“Hey,” the slender green-eyed boy says back. “So, what are you in for?”

  “Oh, they’ve let me go. I’m just waiting for a friend.”

  “Right.”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, you know.” He points to the ears. “The elves have ‘friendlier’ relations with the demons, so my presence makes me automatically suspicious, no matter how many times I say I was hunkered down on the other side of the campus during the fighting.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. I guess the army’s kinda known for being like that. Don’t worry, though. I’ve been told they can’t really do anything to us on campus.”

  “Oh?” He raises an eyebrow questioningly, with a mischievous glint. “You’re saying they won’t shoot me if I try to walk away?”

  “Ah…I meant legally. Maybe don’t press the shooting thing.” Allia laughs nervously.

  “Right…” he lets out a sigh and readjusts his posture to a more relaxed and leaned back manner. “I suppose that’s comforting to know. Thanks.”

  Allia smiles perkily at the gratitude. “You’re welcome! I’m Allia, by the way. I heard we had an elf student, but I don’t think we ever met. Nice to meet you!” She extends a hand to shake.

  He regards the hand amused. “Charmed. I’m Jason,” he says, grabbing the hand and kissing the back.

  “Oh!” Allia says, her eyes perked up. Before he can withdraw his hand, she turns it over and kisses the back of it in return. “What an interesting greeting. Is it an elf thing?”

  “Um… not exactly,” he says, turning away to hide his embarrassment. “And I’m not an elf. I’m a human…or at least that’s the part of my heritage that I’ve chosen to embrace. No elf my age could survive this far from the woods. Also, these would be longer.” He points to his pointy ears.

  “A half-elf? I didn’t know that was a thing,” Allia tilts her head as if trying to dislodge a memory.

  “Heh, neither did I until I became one,” he has a wry smile as he says it, his embarrassment evidentially quickly recovered.

  “Um…”

  “Never mind. Just a silly joke. But we are quite rare. I might be the only one presently, though other woods might be more active in that regard.”

  “But you said you choose to be human? How does that work?”

  “I meant culturally and whatnot. Got enough of the ‘mystical elven ways’ growing up.”

  “You mean you didn’t like growing up with elves? Did they treat you badly?”

  “Um…” he twists his face as if chewing on the question. “Well, how do you imagine elves treat half-elves?”

  “Um…” Allia rubs her chin thoughtfully. “Well, given how territorial they are…”

  Jason interrupts. “They’re not territorial. That’s a misunderstanding.”

  Allia raises a sceptical brow. “You mean they don’t kill everyone who strays into their parts of the woods?”

  “Ah, I mean… Yeah, I guess… Kinda.”

  “How do you ‘kinda’ kill someone?” Allia laughs, bemused and amused.

  “Look, it’s um… complicated. Anyways, go on.”

  “Well,” Allia continues, “given the ‘totally not territorial’ boundary between elven and non-elven, I’d assume they’d treat you as an impurity to be shunned.”

  He gives a wolfish smile, as if expecting the answer. “Exactly the opposite. I was adored…exhaustingly.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Heh,” he laughs. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.” He leans back on his chair, covering his eyes with his hands before shrugging and deciding to share. “My elven relatives… they said I can do anything.”

  “So what?” Allia asks, lips pressed thin, trying to comprehend the meaning of the statement. “Human parents say that to their kids all the time.”

  “Yeah, but the difference is that human parents don’t believe it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they’re not lying. It’s just that for them, the phrase is an idiom that doesn’t quite mean what the component words would suggest. What they actually mean is, they can achieve any social or magical standing previously achieved by members of their society with some margin of error for the slim chance of innovation.”

  “So, what did your relatives mean by it then?”

  “They meant I could do anything.” He draws out the last word for emphasis. “Pluck the sun from the sky and put it in my pocket, and I would not be exceeding expectations.”

  Allia scrunches her face as if imagining the logistics of such a deed. “I see. I guess that must have been a big burden for you.”

  He shakes his head. “Oh, no. Sorry. You misunderstand. They didn’t expect me to do anything like that; they just didn’t expect me not to do that either. I mean this literally, Allia. If you asked them if I could do that, they would say ‘maybe’ and be completely serious.”

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  “Right, um. I guess I understand… But um… why? Why would they think you could possibly do something like that? I mean… you can’t, right?”

  “Ha! No. Let’s just say it’s complicated.”

  Allia glances about at the empty room. “I think we have time.”

  He sighs. “Okay, if you really want to know, I guess it would take my mind off our current situation. It’s hard to explain in Thalassic, but I guess I can just repeat what that one mage said when I told him about it. The elves view the combining of things as having great significance. So, the fact that I am of two types meant they treated me as – in the mage’s words – ‘a living embodiment of a dialectical synthesis, capable, by my mere being, of resolving contradictions inherent in both cultures that seem as or more impossible to them as any act of magical potency’.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.” Allia nods her head as she thinks it through.

  “Really?” he asks with a shocked face.

  “No, not at all.” She says, causing them both to laugh. “I mean, it kinda makes sense. The part about you being the embodiment of a dialectical synthesis and all that. But any impossibilities that you could be able to resolve should be logical impossibilities, while the sun plucking thing is a physical one. While logical impossibilities are often treated as a higher order impossibility than physical ones, the ability to resolve logical impossibilities does not imply an ability to perform physical ones.”

  “Heh. Try telling that to the elves. But to be clear, they don’t think I can necessarily do either, they just don’t think I can’t either.”

  “Okay. I think I get it. But only kinda. You said it was exhausting, but how? Like, they wouldn’t get mad or anything if you didn’t resolve any contradictions, right?”

