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Chapter Text

An Account of the Second Research Expedition into the Ruins of the Floating City of Aeor Undertaken by Essek Thelyss and Caleb Widogast

This translation was originally produced by the Soltryce Academy as an appendix to the 50th anniversary academic edition of Thelyss’ biography of Professor Widogast. The original manuscript (written in undercommon) was found by Academy librarians among the Widogast Collection (approx. 100 books and manuscripts from the Professor’s personal collection, bequeathed to the Academy after his death), possibly included by accident. Given the personal nature of the material, the editors at the Academy Press made every reasonable effort to contact the author for permission to publish, but he could not be found; a limited print run was approved regardless, on the grounds that (in the words of the head archivist) ‘if he cared what happened to it, he shouldn’t have left it lying around with no forwarding address’. Nevertheless, certain particularly private passages have been disincluded, because this editor values her life.

Day One

It was five days ago that I received a message from an old friend and colleague (perhaps old is the wrong word, but trusted) with a proposal I had been awaiting, but had not expected to come for some time. A few months ago, having already spent some time here at the outpost studying the ruins of Aeor from the relative safety of the frozen surface, I was met unexpectedly with some travelling friends, who - for reasons I will not go into here - were descending into the very heart of the ancient city below, where no creature in recorded history had gone before. They asked me to join them, and, despite some apprehension, I accepted - not least because among these friends was Caleb Widogast, a brilliant human wizard with whom I had had the pleasure of collaborating before, and I could hardly have hoped for a better partner to break new ground with in such a fascinating place.

Our exploration, while eye-opening and indeed pioneering, was necessarily shallow, as our mission was urgent, and we could only afford to spend very limited time and resources on scientific curiosity. Suffice to say that we discovered enough to whet my appetite greatly, but left far too many questions unanswered and spaces unexplored to satisfy me - nor could it satisfy Caleb, whose curiosity in the face of danger outweighed my own. I told him that someday we could return, in less dire circumstances, and conduct some more in-depth (and hopefully more leisurely) research; the suggestion became a promise, and then a plan, and now a reality.

In addition to ourselves, the party will include seven more people, consisting of Dagen, an experienced local ranger known to Caleb and to a lesser extent myself; two of my own research assistants whom I believe are likely to be the least discriminatory (in terms of both racial bias and scruples about rules); as well as four of the outpost’s own rangers as scouts and guards. If their names do not come up naturally within this account, I will be sure to list them on the back page for posterity, particularly any who die, although we are taking a much more measured approach to risk this time around, so no casualties are anticipated. I had half expected Caleb to bring some of his own trusted collaborators as well - the halfling Veth Brenatto and his sister human Beauregard Lionett have both worked with him with great success in matters arcane and academic, respectively, before - but all are occupied with other commitments. I confess I am a little relieved - both are friends, of course, but Beau can be a little wary of me and has always been rather loath to leave Caleb alone with me; as for Veth, affable as she has always been, I suspect she still holds a grudge about that time I imprisoned and interrogated her husband.

Caleb and Dagen arrived, despite inclement weather, at the outpost yesterday morning, leaving us just time to eat, get hastily reacquainted, and discuss our plans perhaps a little too late into the day, before he needed to sleep. Happily for those of us here at the outpost, who keep a nocturnal schedule, long-distance time differences and Caleb’s sleep-defying study habits allowed for the expedition to run on our usual rest/wake cycle, with no need for any sleepless days or double rests for anyone but the hardy Dagen, who has a remarkable ability to sleep anytime, anyplace. The humans’ rest time left me with a few more hours to gather our equipment (list appended, with the exclusion of the camping supplies the scouts insisted we would need despite Caleb’s assurances otherwise) before resting and rising for sunset. We had decided to utilise the same entrance as before, partly because Lucien’s still-secret entrance will lead us into parts of the ruin which neither the Dynasty or the Empire have yet discovered, and partly for the sake of facing the devil we know. There are no safe parts of the city, but there is safety in familiarity, and six months is not so long, in the grand scheme of things, for the monsters we previously excised from the area to be replaced. In theory.

The weather was far better for the commencement of our journey than it was yesterday, being unusually clear and ship-haltingly still. As such, we made very good time to the entry point, and the sun had not yet risen when we arrived. The mood in the party was cheerful, conversation plentiful, although the corpses left around the entrance dampened things when we reached it. Some have been removed - those of fallen outpost rangers, and one of the frost giants, which are prized for their meat and hide by locals - but those which had been left were eerily unchanged, the icy cold preventing decay. We passed them silently, the rangers stoic, the researchers a little nervous.

I had forgotten how narrow the tunnel into the first chamber is. Considering we were unlikely to make it much further tonight, we felt little need to conserve magic, and Caleb being a transmutation specialist with a much better memory than me, was prepared to cast reduce on Dagen (for ease of getting his wheelchair through), the goliath ranger Vagar, and my research assistant Cheszara, who is not very large but is quite claustrophobic. I did not ask for it myself, although I rather wished I had, the crawl being very uncomfortable, not to mention undignified, but I did not feel it was my place to ask such a thing of Caleb in this place where every spell comes with a risk of malfunction ranging from inconvenient to catastrophic, and nor did I think it becoming of a leader. Thankfully I had remembered the long drop from the tunnel mouth to the floor of the cavern, and prepared accordingly to featherfall everyone down. I wonder if this entrance has been neglected, not simply because it is unknown, but because, if it was discovered, the route would have been considered impassable by many; certainly impractical for a large research party, especially considering both magic and tunneling works are risky here. The rich reward for braving the tight space and the fall is, of course, to emerge into a part of the city that has never before been touched by either the Empire or the Dynasty.

The first chamber, as marked on the attached map, appears to be a residential area, mostly in ruin; if I recall correctly, Veth and Yasha accidentally knocked down one of the few towers left standing the first time we came, which accounted for the one ruin that was not covered in years of dust. To their credit, none of our entourage appeared to react adversely to the carpet of bones on the ground. With an archeologist to hand - Nickel, a Tiefling whose full chosen name, appropriately, is Chronicle - we confirmed that the bones were mostly those of the former inhabitants of this place, killed on impact or shortly before or after Aeor fell from the sky. A few, however, were far too large and inhumanoid for Nickel to identify; these tended to be far more recent, and subtly permeated with magic. We tried not to think too hard about the implications of this.

The only thing of true arcane interest in the room was that strange brown mold, which crept towards sources of heat and drained the heat from them. As previously determined, it was easily destroyed by extreme cold, so after taking some live samples (and discovering that no glove is thick enough to prevent mild frostbite upon touching it), the rest was freeze-burned away for the safety of the party. It appears to be - much like many of the strange creatures in this place - largely biological, but affected by some form of arcane mutation through long exposure to extremely unstable atmospheric magic. Not everything we will find down here was created by the design of the ancient archmages of Aeor, and we are not ourselves immune to the effects of the ambient magic of this place. It is easy to forget that these ruins are not friendly to wizards, but the bones of a hundred dead predecessors, all no doubt just as confident in their abilities as us, crunching underfoot do serve as a poignant reminder.

Perhaps it was as a result of this morbid thought that I felt a strange, uneasy feeling a few times in this cavern, a prickling on the back of my neck as though I was being watched from behind. Each time I looked, however, nobody was behind me, and nothing was setting off my active detect magic except our equipment, the mold, and that very faint trace on some of the bones. None of the rangers seemed to have noticed anything, and their perception is more reliable than mine. I considered asking Caleb if he’d noticed anything, but being here reminded me uncomfortably of my lack of courage in certain moments on our last visit, and it seemed rather too early in our expedition to be submitting to paranoia, at least openly. I am sure that in hindsight, I will read this back and know that paranoia was all it was, and yet clearly I am just suspicious enough that it might turn out to be something that I have decided to record it. Something invisible that does not set off detect magic seems far fetched, but if such a thing did exist, it would be… quite something.

After this, there was very little left of our night; it was fitting, considering that this was the first place we had made camp the first time we came here, that we make camp here again tonight. I had the pleasure of seeing the party’s reactions as the phantom door opened and they stepped into Caleb’s nine-sided tower for the first time. I could not help but be reminded of my own first time here: true, I was less awed by the concept of portable doorways and constructed pocket dimensions than some of them were, but upon entering, I had been as impressed as anyone. It was not the power of the magic itself that struck me - although the incredible detail of the place, down to the words in the books in the library, is a testament to the power of Caleb’s mind - but I was struck by the artistry of it.

