If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it's because he hears the beat of a different drummer.

-Henry David Thoreau

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"You two should sleep," Taurus said at last. "There are things out there that cannot get to you when your eyes are closed."

"And what will you be doing?" I meant nothing by the question, but it came out sounding more irritated and suspicious than intended.

If the elf took any offense to my words; he cared not to show it, instead choosing to bend over and snatch a twig up off the ground. "I'll keep watch while you two rest," he shifted his eyes in our direction, which caught the amber glow of the fire.

I dragged my bag closer and laid it by my head, but somehow I couldn't bring myself down to sleep. Instead, I took the blanket Taurus had lent me and went to sit closer to the fire. The elf looked up slowly, as if my movement was just a common illusion sent by the flames. "You should rest," he said wearily, as if this were the last time he would attempt to tell me to bed. "There is still another four days journey ahead."

A slow movement slipped from the corners of my eyes and I turned to find Aldyth getting up from where she laid. "What?" She voiced. "If you two are not going to sleep, then I'm not going to either."

"See what you did, Elias," Taurus chuckled. "Why do you have to be such a rogue?"

Aldyth scoffed loudly and rolled her eyes. "Eli? A rogue?" She flipped her dark out of her eyes with a loud, tut. "Well, I suppose you could call blatantly ignoring chores, rogue, but back in Gris, we just call it adolescence."

"Alright, I regret it, let's just go back to sleep, shall we?" I announced and quickly buried my face into my pack as if I were back at home and my bag was my pillow while the ground was my bed.

Something soft hit the back of my head. I turned around quickly to find Aldyth clutching the hem of her blanket with a mischievous smirk riding over her lips. "No." I shot her a look.

"Yes," her smirk split into an outright grin.

"I was wrong about you two," Taurus crossed his arms over his chest. "You are children. "

"A child is as a child does, Taurus," I addressed the elf easily before sticking my tongue out at Aldyth when she wasn't looking. She appeared to catch the motion out of the corner of her eyes anyway, because not ten seconds later did a fist full of dry leaves get thrown at my head.

Taurus grinned easily and started tapping on his knees with his fingers. For a moment I didn't notice it because Aldyth had an intent of burying my face in leaves and dry earth, but after a while even she stopped to watch him tap aggressively at anything within hands reach. His leg, his pack, the ground. The rhythms and patterns were so fast and complicated that it became clear within a few seconds that it wasn't just some casual tapping.

The motions of his hands drew us in. The movements were so fluid and so natural, yet so increasingly complex that if I were to try and mimic him, I wouldn't know where to start. His lips started moving as he drummed, weaving in a series of background sounds that I would have never imagined would fit in with his seamless rhythms.

The temperature around me seemed to rise as Taurus's hands started clicking at the air. Physical sound ceased to exist, yet with each stroke of his hand I could hear the deep pounds of the earth smashing together, along with several variations of high pitched patter than ranged in every velocity from rainfall to butterfly wings brushing against one's face.

Suddenly Taurus's eyes snapped open and he swept his right hand out toward the fire at bone breaking speeds. A sharp wind took ahold of the air and sent the cold hurdling away like a feather tied to a spearhead. The fire flickered low to the ground as if, like Aldyth and I, it was stunned into forgetting how to breathe. Taurus's large eyes darkened as he blinked away his daze and saw that the flames were dying. He quickly crouched down by the pit, waved his hand over the embers and murmured,"Nöchæ." As if they had never died in the first place, the flames picked up and started to dance again.

I turned to look at Aldyth. Her eyes seemed to be frozen in shock and I knew I could hardly look too much better, but neither of us could cough up the words to ask Taurus what he had been doing. It took the elf a couple seconds to notice our silence, and another few to figure out the looks on our faces was shock instead of gratitude. "Something wrong?"

"What was that?!" I exclaimed in disbelief.

"What was what?"

"The fire!" Aldyth cried before I even had a chance to string words together on what had just occurred. "You killed it, and then, then you brought it back to life again!" She waved her hands about frantically in what was probably an attempt to convey her shock, but truth be told, looked more like muscle spasms than anything else.

"Calm down, child," Taurus moved away before Aldyth accidentally struck him with one of her flailing arms. "It's as if you've never seen magic before!"

"We haven't!" She retorted.

The elf's face drooped like someone had just informed him that he was to eat stale bread for the rest of his life. "Isolationism should really be illegal, that it should. Next you'll be telling me that you've had no defense training against the Poetry Clan of southern Alyvanter."

"Such a group exists?" Aldyth's eyes widened.

"No," replied Taurus simply. "But the fact that you believed it did, even for a second, is rather pathetic. There is not much of the world you have seen, is there?"

Their arguments blurred to the back of my mind, for it was not the behavior of the fire that bothered me, as strange as it was. I could still hear the moving cadences of drum batter beneath the sounds of the evening forest. Now that I had put a word to it; it became obvious what Taurus had been doing right before the fire so dramatically extinguished. "What bothers me is not the fire," I spoke up, interrupting Aldyth in mid-retort. "But how you managed to snuff it. The drum sounds; what was that? How did you do it?" I looked to to find all the humor gone from the elf's eyes.

"You could hear that?" Taurus breathed.

I nodded.

"What drum sounds?" Aldyth asked.

"You didn't hear it?" I turned to her.

"He was tapping at the air, but he made no noise of it --."

"Elias," Taurus snapped and suddenly all I could see was him. "You could hear it? What did you hear?"

"Drums," I replied instantly. "All sorts of them --"

"How did they sound?" His eyes flared like the fire had taken to their face behind them.

"W-what?" I stammered.

"The song!" He yelled as if it was obvious. "Was it happy?! Was it warlike?!"

Frantically, I scrambled away from him. Taurus's already lizard-like irises broadened such to make his slitted pupils disappear, leaving only seas of angry yellow amber glaring back at me. His lips pulled back in a silent growl, revealing his rows of razor sharp teeth. He leaped to his feet, leaning out over me in a hunting crouch and for the first time since he'd dragged us away from the Easterners, he appeared as the elves did in legend -- more monster than man.

His left ear flipped as Aldyth as snapped a twig in distraction. With his attention broken, Taurus appeared to get a handle on himself for his eyes went back to normal, his teeth disappeared behind his lips, and he fell down to his knees. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry," he muttered into his chest. "I frightened you, I'm sorry."

I leaned forward cautiously. Though it pained me to admit it; there was still some part of me that was terrified that the elf would jump out and bite off my ear. We had only known him for a day, and I wasn't ready to trust him completely -- no matter how little of a choice I had in the matter. Yet he looked so beaten, like he had spent his entire life trying to disprove the legends, only to find that they were truer than he first believed. "What's wrong, Taurus?"

The elf straightened his spine, but avoided my gaze. "This changes things. Get some sleep, the both of you. Tomorrow we will talk."

A/n

So how are you all liking my spin on elves? There's a lot more where that came from.