1. Chapter One
Chapter One
Kragen
The last customer leaves the Taproom at eleven-forty. I flip the sign and start cleaning the bar.
Walt is at the far end with his coffee, the one he makes himself after nine because he stopped drinking his own beer years ago for reasons he’s never explained and I’ve never asked about.
Walt is sixty-something and human, the kind of man who built something with his hands and has been watching it run ever since.
The Taproom has been his for going on twenty-six years, a craft bar off the main drag in Sunshine Valley, two blocks from the post office.
He hired me eight years ago when almost no one in town was hiring orcs for anything that required talking to customers.
I’ve been here since.
He watches the room the way he always does after close, not checking on anything, just appreciating what’s his. “Good crowd,” he says.
“Good crowd,” I agree.
That’s the whole conversation. Walt doesn’t require more than that, and neither do I, which is one of approximately four reasons this arrangement has lasted as long as it has.
I work from the taps toward the register, then the glasses, then the chairs, lifting each one onto its table, working my way across the floor.
Walt finishes his coffee, rinses the mug, sets it in the rack, and says goodnight.
The door closes. I lock it behind him and stand in the quiet before I remember I haven’t done the stage yet.
The Taproom after close has its own kind of quiet: the absence of people rather than the presence of emptiness.
My guitar waits on its stand in the corner of the small stage, right where I left it before the first set.
I’ll pick it up before I leave because I don’t go anywhere without it.
This is not a decision I make. That’s how it is.
I played two sets tonight. The second ran long because someone requested an old song I hadn’t played in months, words and all, and I had to feel my way back into it.
It took longer than it should have and ended up better than if I’d played it clean.
That’s the thing about getting a little lost: sometimes you find something on the way back.
The crowd was good. They always are on Friday.
I know most of them by name, and the ones I don’t, I know by order, which amounts to the same thing after enough time.
This is what I built here: a Friday crowd of orcs and humans both, which took longer than building just one or the other, but it held.
I am good at this. I’ve known it long enough that it doesn’t feel like pride anymore, just fact.
It’s just me and the guitar and the silence of a place I know completely. I sit on the edge of the stage and pick it up and play nothing in particular for a while: not a song, just my hands moving, the way they do when my brain needs somewhere to put itself.
Before the Emergence, I played a drathvik, a stringed instrument from my world that has no equivalent here.
The closest Earth has to it is a guitar, so a guitar is what I play now.
My hands made the transfer without much argument.
This one has been with me since my first year here, a beat-up acoustic that has no business sounding as mellow as it does, and my hands know it like my own face. Better, maybe.
I play for twenty minutes without deciding to. The silence after is good.
Later, back at my apartment, I’m on the couch with the guitar across my knees and my phone in my hand. I’m scrolling the usual late-night algorithm, music content, always music content. The feed figured me out years ago.
A guitarist in Nashville. A fiddler in Ireland. Someone’s kid in a kitchen playing a tune she clearly just made up; those are the best kind.
Then the next video starts, and my thumb pauses over the screen.
A woman’s hands. That’s all I register at first: two hands on a small instrument, moving in a way that’s unhurried and exact.
The instrument is laid flat across her lap, narrow-waisted and fretted.
The sound coming out of it settles low in my chest, warm and resonant, like a room that’s been lived in for a long time and still holds the memory of everyone who’s ever been there.
Not guitar. Not fiddle. An older voice than either.
Although there was nothing like it where I came from, it makes me think of home.
I play the video.
Then again.
The caption says Mountain Dulcimer, Missouri.
I don’t see the woman’s face. The camera stays on her hands and the instrument, the grain of the wood, the frets worn smooth from years of use.
I watch it a third time, focusing on her right hand, the way her fingers move across the strings, and a longing inside me answers before the rest of me catches up. Then I watch it a fourth time.
I set the guitar aside.
The instrument is small. I can tell from the scale of it against the woman’s hands, the narrow body, the whole thing built for a lap instead of a chest. My fingers make other guitar players wince sympathetically when they watch me tune, and I’ve learned to ignore that because the fingers know what they’re doing regardless of how they look doing it.
But this is different. I picture my left hand on the neck of it and almost talk myself out of the whole thing.
There’s a quick run near the end that I’ve started waiting for, even though I know exactly when it’s coming. When it arrives, I watch the whole video a fifth time just to hear it again.
I stop talking myself out of anything.
Her website is spare and professional. There’s no photo of her, which surprises me until I keep scrolling and understand.
She’s not the product. The instruments are.
Plain ones, decorated ones, custom work, commissions open.
The site tells me almost nothing about the woman and a great deal about the work, which feels deliberate.
I pause on the page of decorated instruments.
Whatever she’s doing to the wood is remarkable.
The designs are burned in rather than applied: the lines have actual depth, and the paint sits inside them like it grew there.
I enlarge one photo after another, then sit here longer than I mean to, looking at a flowering vine worked into pale wood with the kind of attention that makes the instrument feel like someone has already loved it for years.
She makes these.
The about page gives me the basics. Custom mountain dulcimers, commissions open, ships worldwide.
The address is twenty-three miles away.
Twenty-three miles. I could drive it in half an hour.
I sit with that: twenty-three miles, a Friday night, a video I’ve now watched five times, and feel recognition settle in, less like coincidence and more like a door that was already standing open.
If she’d been in Montana, I don’t know what I would have done.
Probably reached out anyway. Probably. But twenty-three miles removes the last excuse I might have made.
The email address is at the bottom of the page, and I use it because I am someone who moves toward things rather than filling out forms and waiting.
I tell her I’m a musician interested in learning the mountain dulcimer.
Twenty-three miles away, I add. I tell her I’m an orc, because it’s better to say it first. Then I ask if she does consultations.
After sending the email, I set the phone beside me and play something slow and descending that doesn’t have a name.
Her response comes in twenty minutes. Brief and direct. Yes, consultations. Here is her availability. She doesn’t mention the orc thing. We set a time for the following Thursday.
I read it twice.
Then I set the phone face-down on the cushion.
For a while, the guitar stays quiet across my knees.