The One Who Doesn't Stop

We've been walking together for four days now.

I say "together." What I mean is: she hasn't left. She could have. The road is right there. She walks faster than I do — a lot faster — and she clearly has somewhere to be. Every morning I expect to wake up and find her gone.

But every morning she's still there. Packed before I've finished stretching. Waiting. Tapping her foot.

I like her.

Not the way Durgan would mean it if I told him. Just... I like the way she moves through the world. Fast. Focused. Like every step has a purpose. Most people wander. She goes.

The problem is, she doesn't look at anything.

Yesterday I found a flower growing out of a crack in a stone wall. Yellow petals, folded into little cups. I've seen them before but never quite like that — the way the light caught the edges. I crouched down to look.

She stopped. Sighed. Crossed her arms.

"We're losing daylight," she said.

"Aye," I said. Pointed. "But look at that flower."

She looked at the flower. Then at me. Then at the sky. Then back at the flower. I could practically hear her thinking it's just a flower.

But she didn't say it.

That's the thing about her. She's impatient. She sighs and taps her foot and looks at the sky meaningfully. But she doesn't leave. She doesn't snap at me. She just... waits. Grudgingly. With her whole body radiating can we please keep moving.

It's honestly a little impressive. I've traveled with people who couldn't stand my pace. Most of them lasted about half a day before they either stormed off or started shouting. She's been doing this for four days and the worst she's done is sigh loudly.

Today it was a beaver. Building a dam in a stream we were crossing. I stood in the water for a good while watching it work.

"Fascinating," I said.

She was on the bank with her arms crossed. You could have fried an egg on her forehead.

Later we passed an old fisherman mending his nets by the roadside. I stopped to watch. He offered to let me try. I sat down and tangled myself up for the better part of an hour. Made a proper mess of it. The old man was crying with laughter by the end.

I was too. Elira watched from the roadside with an expression I couldn't quite read. Not annoyed, exactly. More like... confused. Like she was watching someone do math with colors instead of numbers.

"Why did you do that?" she asked when we were walking again. "You didn't learn anything. You failed completely."

"Aye," I said. "But now I know what failing at it feels like."

She went quiet after that. Not the impatient kind of quiet. A different kind. The kind where someone's thinking about something they didn't expect to think about.

---

She talked about her father today.

We were walking through a quiet stretch, Loaf snuffling along ahead of us, and she just started talking. About a burned house in Elwynn. About herbs and silence and questions that never got answered.

I listened. She's got a good voice for stories — careful, like she's choosing every word before she lets it go. But underneath the care there was something raw. Something that's been sitting in her chest for a long time.

When she finished I thought about it for a moment. It didn't feel right to ask questions. People always ask her questions. I could tell by the way she braced herself after she stopped talking, like she was expecting an interrogation.

So I just said what seemed true.

"He sounds like he loved ye."

She looked at me like I'd said something surprising. Like no one had ever put it that way before.

Then we kept walking.

---

We're approaching Dun Algaz now. There are Dark Iron dwarves patrolling the pass. I spotted them about an hour ago — their torches, anyway. Sloppy patrol patterns. Too much noise.

Elira wanted to push through. You could see it in the way she tensed up, that forward-leaning energy of hers. But I sat down on a rock and waited. Loaf dropped beside me and fell asleep within seconds. He's very good at waiting.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Watchin'," I said.

"For what?"

"A gap."

She stood there for a moment. I could feel her impatience radiating. But she didn't argue. She sat down next to me — not close, but close enough — and waited.

It took about two hours. The patrols switched at noon, just like I thought they would. Ten minutes where the pass was clear. We slipped through without a sound.

After we were clear, she looked at me differently. Not like I was a problem to be managed. Not like I was a strange dwarf who stopped for flowers and beavers and fishing nets.

Like I knew something she didn't.

I do know some things. Not many. But I know how to watch. I know how to wait. I know how to find the gap.

Most people never learn that. They're too busy running.