Jester has always had a lot to say in praise of the beauty and creativity of Caleb’s magic, but she is not the only one to have noticed it. I cast my mind back to a day, a year ago at least, when I had put him to the test, challenged him to show me something impressive from his arcane arsenal, and his choice had been intriguing; it was not an extremely exotic or powerful spell - surely he knew that if I'd wanted to know what his most powerful spell was, I could simply have asked - but it was his most personalised spell. It was a modification of Bigby's Hand, altered to look like a cat's paw - his cat's paw, in fact, down to the colour and the markings. Not a weak spell for one of his age and accomplishment at the time (and he has improved many times over even since then, humans being necessarily quick to learn within the constraints of their short lifespans), but what stood out was the work he had put into creating his own spell, albeit based on an existing pattern. Few wizards at his level had begun to create spells - few wizards in history have, and even fewer outside of a research environment, with the limited resources of a roving adventurer - and Caleb had put in time, effort, thought, and creativity simply to make the spell look different. It was only a re-skin - as far as I could tell, it functioned the same as Bigby’s humanoid original - but that was almost more interesting than if he'd made mechanical improvements; all that effort had been simply for the challenge of it, the joy of it. And it was perfectly executed: the articulation of the toes correct to feline anatomy, the texture of the fur and the way it moved, the depth of the color - not a detail had been left unconsidered.

I could see from the faces of his friends that they doubted I would be impressed - to them, all he had done was shown me a giant floating cat's paw - but, as was so often the case, it was only he and I that understood what he was really telling me. He was telling me that he wasn't just good at magic, it wasn't just a tool he wielded well - he loved it, for its own sake. He poured time into it when he didn't need to, experimented with it as an academic, played with it as an artist. His tower - the home he built for his friends - is a testament to the way Caleb does magic: from the stained glass to the feline servants to the levitation between floors in place of stairs, it is frivolous in the most passionate and diligent way, and I remind myself to emulate this. Artistry is not my strong point.

But, forgive me, I have gone off on a tangent: this account is for retelling the events of our expedition, not for musing upon personal matters. It will not happen again*. Here ended the productive part of our day, and here I will end this entry.

Chapter Text

Day Two

Almost first thing this morning we moved on from Chamber 1, deducing that the limited archaeology there was not worth spending a day on when there are so many more to explore which we previously passed by, or previously marked as interesting before being forced to move on. We would much rather follow the unfollowed paths, and return to the points we were excited to return to, than waste time sifting dirt for gold.

(There is perhaps one chamber marked for exploration which I am not in any hurry to return to imminently, but if I am to put that off, I would rather delay it with worthwhile pursuits than with true time-wasting - pun not intended. But my trepidation of that place will be best set down here when we come closer to it; there is no good in my dwelling upon it now, and souring these early days of exploration.)

And so, we moved on to the Praesidis Ward. This place, as we understand it, seems to have been a centre for politics and discussion, with almost as many official buildings as homes, and various forums including a large central amphitheatre, the stage of which is occupied - as it had been before - by a woman held in stasis in one of those unique arcane bubbles, of which there are several across the city, each holding a single citizen, frozen in the moment of Aeor’s fall. The shifting complexity of the arcane sigils moving over its surface, layered so densely it might have been two or three spells interwoven, is like nothing I have ever seen; I have attempted to sketch some of the patterns I saw, but the way the surface moved, and the overlap of the layers, made it extremely difficult.

I remembered from last time that detect magic was about as useful in this case as pointing a compass at a pile of magnets, but this time we had - well, time. These domes being one of the key phenomena of interest in the city - one of the top ten on our list - we had no hesitation setting up here and focusing on this one for the rest of the day, with a little poking around the rest of the colosseum too. The results were middling, giving us a few intriguing new insights - a presence of dunamis within the spell, as well as some unknown magics which may have been a true combination of multiple schools into a single spell (as opposed to multiple spells simply layered over one another), or an entirely unknown school of magic, the difference being difficult to discern in the same way it would be difficult to tell whether a purple liquid was simply purple, or if it was a red and a blue liquid fully combined together. However, we found little conclusive evidence of what exactly the bubble was (besides the obvious, ie. a protective shield), who had created it or why, how to dispel these bubbles, or what would happen if we did. I am inclined, based on what we have found elsewhere in Aeor, to believe that these bubbles are, at least partly, a kind of time manipulation magic, holding not only the person within it in stasis, but the very moment in time itself.

Our continued exploration may reveal more information, but even if it is possible to dispel the domes - and I am increasingly certain there is a way, although I cannot tell what it is - I would have been loath to free that woman on the stage, regardless of what secrets she could tell us; Caduceus' investigations suggested that she - Brashaar - was one of the leaders of this place, an archmage of archmages, whose arrogance brought down the wrath of the gods, and I doubt we could have done anything to stop her if she decided to kill us all and go take over the world. I could not help notice, uncomfortably, the similarity of her dress to my own: the cloak, the mantle, the jewellery, symbols of status which apparently have stayed in fashion for thousands of years. For the first time in some time, I wished I was dressed differently. I did not want to think of my own hubris, the times when I, like her, had thoughtlessly forfeited the lives of my countrymen in my quest for forbidden knowledge. At least I did not have to see them crowding around me, decrying me in their last moments, like the corpses in this place had her. I do not think anyone would argue that she did not deserve it. By her expression, she appeared uncowed, which is more than I could say for myself; I, as it turns out, was easily broken by the ire of just a handful of people I cared about. Well, perhaps Brashaar did not care for anyone.

While Cheszara and I were manning the instruments at the dome, Caleb and Nickel explored the rest of the space, wandering perhaps a little far for my comfort, although the rangers adapted their perimeter seamlessly to cover both parties. Still, I kept half an eye on them as they pushed to the edges of the colosseum and beyond, and felt some relief when they returned and the circle of rangers closed back in. That strange feeling of being watched had returned, and this time I did catch Caleb and ask him if he felt anything. He said he did not, but with a look of concern that suggested he took it more seriously than I was inclined to, if I was indeed the only one who had any such misgivings. My embarrassment could not withstand the combined strength of his paranoia and mine, and in the end we called upon the rangers to conduct a more thorough search. One or two of them reported having a similar feeling a few times, which both comforted and worried me, but we could discover nothing of note.

This being said, Caleb - scanning with his still-active detect magic - paused and squinted at me, and asked, rather awkwardly and with careful choosing of words, if I had any active spells on me, around the head area. It took me a moment to realise that his hesitance to ask was because of the implication that I might - as some people, I suppose, do - wear an illusion to enhance my appearance. With a laugh, I assured him that I did not (his relief, I assume, was because he had not created an uncomfortable moment, and nothing to do with any snobbery about the concept of such enhancements), but I was wearing the anti-scrying necklace he’d given me a few months ago, and a pair of heirloom earrings with a minor enchantment on them. He examined them more closely, and appeared satisfied that this would explain whatever it was he was seeing. Here at the end of the day, with all my jewellery removed and access to a mirror in my room, I have repeated the check myself, and detected nothing, but again, I am just suspicious enough that this may prove to be something that I have taken the time to write it down.

Before moving on, we took inventory of what Caleb and Nickel had found on the audience in the colosseum. Most of their clothes are heavily decayed - the atmosphere in the city proper is not as cold as it is elsewhere, due to some sort of atmospheric heating magic which I intend to investigate presently now that I have remembered it - but naturally, any magic items on them are perfectly intact. These people appear to have been regular citizens, by Nickel’s estimation, but in an economy where magic was pervasive enough to be cheap, there was some in every pocket. The majority of people seemed to have carried something similar to a sending stone, set with multiple small gems providing multiple connections to a variety of different stones, giving each person a small network of others they could speak to from afar at will. Nickel was keen to try and track down the bodies of a full network group, to connect together a social circle; I fail to see the point of this, but it is not my area of expertise, so as long as it doesn’t pull us away from more important things, I don’t see the harm in a casual attempt. Some had jewellery which provided minor cosmetic enhancements; perhaps this is what put that idea in Caleb’s head. Nickel suspects, based on the apparent gender balance of those decorated thusly, that this was a slightly patriarchal society. Many also carried potions which could treat minor ailments or meet simple needs, including tiny pills similar to goodberries, which would provide a full day’s nutrition in one dose. Almost everyone had arcane focuses, of course: wands made of a smooth white lacquered metal, which we had seen elsewhere in the city cladding buildings, seem to have been the most popular, but some carried component pouches, containing a mix of familiar bits and pieces, as well as components which none of us could think of a single arcane use for. A full catalogue is attached overleaf; we have, of course, kept it all for future use, if and when we find instructions for any lost spells that require them.

