Shadow Dwarf Name Generator

The story

Dovra knew the necklace was imitation before she knew why she was pleased. Its bright stones sat in the soft stage-metal setting she had repaired since apprenticeship. The unfamiliar man at Nellis's table carried it beside a letter edged in gold. When he called something his ancestral estate, Dovra felt a small clean click of explanation. Here was an actor pretending to be rich, and here was her oldest friend, apparently preparing to believe him. It would be a serious problem. It would also be a problem Dovra could solve without losing a friend to a perfectly ordinary chosen departure.

Three nights earlier, Nellis had told her she intended to join a touring company for one season. She had accepted paid accounts work and would travel with Beren, an adult performer she had been seeing for months. She wanted Dovra to know before the announcement, but asked her to keep the plan between them until her employer had been informed. Under their town's Named confidence practice, Dovra was the named person trusted with that account. She could ask Nellis questions. She could not recruit half the street into assessing a plan its owner had not chosen to publish. She had agreed readily, then spent the next two days thinking of reasons Nellis might not go.

Their weekly suppers had continued through two moves, a failed shop partnership and a year when both claimed to prefer eating alone. Dovra kept a spare key for Nellis's house. She knew which pot leaked and which favorite dish ought never to be made according to Nellis's written recipe. A season sounded short when described by actors and very long when she counted the empty supper evenings. Instead of saying this, she had asked practical questions about trunks. Nellis mistook the questions for interest and supplied detailed answers. Dovra found the trunk answers increasingly difficult to forgive.

Now Beren asked whether she could mend a broken link on his necklace. Dovra's maker name, Dovra-Cair, acknowledged the costume metal she knew how to repair. Cair was a fictional material root, neither a real translation nor a claim that the wearer possessed precious jewels. She had recently begun leaving it off her shop's grander advertisements because customers wanted expensive-looking commissions. She took the necklace and asked Nellis's permission to show the fitting to a second maker. The guild required finished pieces to be checked independently. Nellis agreed to the object examination, not to disclosure of her private travel plans. Dovra understood the distinction, however much she wanted an audience for her worry.

Istr examined the piece at her bench. He identified familiar stage construction and the maker's small stamp. He did not appraise Beren's character. Dovra asked whether it might fool someone at a distance. He said almost anything could fool somebody who had decided what she wanted to see. She disliked the sentence until she interpreted it as confirmation about Nellis. She repaired the broken link, returned the necklace for Istr's actual finished-piece check, and obtained a note about that repaired joint. The note did not say genuine aristocrat, fraudulent suitor or safe traveling companion. There was no column in which she could reasonably add those things.

When she brought it back, Beren was in the next room practicing an argument. He demanded the return of his ancestral estate and then stopped to ask whether the final line sounded too much like somebody ordering soup. Nellis laughed. Dovra heard how easily a rehearsed grand manner could be mistaken for a personal claim. She saw a playbill on the table identifying Beren by his ordinary full name and naming the fictional baron he played. The apparently splendid letter was a prop described on the rehearsal list. None of these facts altered the necklace's material. They altered the story she had been building around it.

She asked Nellis whether she knew the stones were costume pieces. Nellis looked at her, then answered yes. Dovra asked whether she knew Beren was not a baron. There was a long pause. Nellis asked what exactly her friend thought had been happening at this table. Dovra supplied her evidence and heard its inadequacy more clearly with each item. With Nellis's permission, they looked at the ordinary company correspondence confirming her pay, her job and the return fare she had arranged. They did not read the personal letters between the pair. Nellis did not need to publish an intimate biography to prove she knew the profession of someone she had chosen to accompany.

Beren came back, learned that his necklace had passed its repair check and thanked Dovra. He did not stay to supervise their conversation. Nellis asked whether there was something about the actual proposed work Dovra distrusted. Dovra began to say a traveling life was uncertain. Then she admitted that she had been counting missed suppers. This explanation made her feel smaller than exposing a fraud would have done. Nellis was angry, relieved and sad in an order neither could maintain for more than a sentence. She had thought her friend was pleased enough to ask about trunks. Dovra said she had been interested in the trunks. She had also hoped they would prove impossible to carry.

Nellis still intended to leave. She would miss the suppers too. She did not promise to return early or recreate them by letter every week so that Dovra could stop feeling disappointed. They made one practical arrangement: Dovra would return the spare key before the subtenant arrived, and Nellis would tell her when the travel announcement was public. Until then the confidence remained. Dovra did not take her unsupported suspicion to the neighbors as a warning supposedly given for Nellis's own good. She returned the key, helped count two actual trunks and charged the company the agreed small repair fee. Friendship did not turn the clasp into an unrequested gift.

Their last supper before departure was imperfect. Dovra overcooked a familiar dish while explaining that she would have plenty to do. Nellis said she knew, which was kind and irritating. They ate it anyway. At the coach, after the public announcement, Beren wore ordinary clothes and carried the necklace in its proper theater box. Dovra wished him a successful ancestral estate recovery. He said the director still thought it sounded like soup. Weeks later another performer brought her a cheap clasp. She completed the repair, arranged its independent check and wrote Dovra-Cair on the bill. That evening she ate elsewhere with a neighbor she had been meaning to know better. It was not Thursday supper with Nellis. It was supper she could actually attend.