Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Essek and Caleb have been exploring Aeor together for four months now. Doing it right this time as researchers instead of tomb robbers. Carefully cataloging all of their finds. Reading all they can together. Caleb develops a way to combine Widowgast's Vault of Amber with Scry and Programmed Illusion to create Widogast's Memory Stones. The spell stores up to five minutes of visual recording in a piece of amber that can be viewed, paused, and navigated through at will. In this way, they keep recordings of all their finds.

They start out treating it only as a research tool, but sometimes they catch outtakes and thoughtful moments. Then it becomes deliberate. Some are candid moments. They get the idea to use Major Image to caption the memory stones to share important moments like short silent vlogs. Able to be replayed with perfect clarity at will as a shared diary. They quickly figure out how to put a magical password on these for privacy and safety. These ones are only meant to be shared with each other.

Caleb has perfect recall, but Essek doesn't and has centuries ahead of him for memories to fade. So the stones are a way to remember their too short time together for the rest of his life. Long in the future they'll be found, unlocked after years of study, and become the best record of their time together.

They try to be safe, but the magic is so wild in this place there are mishaps. Most of them pass on their own. There is camaraderie in experiencing things together that no one else would believe. They try to keep Greater Restoration scrolls on them, but they often run out.

They grow closer day by day. Their relationship, reshaped by hurt and betrayal, begins to heal again. But they're afraid of crossing boundaries with each other. To further complicate what they have by reaching for more. Both the tension and restraint remain between them.

They set up Caleb's tower as a base camp, recast at the start of every day. While cataloging the area around one of their camps, they find a building with strange translucent blue mushrooms growing from cracks in the second story with a door on the ground level. A place of note to return to.

They decide one day to document the species, wearing gloves to avoid getting any unknown poisons on them. The door is stuck and hard to move. They have to work at it with spells for a while until it comes free. A cloud of spores from unseen mushrooms on the back of the door erupts as they're dislodged. They breathe them in before realizing what's happening and look at each other with dread for what may happen. They realize their folly in not wearing masks. Quickly they retreat towards their camp, so they're not caught in the open with a medical emergency.

Chapter Text

They're halfway to camp when the spores begin to take hold. Essek says something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should lead…" Suddenly the caves are full of huge white tundra bats, startled by the commotion, flying at them aggressively and screeching as they try to outrun whatever is happening.

A strangeness comes over Essek's body like his bones and flesh are warping and reforming unnaturally. Like polymorph but with fell electric energy and impossible shapes. Essek feels his body extend, reaching down to the ground as his legs become arms and another set grows from his torso like a beetle made of soft flesh. The cold hits as his clothes seem to sink into his form.

He looks up and sees Caleb has become a round ball on stick legs. His face, long hair, and beard stretched across him like a balloon drawn on before being inflated. His leg bones connected to his skull bone. His form is abstracted like 4-dimensional rotoscoping into a 2-dimensional shape with flat color blocks. He feels like he's losing all sense of time and self as his bones dissolve into the offset primary colors of ink.

An entity moves in the darkness like a bulbous metal chair with a jellyfish bell beneath it and some strange humanoid creature like a baby alien in it. Towards them? Past them? Essek rears up with his front segments and scrambles for the door of the tower on his purple hand feet. Caleb runs under him before scuttling through. Essek slams the door behind them.

References

1. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
2. Long Essek created by @ bloodfliess on Twitter.
3. Short Caleb by @ snufclay on Twitter.
4. Baby Alien from The Masked Singer

Chapter Text

Essek sinks to the floor between the Transmutation and Conjuration windows, staring at the Dunamancy one. Caleb plops next to him, accidentally bumping him, their opposing roundness bouncing off each other, misjudging in this state where these forms begin and end.

The colors of the stained-glass shimmer impossibly intensely and the globules' light swirls around him. Essek stares at the depiction of Dunamancy as it stretches into its own vast expression of time and space. The intricate geometric patterns of the parquet floor become their own three-dimensional landscape.

Essek starts to speak but his face feels numb and tingly. It takes a moment to adjust to the feeling that he's breathing through spiracles and trachea instead of his mouth and lungs. As he thinks about it, he projects his voice through some unknown magic, unsure if it's out loud or directly in Caleb's mind.