Deciding that none of us were overly comfortable setting up camp in the midst of this dreary scene, we decided to make our way to a spot where we could get a good start tomorrow. Although the rangers have been careful to detour our path any time they detect any hints of distant movement, I still count us extremely lucky not to have run afoul of any monsters so far - that being said, it has only been two days, so perhaps I shouldn’t speak too soon. One of our rangers, a goblin woman named Briva, is getting a tad bored, and has loudly expressed her desire for some excitement, which Vagar seconded, so I would not be entirely surprised if they ‘failed to spot’ something dangerous tomorrow, forcing us into combat. Briva is one of the few people on this expedition that has never been at all intimidated by me, and I doubt my stern words will have done much to deter her if she decides to follow her troublesome inclinations; at least I can hope that the others will not.

Caleb and I followed our vague memories of our last journey through this part of the city towards that odd mausoleum we passed, a good central point that seemed quiet enough to set up camp, surrounded by plenty of buildings to explore. With no major detours necessary, we managed not to get lost; if we were in any doubt, the corpses of monsters already slain, as well as the occasional familiar footprints and, at one point, a discarded candy wrapper for which I can only blame Jester, assured us of our direction.

It is strange, following in the footsteps of our previous, more perilous voyage. There is a dissonance in the memory, the contrast between then and now: needless to say, the emotions that come with a race to prevent the impending end of the world are not those that come with a leisurely research trip. My thoughts, my feelings, even my very character, are all quite different now compared to the last time I was here. Not to say that it is not exciting (and, indeed, dangerous) to be here now, but thinking you - and possibly everyone else in the world - are about to die drops one's inhibitions more effectively than any drug. Why else was it that everyone else in the Mighty Nein who had unexpressed feelings for each other chose such a short window of time to declare them, after months in each other's company failing to do so? At the time, I remember thinking that it would be far more sensible to delay such serious developments for the relative composure of the aftermath: fear and confusion can addle the mind and warp the emotions, and one might easily regret what is said or done in the heat of a dire moment once the dust has settled and normality returns (if I can call this current time 'normality'). I stand by that - goodness knows I have made choices in emotional moments that I did not wish to stand by when I was myself again - but it had not occurred to me how odd it would feel to navigate these relationships after that strange, uninhibited time came to an end without having codified it as the new normal. At least if a decision is made, albeit while one's judgement is impaired, then all you have to do the next day is ask did you mean that? But one cannot simply say, remember how we spoke to each other that time, how we acted towards each other - is that the way things are now, or are we going back to normal?

I do not know if the* familiarity that grew between Caleb and I during the Eyes of Nine incident was intended to be permanent, or if it was a characteristic of the quest itself, and as such I do not know if I offend him by behaving much as I did before the world was ending, or if I would offend him more by behaving exactly as I did when it was. How clever I thought I was being, too clever for deathbed effusions that may mortify me if I survived, so much more sensible than Beau and Yasha and Jester and Fjord - but at least a confession is clean. How does one ask a friend if they’re on intimate terms forever now, or if that was just a comfort when it was needed? Is it strange to him that I have not spoken of it, or spoken much at all with the kind of profundity we did back then, or would it be stranger still if I did so, now that we are both fairly certain of our safety? How does one determine exactly what their friendship looks like from the other person’s perspective, and how is one supposed to behave while they are not sure?

But again, I digress. I daresay that whatever awkwardness may exist between us now will not survive our first fascinating discovery. For all my uncertainty, I can say that he and I have always found our most perfect affinity in moments of scientific breakthrough, long before we experienced the intimacy of almost dying together.

Not, to be clear, that that is my motivation here: the work is its own reward, a collaborator enhances that work, and any bond that may arise from such a shared passion is merely a happy side effect.

*translator’s note: here, the writer looks to have paused for so long before choosing the next word that the ink is a different consistency by the time he starts writing again.

Chapter Text

Day Three

Today, at the urging of Caleb and Nickel, we decided to pass over the temptingly grand-looking municipal buildings and explore some of the homes in the area; Nickel wanted to learn more about the average citizen (if ‘average’ could be used to describe any of the residents of this elegant ward) for archaeological reasons, and Caleb believed that, assuming these homes belonged to wizards, we may find more in the way of spellbooks and evidence of magic there than we would in an office or civic building.

“You wonder if it was really the Age of Enlightenment we hear it talked about, pre-Calamity,” he said as we walked, “or if it was just like it is today: the people at the top having all this, while the people down below had nothing.”

“Unfortunately for archaeologists,” Nickel said, “what survives tends to be the stately buildings and the precious metals, while all that belonged to the common people turns to dust over the years.”

“Everywhere, the same story,” was Caleb’s grim reply.

We selected a house that looked as ordinary as possible (based on what limited metrics we had to judge by), and the rangers went ahead to scout the whole place before we entered. With the topic of class dynamics fresh in my mind, I could not help but glance to Caleb for signs of discomfort about sending hirelings into potential danger in our place, he being (as far as I understand it) from an echelon closer to theirs than to mine - but if he felt any apprehension, I did not see it. Perhaps his importance within the empire in his youth was greater than I knew, or perhaps his travels with the Mighty Nein have simply accustomed him to being accompanied and protected by a stronger contingent of the party. Perhaps I, myself, feel more strangely about such dynamics than him; I am more used to being pre-eminent, perhaps, but far less used to being in a group in general.

The house, like others around this part of the city, was narrow and relatively tall, although not tower-tall, spread over three storeys. While the impact that destroyed the city had thrown the contents of the building to the floor, the walls were mostly intact, or at least there was enough left of them to see where they would have been when they were intact; a sketch plan of the layout is attached. As will be clear, the ground floor contained a small receiving room as well as a kitchen and utility room, and a stairwell which led to a set of living and dining rooms on the middle floor; the final top floor contained three bedrooms and something like an office or workshop, which was of particular interest - but I will not jump ahead.

On the first two floors, we discovered some small but brilliant pieces of domestic magic, which gave us a fascinating insight into everyday life here; magical kitchen utensils designed to ease the time and labour required for cooking, tiny mechanical animals similar to a simple Aeormatons which may have been toys for children, a fireplace stuffed with glowing arcane crystals in place of potentially dangerous flames. More than any of the grander or more important places we have seen in the city, the simple normality of the place held us in silent awe, like the bedroom of someone recently passed just after the body is removed, eerily cold and lifeless but with their shoes still sitting by the door. It felt, somehow, more haunted than the horrible scene at the colosseum, and I noticed that Cheszara on my left and Caleb on my right were both standing much closer to me than they usually would, the former seeming a little frightened, and the latter not immediately letting go of my arm after taking it to pull me over to whatever had caught his attention.

Cracked on the floor close to the fireplace (crystal-place?) in the parlour was a frighteningly lifelike portrait of a family, produced using some kind of illusion magic captured and frozen onto glass with no need for maintenance. As somebody without any artistic skill, and who despises sitting for portraits which never seem to turn out true to life, I found the implications of this last item very exciting; more so, evidently, than Caleb, who looked amused at my enthusiasm - affectionately so, I chose to believe, rather than mockingly so. I did, however, catch him returning to stare at it a few times when I drifted off to look at something else; Nickel, too, was captivated by it, but there was something much sadder in Caleb’s rumination, which made me glad we had not found any skeletons in this house. The family were human, which perhaps resonated differently with him than with me; they did not look particularly like him, but they must have looked disturbingly ordinary to him, these ancient and alien people who lived and died in this place.

Feeling that I ought to say something, I approached to look over his shoulder at it, only to find that I could think of nothing to say. Thankfully, my silent presence prompted him to speak:

“Four children,” he said. “Quite the family.”

Knowing that nothing good could come from dwelling on thoughts of dead children - of which there must, of course, have been many thousands in this city - I said, “I wonder what the parents did for a living.”

“I assume they were wizards, of some sort. Wasn’t everyone here? Although, if everyone was doing magic, perhaps nobody considered themselves wizards.”

“Measured by degrees, perhaps; a certain level of arcane skill was as fundamental as writing or mathematics, but at higher levels of skill and dedication, you are a writer, a mathematician, a wizard.”

“That would make sense. Not everyone in the whole city can have been working on grand experiments and god-defying philosophies; even if they had magic and Aeormatons to do all the menial tasks, any city with such sophisticated governance must have had pencil-pushers, bureaucrats.”

“Teachers,” I offered, relieved to see him refocusing on theory. “Artificers. Architects.”

“Architects,” he picked out the word, pointing a finger as if to highlight it in the air before resting his fingers at his mouth in a habitual gesture of thoughtfulness. “That is a word we have heard used in relation to this place. Not in the usual context, but with an implication of…” he shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. Leadership? Creation? An important position in the formation of the city itself - not just the buildings, but the fabric of it. The magic of it.”

“Brashaar,” I remembered, “was called an Architect.”

“Exactly.”

“But what does it mean?”

He gave me a small smile. “Questions,” he said, with the same tone one might say presents or cake.

