a perfect stranger who'd dropped out of nowhere.
"And the attempt to speak their language?" he asked, more gently now. "'Hot pan'? Seriously?"
Corin blushed again, but this time a small, embarrassed smile slipped out at the corners of her mouth. "I picked up a few scattered words, years ago, from a merchant who tried to teach me in exchange for a favor," she admitted. "I never managed to put them together into a sensible sentence. I suppose the anxiety didn't help, in that moment."
"Well, you said something like 'we don't want war, hot pan,'" Simon said, a smile spreading across his face despite everything. "If they were confused before, I imagine they were doubly confused after."
"Better confused than hostile," Corin said, shrugging, her tone slowly turning lighter again. "But seriously, Simon. You spoke both languages — Solar and Lunar — perfectly. No hesitation, not the slightest wrong accent. People who study a whole lifetime to master even just one of the two never reach that level of fluency. How did you do it?"
Simon thought for a moment, letting the question turn over in his head before answering. "Honestly I don't even know myself," he said finally, sincerely. "For me it's like I'm just continuing to speak the language of my old world. I never studied Elvish, let alone Dwarvish or whatever else they speak around here. In high school we had an elective language course — like fantasy Elvish, tabletop-game stuff — but I wasn't interested at all, I always blew it off to do other things." He paused, a crooked smile forming on his face. "I should have signed up, apparently. Would've come in handy."
Corin shook her head, a sound that was half laugh and half pure disbelief, but her gaze stayed thoughtful longer than the joke would have justified.
"First the skill learned from nowhere," she said, after a moment, more to herself than to him. "Now this. I don't know anyone, human or of any other race, who can understand and speak any language they come across without the slightest effort, without study, without even noticing until someone points it out. That's not normal, Simon. It's not normal even by the standards of this world, which has still seen plenty of strange things."
"So what am I, in your opinion?" Simon asked, in a tone that tried to stay light but betrayed, underneath, a more serious question than he wanted to admit. "An anomaly? A failed experiment? A particularly elaborate cosmic joke?"
"I don't know," Corin admitted, shaking her head. "And that, if I'm honest, unsettles me more than any concrete answer I could've come up with. Usually I can figure people out pretty quickly — what they can do, where they come from, what makes them who they are. With you, every time I think I've understood something, another piece pops up that doesn't fit with anything else."
"Welcome to the club," Simon said, with a bitter smile. "I don't have the slightest idea what I've become, lately, either."
They walked on for a stretch in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, before Corin started talking again, this time in a lighter tone, as if wanting to ease the tension that had crept in between them.
"Anyway," she said, "if you really do understand every language you hear, my terrible Lunar Elvish pronunciation probably sounded even more ridiculous to you than I thought."
"You have no idea," Simon said, finally letting himself laugh for real. "'Hot pan.' I keep wondering what you actually meant to say."
"I don't even know anymore myself," Corin said, laughing too, the tension from the encounter finally dissolving into something lighter.
They continued along the path for the rest of the day, the landscape slowly changing around them — the fields gradually giving way to an ever-thicker traffic of caravans, solitary riders, small groups of travelers headed in the same direction. The path itself widened as they advanced, the packed earth giving way to cobblestones worn smooth by the passage of countless wheels, an unmistakable sign they were approaching something far bigger than any village they'd passed through so far.
It was only in the late afternoon, when the sun had already begun its descent toward the horizon, that Simon saw, for the first time, in the distance, a dark, jagged smudge standing out against the sky — towers, roofs, the smoke of countless chimneys blending into a single grayish haze above what could only be Cajin.
"There it is," Corin said, following his gaze with a half smile. "The heart of everything. Get ready, Simon. What you've seen so far was just the appetizer."
Simon stood staring at that dark smudge on the horizon, the chimney smoke mixing with the now orange sky of sunset, and felt, for the first time in days, something that truly resembled anticipation — not fear, no longer just confusion, but the genuine curiosity of someone finally ready to discover what awaited him.