Fallon and I sat together, leaning against the spongy hump of green moss that one of our saviors had raised earlier. A short distance away, where the predator’s corpse had briefly lay, dissolving more gradually and slowly than the prey, our three rescuers stood together, engaging in a fierce, if whispered, debate.

  Now, with the fight over, I could see more clearly that the trio truly weren’t human,though there were more than a few similarities. I was sort of reminded of elves, as their bodies were close to human enough to be familiar, even if they were distinctly inhuman.

  They were tall, for one. While I couldn’t be sure if that was universal, even Eni, the mage and archer, was easily six feet tall, despite her general air and build of thinness. Char, the androgynous knight, was a few inches taller yet, and the still-unnamed man towered over even them.

  Their faces, as I had noted when I had first seen Char, were more angular than any normal human’s, and their ears were weird, lobeless and upswept without being quite the pointed ears stories always gave to elves. Their eyes, similarly, weren’t too dissimilar to a normal human’s, but they were a little larger in their face than normal. That size, combined with the vivid colors of their irises, made them hard to look away from, despite their uncanniness.

  I had already noted the washed out lavender of Char’s intense gaze. The mage, Eni, had eyes the same color as the bright green moss I was resting on, while the towering man had bright amber eyes.

  It was possible that the last man was even a distinct species as well, as he had a few features the others lacked. Broad shouldered, with long limbs, he was an absolute hulk of a man. His frankly upsetting muscles were covered in a far-too thick layer of burnished gold body hair that lent him a wild aspect–though not nearly so much as the fangs that dimpled his lower lip, or the triangular ears that poked through his mane of golden blonde hair.

  “So they’re definitely not human, right?” Fallon asked me, her voice a shaky whisper..

  I nodded. If nothing else, Eni’s shock at the sight of me had made that clear. “The question,” I posed instead, “is how do they know what humans are?”

  The wildman suddenly looked at me, as if he had heard my quiet question even across the distance between us. He growled something, and the other two turned to look at us too. Before either of the others could talk, the knight, who the others had called Char, held up a hand to both of them, then approached us.

  “You can understand us, right?” they asked.

  Fallon and I looked at each other, both us suddenly feeling very, very young, and we nodded. It hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder about that.

  “Good,” they said, warmly enough that I felt the same. “Can you tell me your names?”

  Fallon immediately responded with hers, but I paused, the question snagging on a lingering bit of stubborn resistance somewhere inside of me. “In our world, it’s common manners to give your own name first.”

  Char’s eyes widened a fraction, but they looked pleased by the response for some reason. “Fair enough. My name is Charrin, though everyone calls me Char. The woman behind me is Enila, and the man is Gellert.”

  I pursed my lips, considering those names. “Danielle,” I finally told them, unsure why I was using my full name, besides that they had used theirs. “But I prefer Dani.”

  “Dani and Fallon. Okay.” Char’s eyes twinkled as they looked us over. “One more question, then, let’s see if we can go three for three. Do you know where we are right now?”

  I frowned. Next to me, her voice empty and numb, Fallon said, “No.”

  “We woke up here a couple days ago, we think,” I explained. “We’ve just been trying to get by, since.”

  Char blew out a breath. “Alright.” They had the look of a person who was neither pleased nor surprised by that answer. “Then let me be the first to welcome you to Elida, home of the ellids.”

  #

  Fallon and I watched as the others got to work, leaving us to think over what we had been told. As we had guessed what felt like a century before, our sudden deaths had somehow gotten us moved to another world. As far as we could tell, Elida was more the name of a continent than the whole world, but it seemed like it was the best we were going to get.

  I was especially relieved to learn that Elida was not, in fact, nothing but an endless underground complex. We were in what they had, to no small amount of shock, called a “dungeon,” located in what they called the Central Provinces.

  Apparently understanding our need to process even just this information, Char had given us each a reassuring smile and left us by ourselves while they set up camp.

  “You were right,” I told Fallon, my tongue feeling thick in my mouth.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “We both were,” she replied, her voice just as numb and toneless.

  We were both still in shock. After days, our luck had finally soured, putting us up against a monster that could’ve, and should’ve, killed us in mere moments, but here we were. We hadn’t just survived, we had finally, at long last, found people who knew where we were and what was going on. People who, to all appearances, wanted to help us.

