A.K.’s Advent 2025 – Day 1

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A Party Walks Into A Tavern
Part 1
Not Fiorella Fitzwright’s Finest Hour

Fiorella slammed the door to the basement and fell against it, chest heaving, heart pounding, brain failing. She’d run out of shrieks as she ascended the stairs, so she bit down on her lip and listened. It felt for a moment as though the walls and floors and doorways were listening back, but that couldn’t be the case: the Fitzwright Inn hadn’t listened to a gods damned thing Fiorella said since she arrived.

No, it was simply quiet, and quiet was…good? She took a leveling breath and then glanced quickly downward. Both slippered feet were underneath her and all her fingers gripped her broom. Now that was definitely good because if she properly recalled the jaws and claws and other pointy bits that had been snarling from the shadows, she was lucky to still have her arms and legs at all.

Fiorella had never seen a direrat before, but she’d heard stories all her life, and the things in the basement could be nothing else. Those stories often included low-level collusion, though, so maybe the quiet was actually ominous. Were the direrats convening about their next attack? Assessing the weaknesses they’d seen? Devising a recipe for when they finally got her? With heads the size of bread loaves, their brains were surely big too, so she shoved her broom through the basement door’s handle, gave it a good tug for posterity, and scurried down the hall. She wanted access to the downstairs much less than she wanted to be turned into Fiorella Fitzwright Fondue, and she didn’t really need the broom anyway: there was no one to sweep up after but herself.

Though the guestlessness was probably a blessing because the Fitzwright Inn was a mess. Fiorella had arrived a week prior to an empty building, and things had seemed fine at first, but the moment she’d attempted to open a window and clear out the must, the place went feral.

Nineteen grueling hours, seven increasingly pedantic spell books, three disastrously spilled potions, and one collapsed timber later, the window was finally open, and her aunt’s letter made a whole lot more sense: the inn would only respond to magic, and supposedly Fiorella Fitzwright had that magic in her blood. Too bad she didn’t have any of it in her brain.

She scurried herself back out to the tavern that made up the inn’s ground floor. Golden light from the sun’s last rays glowed in the high windows, the warm, herby smell of meals past clung to the beams, and familiarity tickled Fiorella’s memories. She had been here just once before and sat in front of the big hearth nestled under the two sweeping staircases, the heat unlike any other fire she’d felt since. But that was long ago, back when she carried around a comforting stuffed animal and was small enough to be carried to bed herself without remembering it happening, and it was before…before…the spider?

Fiorella squawked and swiped at the eight legs dangling from the rafters. Its silk broke and she dove behind the bar. A full minute later, she peeked out, spied nothing because, of course, it was only a tiny thing in a rather large tavern that she should never have been afraid of in the first place, and she dropped her head on the bartop and groaned.

The inn groaned back in mockery and warning both.

“I know, I shouldn’t be so jumpy, but I did almost get eaten downstairs.”

Wind whistled through the chimney flue, and as far as whistles went, this one could only be called farcical.

“Please,” she mumbled up against the wood grain with a mournful sting in the back of her throat, “for once can you just be helpful?”

There was a creak then, but it wasn’t one of the inn’s sarcastic sounds—this was purely functional.

Fiorella lifted her head with courage anew. There was something about the mockery of a building that tended to be inspiring in such a way, especially after suffering under it alone for so long.

The double doors at the inn’s front had opened, and Fiorella sucked in a shocked breath. No one had come to stay since her arrival, as if somehow travelers knew she wasn’t ready, but she wanted desperately to just get on with the being open thing. The inn was more than a handful, but if she had guests, Fiorella thought that would somehow even out all the other problems, or at least allow her to ignore some of them in trade for new ones. Cranky people were surely easier to deal with than creaky floorboards.

In the blinding evening light, the open doors let in, a silhouette appeared. One with four heads, a whole mess of arms, and a shambling gait. A silhouette some might call monstrous. But not Fiorella! Though her instinct was to run, she steeled herself instead—there were all sorts in the Whispering Woods, and she would absolutely take whatever guest she could get.

“Welcome to the Fitzwright Inn,” she chirped for the first time in her entire life, and the words felt like a spell, an ethereal comfort passed from her lips to her first ever guest’s many, many ears.

“Uhhhnnn,” the shambling mound groaned back.