Cheszara called us up to the top floor, where she had been the first to discover the office, emboldened to go ahead by the comfortingly large presence of the goliath Vagar. This room was no wizard’s laboratory, and in fact did not seem to be entirely dedicated to study; in the corner opposite the desk stood the crushed remains of a piano and what might have once been a painter’s easel, as if this room was a place to practice skills of all kinds. But the contents of the desk itself drew all of our attention: fine inks, quality paper, and a notebook full of spells.

As we had surmised, the person (or people, as we noticed two different styles of handwriting) who kept this book was no great wizard; all of the spells inside were relatively simple and cheap, between what an academic might call the first and third levels of difficulty. But only around half of them were spells we recognised; the rest were entirely new, and most of them very different to what I might have expected to find.

“Magic for recreation,” Caleb surmised as we turned the pages, his voice hushed with excitement. “So much abundance, they did not have to focus on utility - they could afford to use magic for fun.”

With his, he clapped his hand on my upper arm and gripped it tightly, as - I realised in this moment - he always did when making a breakthrough, as if to channel the excitement through his compatriots like an electric shock. I had seen him do it with his other friends, as well.

This was the end of our good fortune, however. After spending the rest of the day sat on the floor of that office, going through each unfamiliar spell one by one and discussing the underlying mechanics and their potential implications and uses (the spells themselves were mostly frivolous, but the building blocks had secrets of their own to tell), Dagen pointed out the time, and we foolishly agreed to take the book back to the Tower, where I’m sure we both planned on staying up extremely late continuing our work. But it was not to be. As predicted, after two quiet days, we could no longer avoid a fight.

On our way back, we crossed paths with a pair of the creatures called ‘absorbers’, created by the Aeorians for the purpose of fighting the divine, perhaps even the gods themselves. Of course, that isn’t to say that two of them - feral and half-starved - had that kind of power, although killing them with magic is particularly difficult. Of course, the people of Aeor were too absorbed (if you’ll pardon the pun) with the arcane and the divine to bother making their beasts resistant to physical hits, and with all of us together, we managed them without any casualties. Well, without any deaths; I had forgotten the dangers of using magic in this place, where the air is already thick with it, and several of us experienced unexpected side effects while casting spells. I managed to blind myself for a solid minute or two, which was very embarrassing and made me effectively useless in the latter half of the battle; Caleb, by contrast, got lucky and was actually bolstered by the ambient magic, the interaction with his spells producing a healing effect he could not have managed if he tried.

Briva’s attempt at magic turned her into a potted plant early in the battle, which served her right, in my opinion. I left her like that for some time before turning her back and giving her a stern talking to about her thirst for danger and her job on this mission.

Unfortunately - well, perhaps I ought to say, thankfully - Caleb used a particularly powerful spell to end the fight quickly after I was incapacitated, meaning that we do not have use of the Tower for our rest today. A fitting punishment for those at fault, but an end to our plans of staying up and poring over the spellbook, as the only logical alternative to the Tower was to create two separate Tiny Huts and split the party between them - seeing as only Caleb and I have this ability, and that the spell requires the caster to remain inside it, we had little choice but to spend the night firmly apart, with two magical barriers separating us. My mood, as can be imagined, is significantly dampened by this turn of events, and was not improved when I spotted Nickel and Cheszara playing boulder-parchment-shears to see which of them had to take the remaining spot in my Hut. Well, perhaps I should not be surprised; I have crafted myself an intimidating reputation, and evidently it is effective - Caleb can be equally frightening when he wants to be, but he is generally very likeable, and certainly a better choice of roommate.

I find myself rather missing the Tower, and not just for the comfort of a full meal and a private room with a bed. I was very much looking forward to a long and sleepless night of study with Caleb. Perhaps I miss not only the Tower, but the friend who created it; we have only been back together for a few days, and prior to that had not seen each other in months, but I have already become so accustomed to his company that its absence feels… strange. I cannot quite put a name to the feeling.

Anyway. In more positive news, I didn't feel that odd, watched feeling today, so I am beginning to hope that all that was simply early-days nerves. If it does not crop up again tomorrow, I will be certain of it.

Chapter Text

Addendum:

Last night’s deviation from it made me desirous of recounting our usual down-time routine in Caleb’s Tower here. While I had originally decided to omit our rest time from this account, focusing on our work only, listening to Nickel talk about archaeology - mostly to Caleb, who either has a genuine interest in the subject, or feigns one very convincingly - has made me cognisant of the value of recording what seems to us to be mundane day-to-day details, but which, to future scholars, may provide some key insight that would otherwise have been lost. As I see it, one cannot be too thorough, and (as will become clear from the following) I have enough time to dedicate to the writing of this account each day that I feel no need for brevity.

Excepting emergencies, Caleb always makes sure to conserve enough magic to create his Tower for us to return to every evening, whereupon he instructs his army of ethereal cat servants - all one hundred of whom appear to have their own names - to begin preparing dinner. The first night he asked me to choose the meal; the second I insisted that he choose; and since then, he has been going around the party giving everyone a turn at the honour. The dining room is set up with a single, long, banquet-style table, so naturally the whole group dines together.

After eating, it is most usual for everybody to spend the evening in the Salon until the time comes to retire; some keep to themselves, reading or maintaining their equipment, while some form card-tables and play games (Briva is particularly vicious, and loud), or simply converse over drinks. Caleb’s habit is usually to study his spells, sitting a little way from the others for comparative quiet, although he has also been taking pains to ingratiate himself with our companions in our time here so far, and will occasionally join a game of cards when invited, or be drawn into a conversation. I would certainly not describe Caleb as outgoing or extroverted, but he is willing to speak when spoken to, more so than I. It is just as well; with the obvious exception of Dagen, everyone else is very curious about Caleb, all of us from Xhorhas having lived our lives in a world with very few humans, and certainly not having had the opportunity to speak on good terms with somebody born and raised in the very heart of our enemy nation. Caleb’s willingness to answer has emboldened even the shyer members of the party to ask him questions, about his world and about himself, the likes of which none have dared ask me; again, I would not call him sociable, but there is an approachability to him, a sense of relative equality between him and the party, which has narrowed the natural gap between expedition leader and hired help. I have never joined a card game, or been asked my opinion on some entertaining topic of casual conversation, not unless it is Caleb asking, and while that is mostly due to my own inclination, I would not have even thought that a social relationship with my underlings was an option had Caleb not made it seem so ordinary. I have always been taught otherwise - to keep a professional distance - and I hardly know which of us is doing right.

Tonight’s example was not atypical: from where they were half playing cards and half debating playful hypotheticals, Briva called over, “What about you, Widogast - if you were an animal, what would you be?”

With a gesture at the steady stream of cat servants moving about the room with drinks and food, Caleb said, “You could probably hazard a guess.”

The party laughed politely. Caleb nudged my foot with his and asked, “What about you?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” I said, aware that this had been my answer to almost every friendly personal question my new friends had asked me this past year. Until one has somebody to discuss such frivolous opinions with, one does not bother to form them. “I am not much of an animal person. I cannot think of a favourite.”

“Your favourite animal isn’t necessarily the animal that’s most like you,” Briva chided. “You might like cats, but do you think you are a cat?”

“If he thought he was a cat, I’d be concerned about his state of mind,” Caleb said mildly. “But sometimes these things are clearer to our friends than to ourselves. I once told Jester I didn’t have a favourite colour, and she laughed.”

I chuckled at that myself. All of Caleb’s spells had an orange tone to them, including those he colours himself.

“You see?” he said in response to my laugh. “You see it too. I have no particular fondness for orange, and yet people associate it with me. But as our compatriot says, our favourite things are not always what we see ourselves in, especially - if you’ll forgive me taking a light question too heavily - if we don’t particularly like ourselves.”

I did not reply, and after a moment, Caleb said in a more bracing tone, “Well, in the interest of self-esteem, I will claim the cat as my animal self.”

“And in the interest of our friends seeing us clearer than ourselves,” I said, “I will defer to your judgement of me. But know that I will take it personally if you choose something unflattering. Like a snake.”

“No, of course not - I’d do you more justice than that. It should be something more…” he sighed thoughtfully, looking for the right words in Common - “Elegant. Intelligent. Proud.”

“Y’know what that sounds like to me?” Dagen said. “A cat.”

Caleb looked at me with a smile. “I have always said we were two sides of the same coin,” he said. “Perhaps this coin has cats on both sides.”

“If you are willing to share,” I said to Caleb, unwilling to engage with the others, who I could see in the corner of my eye were exchanging meaningful glances, “I will accept the honour.”

(I may have heard someone, probably Briva, say something along the lines of fire and ice, which someone else, probably Dagen, chuckled at, but I chose to let it slide).