  He breathes in deeply, then out. “So, say that when you were like 4 and you were learning math, right, and you said 1+1=3? What would your teacher do?”

  “Um? Calmly correct my mistake?”

  “Sounds sane. Mine seriously considered the possibility that I was right, consulted an expert who then spent the next couple years writing a several hundred page book to prove it one way or another. Admittedly, they did eventually arrive at 2 being the right answer, but in the meantime, I was left to figure it out on my own.

  “It was like that with everything. I had to constantly assess myself and deduce entire concepts just to make sure I didn’t say something stupid that caused a bunch of people to waste years of their lives trying to figure out if I was right. Because after all, I was supposed to disrupt long standing beliefs, wasn’t I? So yeah, it was exhausting. I mean, is it really so much to ask that I can live in a civilization where I’m not the highest epistemic authority?”

  “I don’t know,” Allia mutters, biting her finger thoughtfully and glancing away. “Sometimes I would like to think more for myself than having to listen to… everybody.”

  “Yeah,” he laughs, “I guess that wouldn’t be so bad if I were the only one I was thinking for. But the way they took me so seriously. I could have caused a lot of damage. Admittedly, they would usually figure out I was wrong… usually. But some things aren’t so easy to refute. I mean, imagine if I accidentally went after some axioms? They’d have no defence. I could say ‘I think the law of non-contradiction is false’ and their entire civilization would be gone like that.” He snaps his fingers to illustrate his point.”

  “Ok,” Allia says, a bit wide-eyed, seemingly trying to figure out if he’s right and finding no reason to doubt it. “Yeah, that does sound like a lot of pressure. You’re lucky it didn’t warp your personality… Actually, how did you manage to turn out so… well, I suppose this may be premature given that we’ve just met – but normal? If everyone treated me like that all the time, I probably wouldn’t question it.”

  He shrugs. “Well, I did have one human parent living with us, and he didn’t believe in the whole ‘embodiment of a dialectical synthesis’ thing. So that’s one thing. Also, it’s just weird to see people react so differently to your mistakes than to your peers. Even without Dad balancing it out, I’m sure I would have figured out something was wrong. Hell, maybe just the teenage hormones would have caused me to rebel pro forma.”

  “Elves go through that phase, too?” Allia asks with tilted head.

  “Well, half-elves certainly do. At least every one that I’ve met.” He laughs at his own joke.

  Allia chuckles too. “Well, thanks for telling me all that. It was certainly interesting. Distracted me from the fact that my friend is still being questioned, at least. So, thank you.”

  “Glad I could help. Distracted me too. Um… I’ve been focusing on alchemy. Perhaps I’ll see you around sometime?”

  “Oh, um, enchanting,” Allia says, stating her current focus of study. “I guess our classes aren’t too far apart. Maybe we’ll cross paths.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.” He half-smiles to himself, looking away in thought.

  “So, um, alchemy? I heard elves are more advanced at that than we are?”

  He laughs. “Yeah. Might as well take advantage of that side, right? Elven senses are better attuned for it. We can smell out if a potion will work as intended. Experts can hear it. Besides, it’s not like I hate my elven side; I just don’t want to be around them for a while. I’ll probably go back someday, at least for a little.”

  “Hmm… sounds nice, having a place you might one day want to go back to.”

  The door to the questioning room opens, and a soldier lets out Sarrah, who politely smiles and nods to him. “All right, you’re free to go,” the soldier says, “if we have any follow-up questions, we’ll contact the provided address, likely in the next three days. Also, it says here that your parents have arrived. They should be waiting for you at the front of the building.”

  “Uh… thankyou,” Sarrah says, then spots Allia and walks to her. “Hey, you didn’t need to wait up.”

  “What? Don’t be silly. How could I sleep without knowing they let you go?” Allia says, standing up and giving her friend a brief hug.

  “Right… um, hello,” Sarrah says, looking past Allia to the half-elf still waiting to be called and currently looking in their direction.

  “Oh, right,” Allia says, slightly flustered. “Sarrah, this is Jason, Jason, my best friend Sarrah.” Sarrah smiles, just a little embarrassed by the adjective. “We were talking about his, um, unique background. It’s interesting. I’ll tell you about it sometime. But um, let’s go.”

  “Yeah,” Sarrah says, her voice cracking with a smile. They exchange farewell pleasantries and ‘see you laters’ with Jason, then walk out the front of the building.

  “Sarrah!” a man’s voice calls out the moment they leave, drawing their attention to Sarrah’s parents, dressed in more formal attire than usual and waving from the other side of a wooden barricade.

  Sarrah immediately runs over and hugs her parents, crying into their arms. She’s been calm the entire time, but seeing her parents after so much has happened evidentially floods her with emotions.

  After a short while, her parents look up and spot Allia standing a little ways off. “Allia! You’re safe too. Good. We’d all be devastated if something happened to you.” The mother says, her voice thick with emotion of her own.

  “Allia protected me. Kept me safe,” Sarrah says, wiping away her tears.

  “Then we’re in your debt.” The father, a tall, thin man, says over Sarrah’s shoulder.

  Allia shakes no. “Don’t be silly. It’s what friends do.”

  “Still,” the mother says, “I believe you were invited to dinner? We’d be glad if you still came.”

  “I… wouldn’t want to impose… after all that happened.” Allia takes a half step back, hand half raised and mouth in a half smile.

  “Allia.” The mother says sternly. “It would bring us comfort to know that you’re safe in our home tonight.”

  “…Then I’d be glad to come,” Allia says, stepping up and joining them.