“Oh dear,” wobbled quietly in her throat, but as the frightful figure stepped under the candlelight of the inn, things started to make a whole lot more sense.

Three men worked as a team to prop up a fourth much larger one—at least, they were mostly men, though one had the pointed ears of an elf, and the largest one had the green skin and tusks of an orc. Of course, even without pointy ears or colorful skin, a person could be lots of unseen things, but morphology didn’t matter because these beings were, above all else, guests.

Fiorella sprinted across the tavern and pulled out the nearest chair, and the three unloaded the massive orc. The seat objected, but Fiorella held its back steady, feeling for the magic that Belladonna left behind. In her week at the Fitzwright, she’d tried to acquaint herself with the bevy of spells holding up beams and tending fires. A panicked scramble of words in her head and ether under her hands eventually found the chair’s joints and fortified them just in time.

With a relieved exhale, she poked her head out from behind the green giant and beamed at the other three road-weary men. “Hi!”

There were a lot of noises then, and they all happened at once. The orc yelped as if just discovering her under his arm, the elf cheerfully returned her greeting, the shorter of the two humans scoffed as the black bird on his shoulder squawked, and the scruffy-jawed man gave her a bow which turned into a crick in his back, and he cried out.

“Oh, you guys are kind of a mess, huh?” She took in the fading bruises and torn clothing and tried not to take in the smell, but then she saw the bolt sticking out of the orc’s thigh. “Oh goodness, you’re bleeding!”

Fiorella ran to the basin behind the bar, collected clean rags and her stiffest spirit to clean the wound, and returned in a heartbeat. The crow that had come in with the men cried out as if in warning, and the bottle was unceremoniously tugged out of her hand.

“What do you think you’re doing, Drex?” the bearded man hissed.

The shorter man pulled out the cork with his teeth then tossed his messy black hair out of his face. “You said Korthak would be fine once we found a place, and it’s been a gods damned long couple of days.” Drex took a swig.

“Madam, please allow me,” said the first man, and it wasn’t until he took the rags from her hands that Fiorella realized he was speaking to her.

No one had ever called Fiorella madam before, and never with a voice like that.

Her lips lifted of their own accord, but then she squinted down at herself, unsure. Her skirt and bodice were still neat, though the apron was a little smudged, but that was what it was for. The long fall of her wheat-colored hair had bits of detritus stuck in the strands, though, and as that wasn’t what hair was for, she plucked them out. Maybe that made her look a little more the part, but then again, the last person she’d heard called madam was Damaris back in Crossglen who ran the…well, people called it a massage parlor, but she wasn’t so sure…

Fiorella shook her head. There were more pressing things going on than how a guest—and he was a guest, regardless of the voice he used—referred to her. There was another guest, in fact, and he was injured, bleeding, trembling.

Trembling?

An orc had come through Crossglen once with a ragtag group of heavily armored and magical strangers, and Fiorella would have bet her life savings—seven copper, two silver, a gold piece with a bent edge, and a shiny stone she was sure was a precious gem in disguise—that he had never trembled once in his life. But then her father had a lot of nasty things to say about orcs in general, and she figured even good assumptions about an entire kind of being might actually end up being bad, so maybe unshakable bravery wasn’t an attribute of every single orc in the realm. Frankly, she supposed she would be trembling too if she had a bolt sticking out of her thigh. In fact, she’d probably just be dead.

Fiorella might have extrapolated more out of those musings if a flash of yellow light didn’t obliterate every thought she’d been having. When her eyes adjusted, the light was only a gentle pulse under the hand of the man who had called her madam.

Now that was magic.

He wiggled the arrow, and it slid out of the orc with a sickening noise and a gush of blood all over the floor—Fiorella didn’t point out the mess despite the impulse—and the wound closed itself up as if a bolt hadn’t pierced him at all.

“Oh, wow,” Fiorella breathed, recognizing then the blue lily on the healer’s surcoat. The man—no, the paladin of the goddess Nuala stood, and she opened her mouth to heap praise on him until she saw how his dark eyes narrowed. Hadn’t those eyes been blue a moment ago?

The bolt splintered in his hand, and Fiorella’s stomach flipped. A base instinct told her to run from the darkness creeping into the stranger’s features, but a learned trait insisted she stay rooted to the spot and smile like an idiot. Dread sloshed beneath the urge to mollify until the other human man called Drex swung the bottle of spirits and connected with the holy man’s head.