I usually stay with Caleb for those after-dinner hours, taking the opportunity for a relative tete-a-tete and freeing myself to speak more openly after maintaining the aforementioned professionalism during the communal dinner; I have about enough time to slowly finish my glass of wine before he and the other non-elves go to bed at around 11. After this, the drow contingent of the party maintain a respectful quiet until they wake again; as it happens, the drow contingent are all quiet people by nature. Cheszara usually retires to her room alone, or finds some nook among the shelves of the library to hide with a book, and the rangers Caldax and Lyrrian - who may be siblings, or possibly a couple, I am not sure - often spend the time together in complete silence, doing practical handiwork with their equipment which I do not recognise, but which looks both productive and peaceful.

For myself, these three or four hours while most of the others are resting are essential for maintaining my sanity, and in the interest of this, I stick to a regular routine: when those who need sleep go to their rooms, I go to mine, and spend an hour or so writing this journal, among other various records and pieces of work. The first time I stayed in Caleb’s Tower, months ago, I stayed in a plain guest room, but since then, Caleb has crafted a bedroom for me just as he had for his other friends. It is similar in decor to my own tower back in Rosohna - it even smells the same - but the ceiling looks like the night sky, exactly as it hangs over the city at home, and the windows - stained glass, as they are everywhere in this Tower - depict a mixture of images inspired by Dunamantic symbols and memorable scenes from my time with the Mighty Nein. If I remember correctly, he placed the same five books on the desk all the bedrooms, so I can assume that the rather poorly researched (and explicit) romance novel written by an Empire citizen about romancing a Kryn drow is not a personal prank, but an amusing coincidence. Still, if I ever find myself in a playful mood, I will make a point of bringing it to breakfast to read in front of him, and raise my eyebrows at the various offensive inaccuracies.

After writing my notes and records, I take my few hour’s rest in meditation, and stir around three hours before the others wake. I spend the first two hours at my leisure, doing what I can to stave off the urge to continue working on my own; I read from the handful of works of fiction I brought with me for the purpose, or browse Caleb’s impressive library (tactfully avoiding the rather large section marked smut), and then go down to the transforming rooms in the great hall and open up a music room, where I have been attempting to dust off the musical skills I learned as a child, which I let slide as my life became consumed with grander and more terrible things. It is a good exercise, somewhere between rest and work, occupying and challenging my mind without wringing out the same part of my brain I’ve been using during the day.

With about an hour left before the others begin to rise - and I hesitate to confess it, although it is a habit I keep more for habit’s sake than for the final effect - I dress and groom myself as I usually would for a day at court. I have been doing so daily my entire adult life, and although I admit it is rather silly to dress up and beautify oneself for fieldwork under a frozen wasteland miles from anyone who might care, the familiarity of it is soothing, and a sense of normalcy goes a long way when you are far from home in a dangerous place. I do not entirely buy into the idea that cosmetics and fine clothes breed confidence, but I do think there is something to be said for looking (and smelling) like yourself in situations where you may benefit from some self assurance. Besides, nobody here has ever seen me without my armour, as it were, and there is even less point in making myself vulnerable to remarks than there is in simply keeping up appearances.

(The whole thing rather brings to mind some of my more fascinating discussions with Marion Lavorre, but she is not here to make any of her teasing yet frighteningly accurate observations.)

After this, everyone else rises and makes their own preparations for the day; eating an informal breakfast, we lay out our notes and our makeshift map on the dining table and decide where to go and what to do, before setting out. I enjoy the early part of the day at the worst of times - the first coffee, the sense of potential, the fact that nothing that bad can have happened yet - but these mornings, with the bustle of activity, papers scattered on the table among a selection of Jester’s favourite pastries, are particularly cheering. Perhaps breakfast with friends bearing research notes brings back pleasant memories - goodness knows I have few enough of those.

Where the day goes from here is, of course, far from routine, and so marks the necessary endpoint of this description. I am somewhat unconvinced of its academic worth, but Caldax and Lyrrian are sparring the great hall, and thus I have had to find something else to fill my usual music timeslot, lest they hear me. Perhaps I chose to write this simply to illustrate how irritating I find this interruption to my schedule, but it has not been unenjoyable, so, nothing particularly lost. Perhaps, if time and inclination continue to be favourable, I will allow myself to record occasional details of interest from our downtime in future, as long as it does not impede the recording of our work.

Chapter Text

Day Four:

Today we decided to tackle the elephant in the room: the Mausoleum of the Forgotten. Being in this part of the city, we could not move on without at least considering exploring it, even if we ultimately decided it was not worth the risk. All the places we’d explored so far had felt as safe as it’s possible to be in this city - the Mausoleum, by contrast, looked almost cartoonishly daunting.

“That the big fancy place that’s halfway falling down?” Dagen asked as we discussed the idea over breakfast. “I wouldn’t wanna go in there if I found it in a normal city, let alone here - even if it’s empty, a step in the wrong spot and the place’d come down around your ears.”

“And it didn’t seem empty last time we were here,” Caleb said. “I’d expect some undead bullshit at the very least, if not some fucked-up necromantic subspecies of sex monster, if we’re unlucky.”

(I don’t remember who started calling the Aeorian Reversers ‘sex monsters’, or why, considering they have no visible sex organs. It has, unfortunately, stuck, much to the mystification of the rest of the party, for Caleb did not offer any explanation for the moniker. It doesn’t help that his jokes tend to come out as deadpan as everything else he says.)

“We could skip it,” Caleb offered unconvincingly. “Although I recall that certain absent friends were keen to explore it the first time we came, and were voted down in the interest of time and resources.”

I remember that vote: Veth calling “Mighty Nein Check in,” and everyone forming a huddle which I wasn’t sure I should join, not sure if I could count myself under the umbrella of Mighty Nein - but the people standing near me drew me into it as though it was a matter of course. Veth and Yasha - rather a disaster-prone team on our quest up until then - were curious enough to suggest exploring the ominous-looking building, but they were outvoted five to two. I did not add my voice to the discussion, being a little irrationally afraid that if I drew any attention to my presence then Veth - the very person who told me welcome to the Mighty Nein that awful night in Nicodranas just months before - would give me a strange look and say, “what are you doing here? I said ‘Mighty Nein’ - you’re not one of us.”

In a stronger position today, I decided to be the voice of courage: “Well, we did not come here to leave interesting stones unturned. And we are not short on time or resources.”

“I agree,” Caleb said, “but I defer to your expertise, Dagen, if you think it’s unsound.”

“Oh, don’t let me hold you back,” was Dagen’s reply. “Just gotta watch where you step.”

“I, for one, am in no danger of stepping in the wrong spot,” I pointed out, and to Caleb, added, “and with the right spell, neither would you be.”

Caleb agreed to this point, pleased to be encouraged rather than cautioned. With no further planning possible, we decided to improvise - not an approach I particularly enjoy, but I will allow it is sometimes necessary. We would simply enter the building, assess the situation, and progress by whatever method and to whatever extent seemed safe, with myself leading - nerve-wracking, but logical, considering I’m the only person who can float consistently without disturbing the unsteady ground* - and Caleb close behind with a Fly spell prepared.

The Mausoleum of the Forgotten was a tower - now heavily leaning - of intricate Gothic design, three times the size of the surrounding buildings, a dreary black landmark which I can only assume would have been visible for miles around. With Detect Magic active, Caleb could sense necromancy coming from inside before we opened any doors. I was impressed he could pick up any detail at all - to those sensitive to such things, the background thrum of ambient magic here among the ruins is palpable even without detection spells, muffling the senses like bright light or the noise of a crowd. Being in this city feels like being deep within the bowels of some great arcane machine, surrounded by a thousand humming cogs and runes, covered in a fine layer of oil. All very well for those of us who are fascinated by such things, and willing to dig around in the messy parts to see how it all fits together, but having visited the Blooming Grove since my last journey down here, I have a newfound respect for Caduceus’ resilience; I can hardly imagine how someone like him could stand to be in a place like this, the polar opposite of his peaceful green domain.

The opposite of the blooming grove would be a fair description of the Mausoleum of the Forgotten; both, technically, are burial places, but they could hardly be more different. There was no need, in the end, for us to fear monsters inside - there was nothing even nominally alive in here, and I would conjecture that the heavy aura of death hanging around the tower acted as a strong deterrent for most living things. There were, however, undead in droves, although not the violet type we were bracing ourselves for. I actually think I would have preferred that.

The lower floor was open, the walls lined with what I thought at first were plaques, but on further inspection, were in fact drawers, like those seen in a morgue, each containing a mummified body. More mummified than those outside, but not as much further advanced in their degree of decomposition as one might expect, given how much older these were; Nickel’s investigation suggested that the freshest were at least three hundred years older than any of the bodies outside, and great lengths had been gone to to chemically and magically preserve them, without the use of divine magic. Despite our great trepidation when disturbing them, the bodies remained still and motionless as we investigated them. They had all been interred without grave goods of any kind.

