“One man’s poison is another man’s delicacy.” - Old Elmaiyan saying.

Much like most other small villages Aideen had visited in the past, the locals proved to be welcoming and friendly. Unlike in the north where the dwarves had taken to the habit of gathering with just their families for meal times, the ones who founded the Hassid Caliphate kept many of their old customs, like how meals were a communal thing where most of the people in a community would gather to eat together.

Even strangers like Aideen’s group were invited to join them for dinner.

As could be expected out of the dwarves, the local ale – probably made out of fermented sweet potatoes, given the flavor it had – was very strong compared to what was more common in human nations. One of the guards that traveled with them coughed a couple times as he was caught off guard by the strength of the drink, while their guide only drank in small sips despite the large size of the clay tankards they were given.

“You humans might want to lay off the greens there. They usually don’t agree with human stomachs much,” said one of their dwarven hosts, an elderly matron from her looks and voice. “Pretty sure they ought to be fine for elves like that lass there, although we have no idea how it’ll work with the therian lass. Too many different kinds of ‘em.”

The group’s merchant-guide and his guards obeyed the old matron’s warning, though Aideen took a bit of the cooked greens – mostly just lightly braised in oil with some salt – and gave it a taste regardless. Since she was Unliving, she could handle most anything when it comes to food and drinks, as no poison would really work that well against her constitution.

“Hmm, I see why you warned them, you made these out of the leaves of the tubers, right?” she asked the matron, who looked at her with some surprise in her wizened old eyes. “That’d be poisonous for most humans indeed, at least the leaves from the potatoes. The others are actually fine for consumption even for us, though.”

“They’re pretty good, yeah,” noted Kino as she munched on some of the same greens. While her therian heritage meant that she had a preference for meat, she could eat vegetables just fine for the most part, as her bloodline was already very thin. “That said, I think this would probably be quite toxic to most of my kind, at least from the reaction I’m feeling. Makes me glad to be unliving, honestly. The poison kind of just adds a nice spice to it now.”

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“Agreed, these are pretty nice,” said Eilonwy. “I much prefer how they make this out of the egg, though,” she added as she sipped on a thick bowl of soup that had one of the large lizard eggs broken into it and stirred to form myriad slivers of egg set in the almost viscous soup.

Like most smaller villages, meat was far from an everyday thing. The village owned a large herd of the horned lizards that were apparently communal property, and occasionally slaughtered some for meat when they got too old to either work or lay eggs, but otherwise rarely killed one. Instead, the main dish they served had some kind of pressed cake made out of soybean mush doused with a viscous sauce that had chunks of mushrooms of various kinds in it.

“Ah, yeah, reminds me of some meals I had in the Kingdom Down Under,” noted Aideen. While she never got to access the interior of the underground dwarven nation back then, she did manage to sample the local culture a bit in the towns and villages on the topside that she could visit. Soybean had been one of the main crops in that region as well.

The dense soy cake crumbled easily on the tongue, with a pretty strong flavor of the beans, but the rich sauce filled with the earthy flavors of the various mushrooms proved to be an excellent complement to it. It was a familiar flavor profile to Aideen, as dwarves had always made use of mushrooms due to how such fungal growths were the most common “crop” that could be grown in the dark underground.

Unlike the dwarves in Alcidea – the ones from the Kingdom Down Under primarily lived underground, while Knallzog was mostly half above ground and half underground – the dwarves in Hassid mostly lived above ground. That was partly due to the rather sandy soil of the region, which made it poorly suited for underground construction, but they adapted quite well to the new lifestyle, from what Aideen could tell.

The villagers also offered them shelter for the night, even if it was at an abandoned house that they would need to clean themselves. The guards had the place cleaned while Aideen and the others were chatting with the local villagers, and were finished by the time they went over to rest.

There were naturally no such things as furniture or amenities in the abandoned house, but it was at least a roof over their heads. During their nights in the forest, Aideen’s trio would sleep inside the wagon, which was rather cramped, while the others would sleep outside with the trees’ canopies as their roof. The house happened to have two rooms, a larger and a smaller one, so their merchant-guide took the smaller room while Aideen’s group took the larger one, while their guards slept in the wagon.

By the time they woke up the next morning, which was not that long after the sunrise, most of the village was already out and about, either working their fields, taking care of their animals, or doing other miscellaneous things. There was even some breakfast left for Aideen’s group, even, left simmering on the large cauldron, since the villagers clearly had their breakfast earlier in the day.

Breakfast was a thick soup, almost like a stew, with chunks of the soy cakes they had the previous night, some mushrooms, and eggs as the ingredients. It was a hearty affair that filled the stomach, the sort of thing people want then they would be working throughout the morning.