"Caleb are you… alright seems like a strong word… I may be hallucinating, or those spores have strange magic. I feel very long and many-legged and you seem like a small legged ball. What are you seeing?"

Caleb's voice also sounds distorted and warped like it's being split in five parts with the pitches layering on top of each other. "Well, my friend, you do look like a giant insect with arms for legs like a Zemnian fairy tale. But your face is the same except for the white eyes. I think I may feel round or a shape that's round in some dimension. I don't feel my arms. So that is consistent with your observations. But as Beauregard would put it, I may also be ‘tripping balls.'

"I am not certain what this is or how long it will last. If it is dangerous, I do not know how to go for help. I am unsure if I can do magic like this to teleport. Perhaps we should give it an hour or two. We should have bought those scrolls of Greater Restoration when we had the chance, even at that outrageous price."

Essek replies, "I do not know if I should be comforted or terrified that you are seeing the same. Another great mystery of magic uncovered. I agree, we wait for now, and hope it passes, but keep checking in. If there is some poison at work, we must try to do something. Something has really, really gone wrong."

A thought floats by. This monstrous body feels strange and disconnected from himself, but there is still something about it that feels better. It is alien but easier and freer to move. It is a feeling he isn't sure he wants to examine too deeply for fear of what he'll find, but his mind digs at it anyway. He realizes what he's feeling is an absence of low-level pain. His bones and joints have dissolved into this new form and aren't hurting. Especially his back and legs. Until he stopped feeling it, he hadn't been consciously aware it was happening. Though he knows it gets worse trying to walk for very long instead of floating. That is probably something he should look into if this experience doesn't kill him.

References

1. "Treason! Animals" by Franz Ferdinand

Chapter Text

One of the cats peaks out at them from the walkways above. Caleb calls out to it to bring him a bag of amber from the lab. He says to Essek, "I don't know if either of us can work this magic, but if we create a Memory Stone, we can view it later to see if this is real." Essek agrees that's a good idea.

Essek looks at the windows while they wait. He feels the weight of their symbology and their details. Caleb was an artist with magic who could see all the subtle facets of the world and finely control them to his own vision. A thousand tiny moments crash and soar in Essek like short clips from Widogast's Memory Stones in his head. He thinks about his process of mastering these elements through his own research. Caleb comes at them differently and it's exciting to share and compare their understanding.

The cat returns with the amber. Since Caleb seems to have no arms for somatic components, Essek tries the spell, weaving his leg hands through the universal forces of magic. It feels strange and hard to get started, but he's able to form it. The scrying eye blinks out facing them. He guides it to look them over. 

Essek thinks of Ginsberg writing,

"who dreamt & made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, & trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images & joined the elemental verbs & set the noun & dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus"

Before the spell ends, Caleb leans into him for a closer shot of them together. The warmth is comforting and grounding. Essek lets his brain sink into this feeling and thinks of a poem by Sappho,

And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.

Almost despite himself, for the first time, he reaches out his nightmare leg arm and wraps it around Caleb. Feeling both the unfamiliarity of everything and the deep bond that lays between them. Caleb leans in and melts into him. Emotionally, thinks Essek, but also, he is not sure if his skin has become energized liquid along the line of their connection. He felt Caleb's warmth through his chitinous armor. There was safety? comfort? An anchor to each other as the familiar became strange, or maybe far too real.

Safety was not a thing he'd let himself feel with many people. He'd told himself that comfort was not a thing he found in others, but maybe comfort had never really been offered to him.

 He had once felt arrogantly proud of people wanting to know him for the resources and influence he could provide them. He worked hard and competitively for his place starting from family power he was also proud of.

But he didn't think anyone would really want to know him for him, so he kept most of his relationships transactional. Isolated himself so they couldn't reject him. Especially for the things he didn't like himself for doing in the pursuit of many kinds of power.

The Mighty Nein, Especially Caleb, very quickly dodged those defenses and made sure he knew it wasn't transactional (which he had to admit had scared him because he felt vulnerable to attack). But slowly that made him believe he was wrong about what's valuable in life, what's worth doing even though it's hard and scary and risky.