In the centre of the room was a large pool of inky black liquid, a little of it spilt due to the angle of the partially-collapsed floor. After some careful experimentation, we discovered an arcane link between the drawers and the pool: the latter was a vessel, the former a conduit, and when activated, threads of pale grey light gathered around the chosen drawer and formed into a ball, like wound yarn - the grey ball then floated into the pool, which lit up. Steam began to rise, and the steam formed into the shape of a face.

Once, I am sure, these faces were able to speak, to tell their stories and share their knowledge with the modern (at the time) world. But evidently too much time has passed. The blurred visages in the steam simply screamed, loudly, incomprehensibly, and horrifyingly, and there did not seem to be a way to adjust the volume. Unfortunately, for the sake of scientific procedure, we had to try at least three to be sure this was a general truth, and not just one or two - for want of a better phrase - spoiled souls. It was not a pleasant experience for any of us.

The discussion that followed - after we had recovered with some very alcoholic hot chocolate - was, of course, extensive: could the Aeorians have tethered these people’s souls to their bodies? How? Was this place intended to function like a simplified Luxon Beacon, storing souls - if that is indeed what the grey light was - but without ever releasing them? To what end? Simply to spite the Gods, denying them even their dead, or was this a kind of archive? Why are all the bodies so old - did they stop the practice, or was the procedure only done on long-dead bodies - on the forgotten? Worst of all - were the souls inert until channelled into the black pool, or could all these dead have remained conscious in some way, all these centuries?

I am sure it would not take a genius to see the comparisons to be drawn here to our own people’s practices around death. I suspect the state of the souls in the Mausoleum is the fate of any soul kept captive on the material plane for this long: I have always posited that the oldest of my people, those who have lived the most lives, are already beginning to show signs of cognitive deterioration as a result of extensive reincarnation, their souls captured and recycled too many times. I am glad I have opted out, so to speak; one of the better decisions I have made in my life, even if it was done partly to spite my mother. After seeing the Grove, that restful place where the bodies of the fondly remembered feed the verdant gardens of their living caretakers, and after seeing the souls tethered to this place, waiting in the cold for someone to come along and give them a voice, I am less inclined than ever to consign my soul to a holding area, awaiting the day it contaminates some fresh, unassuming child with the burden of crimes committed in a past life - even if the Beacon itself is rather more comforting a space than that awful tower with its racks of desiccated corpses.

Well, easy for me to say, I suppose. I can expect to see the better part of a millennium without any interventions, simply by virtue of having been born an elf. Most other species have a good decimal place less than that, lucky to make it to triple digits. Quite why it is my people who are so obsessed with cheating death - well, I do know why, but it seems ironic that the so-called secret to immortality came into the hands of some of the longest-lived creatures in the world, and not the shortest. Humans, especially, have grand ambitions, and I am sure they would turn this world on its head were they to find some way to give themselves more time to work their machinations. Perhaps it is well they cannot: quite besides the fact that many humans’ ambitions would be terrible to behold if they were to unfold over centuries or more, but I rather think it is the shortness of their lives that drives them to progress in their many endeavours so quickly, and with such passion, compared to the relative complacency of elves. I do not think as lowly of humans as many of my people do - I never did, always having felt myself to possess a rather human-like urgency in my ventures - but nowadays I hold them in even higher regard, for obvious reasons. In my biased opinion, the humans I care for would do great things with the kind of time elves have; this being said, I am not sure the humans I care for would like to live so long. I hope they are in no hurry to die, but it is hard for me to imagine Caleb - even with all his grand ambitions for knowledge and power and world-shifting change - pursuing immortality. Unhappy news for me, perhaps, but there it is.

Well. On a more substantive note, as we stood outside the Mausoleum, drinking, resting and discussing, I once again felt the gaze of some unseen creature behind me - so much for a false alarm. Being increasingly worried about it - and, after a grand total of five days in his company, already tired of hiding things from Caleb (how did I stand it for so long last year?) - I spoke up immediately. The rangers - already shaken from the events inside - attacked the space I’d pointed out like bloodhounds, but found nothing, as usual; however, this time both Cheszara and the pair of soldiers who are either siblings or married admitted to feeling it too, at about the same time I had. Caleb pointed out that this represented the entire drow section of the party; so far, none of the others had ever felt this sensation. Whether that is significant or not remains to be seen, and there is little else we can do about it, although Caleb did insist upon burning through every means of magical examination at our disposal before the night was over.

“Are you alright?” He asked me as we did this, in a low voice so that the others would not hear.

The concern in his voice, albeit mild, worried me. “Why? Are you getting something?”

“No, I mean… this place. The black pool, the faces. It was… disturbing.”

“Coming face to face with death usually is, I suppose. Especially death without rest.”

“More so from the Kryn perspective, I’d imagine,” he said, following the same train of thought as I had. “Not a favourable demonstration of a soul held in stasis, for someone whose soul is likewise bound.”

“For someone whose…? Oh, no, I’m not consecuted,” I said, momentarily surprised that he did not know, despite the fact that nobody outside my family does.

His surprise was much greater, but he managed to keep his voice down. “What? You told us you were!”

“When did I tell you that?”

He began to describe some occasion last year - his memory, as always, infallible - before realising what he was saying and stopping, the explanation presenting itself.

“I was not exactly truthful with you back then,” I confirmed, sheepishly. “On more subjects than one.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t go around telling people you don’t trust how easy you would be to kill.”

“No, I mean - why were you not consecuted? Someone of your station - forgive me, I do not know much about it, but from my understanding it would be a matter of course, yes?”

“It would. It was offered, and I declined. And if it makes you feel any better, this is a secret from everybody; nobody knows except my mother - who was furious, but keen to ensure the scandal in our family stayed under wraps - and my brother, who knows many of my secrets.”

“Why decline?”

I decided against spending the next hour breaking down the many intertwined aspects of my family situation, my feelings about religion, my uncertainty about the Beacons and my suspicions about the long-term consequences of living too many lives, and the attitude to life and death and rebirth that I had developed as a rare fresh soul in a world of second- and third- timers, and chose trust in our similarities to secure his understanding: I said simply, “Would you take it?”

He considered for a moment, and then said, “Fair enough.”

It seems redundant to say, but this is precisely what I enjoy about working with Caleb: lengthy explanation is unnecessary.

Exploration further up the tower was limited, due to the increasing instability of the higher levels; Caleb and I flew up through some holes in the floors, but found little of note except more and more rows of bodies, and some hints of motion which we were not keen to stick around all by ourselves to investigate. As we descended, some of the corpses - belatedly and horrifyingly - had begun to shift and stir, perhaps preparing to enact some rusty defence mechanism; I suspect our unsanctioned ascent into the upper floors had triggered it. Neither of us having any interest in necromancy, and as such neither of us feeling inclined to take anything from this place for further study or use, we decided to leave quickly and lock the door behind us, and end our investigation here.

“Should we destroy it?” I suggested to Caleb as we stood outside, listening to the soft sound of shifting movement from the other side of the door. “The tower itself, I mean. Nickel will protest, I am sure, but… well, it seems foolish to simply say I don’t like it…” I was not sure quite how to express what I was feeling.

“You’re the expert,” he replied. “Relatively speaking. Do you think the souls would be released to the astral plane if we destroyed the place? Would the souls within a Beacon be released if it was destroyed?”

“As far as I know, the latter is not possible, although as a purely theoretical circumstance, I’d say yes - the former, though, I am not sure. I think it unlikely that simple physical destruction would have such an effect; if we disintegrated each body, perhaps… but that would take time and resources, and - well, I don’t mean to sound ruthless, but I’m not sure I care enough to waste either on such a project.”

“As long as we’re being ruthless, I will say that it wouldn’t hurt us to leave it as it is,” he said. “I am all for leaving places better than we find them, as you well know, but I think if we tried to apply that to this city…” he ended the sentence with a gesture and a shake of the head to illustrate the futility of such an endeavour. “We have many capabilities, don’t get me wrong, but we are only men. Well, some of us,” he added, seeming to remember the rest of the party’s presence.

We left the Mausoleum as it was. It felt odd to walk away, but I suppose this is a feeling we will have to get used to in this place. It was a quiet night in Caleb’s Tower, and I suspect even those who did not stay up later than usual will be sleeping a little less tonight.

*prior to the discovery of this account, it was not known how or why Thelyss adopted his well-known and unique habit of floating a few inches above the ground at almost all times - later in these pages, however, he does explain its genesis, if not its mechanism. With all due respect, the reason is far stupider than most scholars believed.

