After hours of traversing the colder, stonier parts of the dungeon, it was good to lay down by the fire. Through Medallion's tired eyes and the waves of heat, Pointes was blurred, their spots blending into one another like laps of brackish water. Nice color, he thought to himself, too weary to pretend he wasn't looking. Unusual. But natural.

"What's in this cask, anyway," he said, attempting small talk. Pointes had hired him to protect them as they sought to retrieve something called the Kommtur's Cask. One of those more eclectic artifacts. He'd never heard of it. "Must be some liquor."

"Oh. It's um." Pointes, who hadn't been looking at him at all, seemed to collect themself from elsewhere. "Casque. Q-U-E. It's a sort of helmet humanoids used to wear."

"Oh." He sucked his teeth. "Why not just call it a helmet?"

"Hasn't got a visor on it. The face part?"

"I know what a visor is."

"Yeah, sorry."

They didn't seem sorry to Med. It was likely that he was more sorry than they were for giving them the impression they had to apologize to him as a courtesy. He stretched his neck and took a deep breath, filling his ribs with his aches and exhaling them in a big sigh. He imagined the casque for himself. He'd seen plenty of humanoid helmets and breastplates and what have you, armor that failed to protect the soft flesh beneath, abandoned carapaces of an extinct species. Were it not for the fact that they could be smelted, or were sometimes covered in jewels, some Coursers would call them trash.

Some Coursers were eager to throw away that which no longer glittered. He'd rusted and gone in the pile of discarded heroes, once. Now he was unrecognizable among piles of scrap. No grand sigils to find beneath the layer of dust. No diamonds in the rough.

"Why do you like this historical shit?" He cocked his head back toward Pointes, his ears low. "I know you don't get a lot of money. And when it's that old, all it's good for is telling you the wrong way to go. How some other guy fucked up, died down here."

Pointes didn't seem to need to think about it at all. They looked at him across the fire and answered plainly: "The harrowing ought to be studied even so."

Med met their eyes. Those, too, were a nice color.