He hadn't been a stranger to risk, but he'd always had ways of making the consequences fall on someone else. Now he was putting himself directly in harm's way to protect others. It was freeing to let go of all that careful control he'd maintained at any cost. It's a core experience that both he and Caleb share. They had begun their interactions dueling to extract what they needed from each other. He hadn't counted on liking any of them so much.

Even after Essek hurt him so badly, Caleb had reached out again. Sometimes he wonders if Caleb will ever really hold him accountable for everything that happened. Or maybe his operative fallacy is believing that unconditional love means not seeing the negative about someone. Maybe it really means loving them despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity.

It was a strange feeling that anyone would see him for who he really was and still love him afterward. He laughs grimly to himself. Here he is, awake one afternoon from uneasy dreams, finding himself transformed in his research camp into a gigantic insect, and somehow still he is holding this man in his arms right now.

Time and thoughts stretch on. That feeling of a dream where you can't tell how much time has passed. A lifetime in a nap on a minute in a full night. The transformation fades but neither of them moves. They are still lying against each other in their regular bodies now. He thinks about the simpler thoughts of being polymorphed into animals and how sometimes it was easier to show affection when he wasn't trying to control every moment.

The room is a kaleidoscope from the colors of the glass blending into each other. The forms seem to shift around each other as his vision unfocuses. He realizes just how far his inhibitions had been lowered from whatever mental effect the mushrooms were having along with the magical metamorphosis.

He'd been trying to hold these feelings off so long. It had been a mistake before to let himself have so much faith in someone and it terrifies him now. It feels like he could get used to having six leg-arms before he got used to the idea of trusting and being trusted or opening his heart to someone fully.

References

1. "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg
2. Fragment of a poem Sappho from "If Not, Winter" translated by Anne Carson
3. "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka

Chapter Text

The need to hear voices hits Essek. He doesn't care what they talk about. Just say something, anything. From a half-remembered song, he recalls "Oh what am I waiting for? A spell to be cast or for it to be broken?"

He wants to say, "I am so grateful to have found you, Caleb Widogast. And that you have not given up on me, despite the wrong I have done you. I thought there was no hope for redemption, so I pushed away the possibility. It feels like something is fundamentally wrong with me. But you saw who else I could be, and a path forward from my mistakes. I shudder to imagine where I might be now without you. A prison of my own making I suspect."

He thinks to himself immediately, "Luxon, did I speak that or think it?" This train of thought may have been a mistake in the state. This isn't the time and he's going to regret every word. His need to reach for some mystery he can't stop thinking about is going to blow up in his face again. This was no different than recklessly opening that mushroom door. It was a day of bad decisions. But he also thinks of Essex Hemphill's words,

"Had I been clear-headed 
there would have been 
no pattern of sanity 
to follow. 
Out of this confusion 
I bring my heart,"

Caleb gently nestles his body further into Essek like a cat to fill a pause that seems thoughtful more than awkward. He recites a Pansy Division song they've listened to together,

"I never expected to be here
Or thought I would end up like this
So allow me to ponder this question, I wonder
What's happened to years that I've missed?"

Essek hugs him a bit harder. They cling to each other through this surreal psychedelic experience, unsure if it's a shared hallucination or the transformative wild magic of Aeor. Or both. Essek floats like there is no end to the connection between the molecules of his body and the entire fabric of the universe. Feeling all of it and yet unable to process more than a fraction of it.

Essek had become long and Caleb short and they see grand visions of the fractal webs of time and fate and possibility intertwined. The length of their transformed bodies is like the time they each have in Exandria. Essek wonders if he's projecting onto the experience or if the magic had shaped itself around that thought.

References

1. "Treason! Animals" by Franz Ferdinand
2. "Common Sentiments" by Typhoon
3. "So Many Dreams" by Essex Hemphill
4. "(Is This What It's Like) Getting Old" by Pansy Division

Chapter Text

After a while Caleb says, "I think I am understanding a little too well what Ginsberg meant when he wrote,

"This image or energy which reproduces itself at the depths of space from the very Beginning
in what might be an O or an Aum
and trailing variations made of the same Word circles round itself in the same pattern as its original Appearance
creating a larger Image of itself throughout depths of Time
outward circling thru bands of faroff Nebulae & vast Astrologies
contained, to be true to itself, in a Mandala painted on an Elephant's hide,"

Essek replies, "Through my work with Dunamancy, I thought I knew that experience better than I did." He hesitates. "Hearing your voice is helping ground me."  He pauses again, searching for what he wants.