Chapter Text

Day Five

I have tried in vain to muster the will to write about today’s events in the correct order, but try as I might, I find I cannot. I have just had a most revealing conversation with Caleb, which has so overtaken my mind that I can scarcely recall what else happened today. Despite being almost entirely irrelevant to our research, it demands to be written about, and perhaps after doing so I will be able to return to the day’s findings. I can always tear these pages out if I so choose.

Where to begin? It was after dinner, although I chalk it up mostly to luck that we ended up having this conversation in the relative privacy of the fireside in the salon, with the others playing a noisy game of slapjack across the room. We had been continuing a full-party dinner-table discussion on gender, a subject which was started upon due to some of Nickel’s theories about Aeorian society, and continued due to the party’s fascination with the fact that Caleb had not grown up in a matriarchy. As might be imagined from the young son of a very old and very traditional mother, I had enough to say on the subject of Kryn high society and its gender roles (and enough hesitancy to speak openly at the dining table) to still be speaking on it to Caleb after the group had broken up.

“But I should not complain,” I concluded, after having complained for some time. “A firstborn son may be a disappointment, but at least I am not my brother: the second disappointment stings all the more, I am sure. Quite how he managed to grow up not hating the whole lot of us is beyond me.”

“Next time you see Beauregard, you must tell her all of this,” Caleb said (for I had shared several anecdotes from my youth, which would have been commonplace to anyone raised as I was, but which were extraordinary to him, and would likely be equally so to his countrywoman). “You two have more in common than I would have guessed. Her father would throw his daughter to the dogs for a son like you.”

“When I was young I used to dream of such a reversed society,” I admitted with a smile. “I would have cared nothing for her misfortune, and envied you your good luck. But I doubt your path to success was clear, either, even if gender was not your obstacle.”

He made a noise of concurrence. “Poverty was my obstacle. Of course, I received a full scholarship to study at the academy, so, at the time, I thought the obstacle was dealt with. I thought it was simply a reward for my genius - I was too young to consider the convenience of a talented child with everything to prove and nothing to lose, and with no family of consequence to miss him. Nobody that couldn’t be easily… dispatched.”

“Is that what they did?” I asked, too curious to notice the weight of what I was asking. “The Assembly? Dispatched them?” It would certainly explain his hate for his former patrons.

He looked at me with surprise, and, apparently no more noticing the weight of his own words than I had, told me: “No - I did. Did you never hear this story?”

“You did what? What story?”

“I suppose you wouldn’t know; I forget who does and who doesn’t. But… yes. When we were about seventeen - well, that age probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but adolescent, on the cusp of adulthood - our mutual friend Trent had a… test, which he would pose to his student Volstruckers. He would modify our memories to make us believe our parents were plotting to betray the empire, and order us to do what was necessary. If the student passes the test, not only have they handily severed those ties to the outside world, but they’ve proven their suitability for the job. The Volstrucker, they are… executioners. If we couldn’t kill on command, without question, what use were we? For my part, when it was my turn… well, in terms of the test, mine was a mixed success at best, but… I did what I was ordered. My fellows and I went to my childhood home, and I set it alight with everyone inside.”

As you might imagine, I could think of nothing to say to this: I simply stared at him.

“The regret was immediate, of course,” he continued. “I think at that point my brain had already started to react poorly to all the spells he had me under - more poorly, apparently, than my peers. Without going into too much detail, I spent the next decade in the Vergesson Sanatorium - you know of it, I believe, Trent’s institution. Obviously I recovered and escaped - many years ago now - and my memories of that time are… piecemeal. Hazy. Rather less so than I’d like, though, in some cases… But, yes. That is what happened. When I speak of my crimes - and the crimes of the Assembly - this is the kind of thing I am speaking of.”

The fire crackled in the following silence. Across the room, the shouts and laughter of the others sounded distant, a world apart.

It took me some time to think of something to say, and when I did, all I could manage was a soft, “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

Seeing my expression, he seemed to remember himself; he took a sharp breath and shook his head slightly, as if sheepishly awakening from an accidental nap.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated back to me, “I probably ought to have prepared you for that story. I’ve told it a few times now - I suppose I’m forgetting how heavy it is for the uninitiated. I must say, though,” he added, “this is probably the least worried I’ve been about the reaction of the person I’m telling it to.”

“Who else have you told?

“The first people I told were Veth and Beauregard: Veth, because she was my best friend and I trusted her, Beau, because we weren’t friends and I wanted her to trust me. I suppose that was the most difficult telling, simply because I’d never said it out loud before, but I think the second time was… scarier. I chose Beau and Veth for a reason; I feared the others’ reactions a lot more. Jester most of all. Such a good heart, you know - how could she possibly grasp such evil?”

Despite everything, I had to smile. “And I, of course, am evil enough myself that I would not bat an eyelid.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say it,” he said, and I think he was joking, though it is not always easy to tell. “It is strangely comforting… how can I explain it? I do not want to say it’s nice not to be the worst person in the room…”

I chuckled at that, which seemed to relax him.

“...I mean something more like… to be on good terms with you, to have respect and hope for you after everything you’ve done… I suppose it makes me feel like there’s some hope for me, too. And that I don’t have to… I don’t know, pretend for you. I think we can both sit somewhat comfortably in our mutual shittiness together, and feel a little less terrible about what we’ve done, knowing that there’s someone else who has done equally terrible things and still become someone we can admire.”

“Well, I am glad to be of some comfort to you.”

There was a long pause while I gathered my thoughts - and my courage - before saying, hesitantly - “Caleb, you were so young - even by human standards, a mere child - and you were under the control of one of the most evil men in the world, which, coming from someone who is also on that list, should mean something. And your regret is enough of a testament to your true intentions in itself. I don’t want to tell you how you should feel about it, but know that I don’t think any less highly of you. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I did not think you would, but still… thank you.”

He had avoided my eye thus far, but for a moment here we caught each other’s gaze, and I suddenly felt a great affection for him which I was far too self-conscious to express. I am not sure I feel particularly comforted by his story - the crimes he has vaguely alluded to in the past were not, as it turns out, his own fault, to the extent that mine were - but his trust in me is a great compliment, and to be a source of comfort to someone else is a new sensation for me. I made a mental note to tell him what happened between myself and my father - in this matter, I believe his absolution would mean a great deal to me, especially knowing his background - but not today.

“It’s funny,” I said, feeling the need to shift the topic slightly, “when I had to confess the darkness of my own past, Jester was the person I was least worried about, for exactly the reason you were most worried: I did not believe that such a good heart could see evil in someone she cared for, no matter what.”

“Who were you most worried about?”

“You, of course,” I said, surprised it wasn’t obvious.

“Me?”

“Perhaps less so if I’d heard your story, but you were the person whose good opinion I valued the most. And, to be fair, you had just threatened to kill me if you didn’t like what you heard.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t having a good day.”

“Entirely my fault, no judgement.”

Later that evening, as we were going to bed, he lingered outside the door to my room before moving on to his own.

“Before I told Beau about my past,” he said, his voice hesitant and laced with some meaning I could not identify, “We were not close. Back then she was not the friendly, socially competent person you know today; I was secretive, she didn’t like secrets, so she didn’t like me, and she made no secret of it. After I came clean with her, things changed. We became…” He paused, apparently struggling to find the word in Common, and instead interlaced his fingers together to illustrate a tight bond. “Like this. As we are today.”

I nodded, not quite catching his point. Realising that I did not understand, he took an embarrassed breath and rephrased:

“What I mean to say is, I hope this conversation… I don’t know. I’ve sensed a bit of a… hesitance, since we’ve been here, and I hope we can be more…” He curled and uncurled his fingers, again trying to grasp the right word.

“I understand,” I told him, truthfully now. “I apologise - I am sure that any awkwardness has been my doing. I do not mean anything by it; I’m just… not very good at this kind of thing. I don’t want you to feel you can’t…” I trailed off, unsure what I was trying to say.

“I think we’re in agreement,” he said warmly, putting a hand on my arm and a much-needed end to this painfully clumsy conversation. I put my hand over his and we smiled to each other, and parted not with a sudden self-conscious goodbye, but with a sense of companionship and a simple goodnight.

Which brings us up to date.

I am not sure how to express what I am feeling now. I am not sure I know. Of course, this conversation has only increased my dread of the decisions awaiting us in that place deep within the Genesis Ward: now I know exactly what the stakes are, it is clearer than ever that I will not - should not, cannot - have any say in what Caleb chooses when we get there. I can offer only my opinion, which is ill-formed at best - whether I can bring myself to offer my help, I am not yet sure. Perhaps I will not be until the moment is upon us.