  Across from us, Enila and Gellert were putting the finishing touches on our camp for the night. The mage had simply held up a hand and walked towards the wall of the tunnel. The stone seemed to melt and dissolve in a perfect sphere around her, allowing her to walk straight through what had been a solid wall. Once she was inside, the mage spread her arms, and the bubble of space around her had begun to expand, until she stood at the center of a small room not so different from the domed caverns we had woken up in.

  Gellert, meanwhile, had paced down the tunnel a short way, returning several minutes later with a stack of long crystals stacked on his shoulder like cords of firewood. He slammed each into the ground at the mouth of the chamber Enila had made, and the mage, with a simple gesture, melted them neatly into the ground, forming a picket line of glowing crystals.

  By comparison, Charrin seemed inactive, simply watching up and down the tunnel, hammer and shield at the ready. But as not a single prey lizard came to disturb the group’s work, I had to assume they were doing something to ward off the shadows.

  “All set!” Eni called from within the chamber, just ten minutes after she had started. Char blew out a breath and relaxed–and then their armor, shield, and weapon alike simply vanished, leaving them in simple, functional clothing not so different from mine, though theirs was in shades of purple and brown, rather than a consistent, matte black.

  I shifted, getting ready to stand, but Fallon stayed where she was, her arms wrapped around her legs, her face rigid, her eyes focused in the middle-distance. I considered her for a moment, then settled back down, waiting with her.

  After a couple minutes, Charrin must’ve realized we weren’t joining them, and they approached, their body language very carefully non-threatening.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Absolutely not,” I told the knight with a smile.

  They seemed thrown off by my response, which had been the whole point, but Fallon surprised us both by finally focusing on the ellid. Her voice was small and tremulous when she asked, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Despite its hard angles, Char did an admirable job of softening their face. “We’re going to help you,” they reassured us. “For now, we’re going to give you both the chance to rest. Then, when you wake up, we’re going get you out of this dungeon, first thing.”

  Fallon drew a sharp breath, and I felt a tiny, anxious flower of hope bloom in my chest. “Seriously?”

  They nodded. “There are a couple other parties around that can clear this dungeon. We should be able to get back to the central cavern in a couple hours, and then Eni can do a retreat ritual and get us out of here.”

  The idea of sunlight, and fresh air, and openness was so overwhelming that I felt tears spring to my eyes. “That would be… nice,” I told them, in what was conservatively the understatement of my life.

  “Then what?” Fallon asked, her thready voice only a hair stronger. “We’re in another world. We’re still lost. We’ll just be lost outside, instead.”

  Char shook their head. “No, you won’t. Once we’re out of here, we’re going to get you back to Primevus Academy. That’s where we all live.”

  “P-Primevus?”

  “Academy?” They were taking us to a damn school?

  “Correct on both counts,” Charrin confirmed. “It’s been a few decades since we found a human,” there was a pause, so brief I wasn’t sure it was really there, that sounded a lot like the knight was skipping a word before they continued, “but the magisters will still know what to do. They’ll help get you settled.”

  Settled? “That… doesn’t really seem possible,” I admitted to them. “I don’t know a whole lot about your world, but I can assure you already, it’s very different from ours.”

  Char nodded with understanding. “Probably,” they told us, giving Fallon a cautious look, “but it wasn’t so long that this world was foreign to us, too. Trust me. You’ll adjust.”

  Well that was ominous.

  “What do you think?” I asked Fallon gently. Even if it had been just two days, or however long had passed, the two of us had rotated between having breakdowns and supporting the other through theirs so often that it felt automatic to try to comfort her.

  She sniffled, and I felt the urge to put my arms around her, an urge I resisted only due to the three sets of uncanny eyes observing us. “It… certainly sounds better than staying down here,” she admitted.

  Charrin smiled, and offered us each a hand up. “Will you join us, then? It’s not much, but we can at least offer you both food, and water, and maybe a little comfort.”

  I was sold at “water,” but Fallon seemed on the edge.

  “It’ll be okay, Fal,” I reassured her as softly as I could manage. “We’ll go together, okay?”

  Fallon lifted her miserable, red-rimmed eyes to me, and I gave her my most encouraging smile, trying to not show the jagged bits of terror and anxiety that had only been barely covered up by my relief. Apparently it worked, because she nodded, and she stood up, and she walked with me as we both followed Char into the safe little camp the three ellids had created.