He feels the hard floor against the muscles of his chitinous back flattening out on the floor like a contented crocodile on a sunny Friday. His body looks like his own again, but some part of him still feels the long-transformed body. The muscles of his leg-arm twinge from holding Caleb, and he wonders how long they've been here. Five minutes? Five hours? Time has become a soup.

He says, "How will we document this place? A lone building with strange fungus? It reminds me of an Adrienne Rich poem about picking mushrooms near an abandoned meeting house. I am trying to remember it. At the end, she reflects,

"And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees."

I would like to reread it. There are many poems I'd like to read with you while my head is still spinning. And this floor is not very comfortable. Can you make it to the library if we follow one of the cats? I want to listen to more than my own thoughts.

Caleb replies, "I am not sure I know where my body is in space or where my legs will end up if I move them."

Essek thinks about his own body dissociation. He replies: "I don't think I can walk, but I might be able to float. I have been teaching you that spell, maybe we should try it."

Gingerly, they stand, steadying each other. Essek is the first to let go. He floats up higher than usual to account for either set of legs, just trying to keep whatever body he has upright. Caleb keeps a hand against the wall as he gently rises and then tentatively pushes away. Both of them are a little unsteady keeping their focus on the magic. But slowly they make it to the center and up into the library.

References

1. "Lysergic Acid" by Allen Ginsberg
2. "What Kind of Times Are These" by Adrienne Rich from "Dark Fields of the Republic"

Chapter Text

They collapse together on the sofa by the fire. Exhausted and dizzy from the journey. Essek looks around the room for the well-known place where "Dark Fields of the Republic" by Adrienne Rich. He pulls it to him with Mage Hand and finds "What Kind of Times Are These" among the cracks where the spine has been held open many times.

They both know it well, but Essek imbues each line with what he is experiencing. He speaks a letter in between the lines full of everything too hard to say. And when he is done, they talk about secret meeting-houses of the persecuted, and mushrooms no one else knows about, and countries that make people disappear themselves.

They get steadier as they talk together. Caleb drags himself to the bookshelf and finds "The Hug" among Thom Gunn's work. He doesn't need the book to remember the poem, but he and Essek trace the indents and slight tackiness of the ink as Caleb reads them aloud.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
        Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
         Your instep to my heel,
     My shoulder-blades against your chest.
     It was not sex, but I could feel
     The whole strength of your body set,
             Or braced, to mine,
         And locking me to you

And as Caleb reads, they practice this, stretching out on the couch reading together. Each poem reminds them of another. The metaphors of writers who saw universal experiences and how their own roads connect. It is simple. But it is everything. The mortifying ordeal of being known. To find safety in the lack of safety. But that risk and the process of getting through it are shared together. Just in this moment, all the hard battles ahead feel like maybe they will be okay.

References

1. "The Hug" by Thom Gunn from "The Man with Night Sweats"

Chapter Text

Tracks:

1. "Disorder" by Joy Division
2. "Brain in a Fish Tank" by Shpongle
3. "Situation" by 1990s
4. "Wolf Teeth" by JD McPherson
5. "Treason! Animals" by Franz Ferdinand
6. "Happy" by Danny Elfman
7. "Human Fly" by The Cramps
8. "Problematic" by Bo Burnham
9. "Creep" by Radiohead
10. "Where Is My Mind?" by Pixies
11. "Lose Our Heads" by YONAKA
12. "Prosthetic Love" by Typhoon
13. "Daydream In Blue" by I Monster
14. "Common Sentiments" by Typhoon
15. "Till Forever Falls Apart" by Ashe, FINNEAS
16. "HOME" by BAYWUD
17. "Post Script" by Typhoon
18. "Boring Machines Disturbs Sleep" by Mogwai
19. "Have You Passed Through This Night?" by Explosions in the Sky
20. "Job's Lament" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
21. "Like Herod" by Mogwai
22. "Postcard From 1952" by Explosions In The Sky