On the footsteps of the Crows

One "no" is Forever

Thirteen dwarves, a hobbit, and an elderly human were in a tavern. It's not the beginning of a joke, but the harsh and strange reality the company found themselves facing with the arrival of a crazy human who slammed her hand on the table and demanded an impossible thing in the middle of the inn, causing an embarrassing silence as some curious onlookers weighed the scene.

Time had frozen in a moment of stasis while the dwarves looked at each other rather perplexed. The hobbit had just made sure his companions didn't stain his waistcoat with their rough manners. Now he had his hand on his chest while the creature's half-human nose curled, the movement also transferring to her lips, making her look like a rabbit.

The elderly man with the long gray beard and hair of the same colour as his tunic was chewing a piece of bread, stretching it with a spoonful of broth. Someone had even stopped the food in mid-air from surprise.

The Prancing Pony soon returned to its usual level of buzz and chatter with sporadic laughter, but the table that Ezyel had assaulted remained silent, tense like a rope as everyone looked at each other to understand what had happened.

The apparently younger dwarf of the group was looking at an older one pouring tea, stopping just in time before the cup overflowed. Another dwarf with a pickaxe sticking out of his skull looked around bewildered, while two other young dwarves looked at each other as if animated by the instinct of a symbiotic beast, and these were just the first ones Ezyel managed to notice.

Not knowing what to do, while Ezyel remained firmly in place, with her hand on the table and a convincing smile, and all too full of self-esteem, finally after the initial confusion, everyone turned as a single organism to a particular dwarf with raven hair and icy eyes, and the elderly human, making it clear that they were ultimately the most influential in the group's decisions, so Ezyel focused her attention on them.

The man was still chewing with exasperating slowness, trying to buy time to avoid being called upon, but the dwarf looked at his friends, then Ezyel, then back at the Sons of the Rocks, holding the spoon in the plate with his index and thumb, and concluded first with a low, rough tone: "We don't need it," lowering his eyes again to stare at the broth to take another taste.

Admitting it, Ezyel expected that it wouldn't be so easy to convince them, so she withdrew her hand from the table and stood up while the bald dwarf and the one with the picturesque silver hairstyle closed themselves in, sitting much better, since they had been almost pushed by her particular entrance, not failing to look at her fiercely from over their shoulders for the possible craziness that Ezyel could do behind their backs.

"Yes," she replied strangely meekly, but with a suspicious smile on her face, "but maybe you needed someone to do the chores," she immediately proposed, apparently never intending to let go, which slowed down the dwarf's head's swallowing for a moment.

"We don't need anyone," he repeated undauntedly with the tone of someone addressing a persistent merchant, but Ezyel didn't give up her intention as she waved away a whiff of a customer's pipe that was passing by. "Make a deal, I'm telling you: I can also take care of horses, I already have my equipment and my own steed, I can cook, tidy up, mend, and a lot of other things" she added, obviously being a bit ironic, which infected one of the dwarves with a couple of slaps and a fur hat that seemed to have appreciated the joke, but the leader was not of the same opinion and narrowed his gaze. "I said we don't need anyone," he snapped aggressively, wisely silencing the others who were murmuring to each other.

But not the man who had finally finished chewing the bite he had been holding for two hours. "Come on," he proposed with a certain tone of understanding as he wiped his lips with a pocket handkerchief, being glared at by the dwarf. "First of all, how do you know about our expedition?" the old man asked, pulling himself up into a more comfortable position, leaning his back against the solid wooden backrest of the inn structure and taking out a long pipe with a fine and essential line, apparently without any decoration.