For some reason, I find my thoughts returning to the phantom sensation of his hand on my arm as he said goodnight to me. I find myself thinking of the first time he did that. I remember little except that I was in a foul mood - the Mighty Nein had dragged me to some backwater forest, and having already asked more favours of me than I was disposed to grant, I could sense they were about to ask another. Naturally, Caleb was the one to approach, being the most likely to persuade me - and as he did, he put his hand on my arm. They had already pushed my goodwill to its limit, and this was a clumsy, high-risk attempt at manipulating a little more out of me - I snatched my arm away, furious. I don't remember if I stormed off home, or if I agreed begrudgingly to help, or both: all I remember is that moment, and the days I spent brooding over it afterwards.

It was not the manipulation itself which bothered me: that was par for the course at that point in our relationship, that was what our relationship was, and we both knew that. We had both noticed the thread of connection which naturally pulled us to each other, and while that pull was genuine, everything else - the flirting, the favours, the smiles and compliments - was transparent politics. We were using each other, using that connection, and given that we both knew it, there was no hurt in it. A harmless game of push and pull. But that day, it was different. What bothered me was that I had been bothered - I had felt something about it. Had I been in a better mood, I might have been smug that he’d fumbled his turn so badly, might have turned it to my advantage, but with my guard down and my temper already frayed, I had felt indignant - I had thought, how dare he toy with my emotions. Which, of course, was my first clue that I even had any emotions at stake to be toyed with. In hindsight, this was the first crack in my shell, the first clue that I cared enough about Caleb and the Mighty Nein that their affection for me, or lack thereof, mattered. The falseness of it left a bad taste in my mouth, because our bond was beginning to feel real.

Then, of course, had come the next thought: that I was a thousand times more false, that I had no right to covet honesty when I was performing a far deeper deception, that it was me who had fostered this relationship on false pretenses for my own gain. I will not pretend that I’d never felt any kind of doubt about my actions before - I had felt sick sometimes thinking of the danger to myself, of the possibility of things going wrong, of failure - but this was the first time I’d felt that way thinking only of how others would feel when they found out. It was the first time in a long time that I’d felt shame, and that feeling had only grown, in tiny but incessant increments, the inexorable drip, drip of something that had long been frozen within me beginning to melt.

Meanwhile, Caleb probably thought nothing of the moment. He had probably not read all that in my reaction, had probably not lost any sleep over it. I imagine he simply assumed - not incorrectly - that he’d pushed too hard on a day I was not willing to be pushed, and told the others that they wouldn’t be getting any more favours from me for a while. Here, today, the train of thought leads me inescapably back to that awful night in Nicodranas, when the truth came out; I keep going back to it, the same way one cannot help but keep pressing on a broken tooth with their tongue, just to see if it still hurts. If there was ever a time Caleb lay awake agonising over the terrible consequences of caring about me, that night must have been it. And, I daresay, the night after that, and the night after that.

Well, I doubt I will get much rest tonight, so we can add that to my side of the tally.

I am not quite sure what my point is. Am I tracing similarities between that night and this - the moment of my own confession and his - or only stark differences? Can my feelings now possibly compare to his, then? Surely not, and yet the parallel is undeniable: he said himself, that night on the ship, the difference between you and I is thinner than a razor. I cannot tell if I believe that now more than ever, or less than I did before.

I have no conclusion. Having put all of this in writing, I had hoped to untangle the knot of feelings tonight has left me with, but, while I feel somewhat unburdened, I still do not know what to make of any of it. I suppose I have a long night ahead of me to consider it all.

I will reassess tomorrow.

*Translator’s note: attached to this entry - like most of the others - were some sketched diagrams and scribbled equations, presumably produced during the days’ work: however, the writer appears to have forgotten to return to the research undertaken this day, or indeed to record any events prior to the evening’s conversation, and as such there is no context to suggest what these may relate to.

Chapter Text

Day Six

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had not succeeded in gaining full understanding of my emotions in the handful of hours between writing the previous entry and coming down to breakfast this morning. After a restless night, I had finished three coffees and re-read the same page of my book three times without taking in any of it by the time the rest of the party were up. Perhaps my perturbation was noticeable, because we agreed to head a little way west to explore a large municipal building which nobody but Nickel expected to find particularly interesting; but, after the night I’d had, I welcomed the prospect of an uneventful day.

It did not turn out to be uneventful, of course - it is difficult to have a dull day in Aeor, even intentionally - but my nerves were not for the day’s activities, and as it turned out, I had no reason to be nervous. If I had feared that it would be more difficult to look Caleb in the eye today, I was pleased to be incorrect. It was as he had predicted: a barrier seems to have broken down between us, a point of tension relaxed, and we are more at ease with each other than ever before. Our conversation flowed more naturally, with less self-consciousness, less hesitation. Someone who, previously, felt familiar only through the material time we have spent together and the startling similarities of his mind and my own, now feels familiar through a genuine knowledge of who he is. I am pleasantly surprised by this outcome, even if I still can’t put my finger on exactly what I am feeling.

Perhaps I ought to be feeling more negatively. I am angry, of course, about what I heard, but up here - so far removed from those to blame - anger is useless, and my anger, when undirected, is usually quick to cool. I know Caleb would not want my pity - which can’t stop me from feeling pity, of course, but will stop me from showing it - but I think what I feel is closer to protectiveness, albeit that the harm was long ago and there is little of it left to protect him from, at least presently. A generalised protectiveness, which makes me understand Veth and Beau’s all the more. A few weeks ago, they cornered me at the Lavish Chateau after everyone else had gone to bed - including their respective partners, so it must have been premeditated - to give me some well-deserved grief about my betrayal at the beginning of the year:

“We want to preface this,” Veth said, “by saying you’re our friend, and we appreciate you, and we understand that the past is in the past and you’re growing and all that...”

“...But we’re gonna be real with you,” Beau said, “last time we were here in town, when we heard what you’d done, me and her were ready to throw you to the Bright Queen and be done with you.”

“Entirely valid reaction,” I said.

“Yeah, it was,” Beau agreed, blunt as always. “You started a war that killed thousands of people from both our countries. Could have killed any one of us, or our families, if things had turned out a little different. Some of us were pretty mad about that. Some of us wanted some justice.”

“Understandable and reasonable.”

“You know what I kept coming back to, though?” she continued. “The look on Caleb’s face. He was the one that found out, you know. He sent his cat to follow you. Saw the whole thing, and then had to be the one to tell the rest of us. You know what the first thing he said was? That he felt stupid.”

Not pleasant to hear, but no less so than I deserved. I’m not sure if she was aware that stupid is just about the worst thing someone like he or I can feel, but either way, she was wielding her weapons well.

“Now on one hand, that made me even more mad at you,” she said. “But on the other hand… he was hurt because he cared, and if he cared - much as I hated to admit it - punishing you would probably just make him feel worse.”

It wasn't necessarily news to me. I know that it was sentiment that saved me. Jester would certainly have cried if I’d died, and nobody wanted to make Jester cry. Although, I admit, Caleb’s attitude towards me when we parted ways after the treaty did not leave me altogether believing that he would shed a tear for my downfall. His actions and words at that time were… mixed. Ice cold death threats one moment, tender words the next. I am still not sure which sentiment was the real one. Perhaps both were equally so.

“All this is to say,” Beau concluded, “If you ever do anything to put that look on his face again - which isn’t hard, because he’s got kind of a miserable fucking face anyway, just by default - you won't be getting any more chances from me. Respectfully.”

Veth was less subtle. She hopped up on the table, pointed a knife at my throat, and said “Hurt my boy again and I’ll fucking kill you!” I’m no expert, but I believe that marks the difference between a good friend and a best friend.

Anyway. We had a way to walk to reach the building we’d noticed on the skyline, down a wide, once-straight road, marked with a pair of deep tracks made of a metal I didn’t recognise. Where the street had buckled during the city’s crash into Eiselcross, the tracks had bent and twisted, jutting up and out of the road in places, driven deep into it in others, sometimes so deep that if you looked down, you could see straight through the hole into another layer of the city below. As we walked we mused upon the possible function of the tracks - presumably transportation, in some way, or maybe security. Perhaps inappropriately, I was in a good mood. I felt something I think I last felt as a child, when my brother solemnly told me that, because we were best friends, I was allowed to know who his secret crush was. I didn’t care which child in the play group he’d decided to marry, of course, but there was an intimacy about it, and a strange pride in knowing I was among the trusted few who knew a special truth about him, the kind of smug pride you feel bypassing the queue to see a performing friend via the backstage door. I think it helped a little that I no longer felt at quite so much of a disadvantage - Caleb has known some of my darkest secrets for close to a year, and now I know some of his.

We were so absorbed in our conversation that we almost walked into the vehicle when we came to it. Enough of it was still attached to the rail that it was clear what it was, but it had impacted into a piece of road that had pushed up into its path during the crash, and its long, rectangular body had crumpled like a paper kite. The speed it would have had to hit the obstacle at to destroy it this badly was difficult to imagine, a speed that I would not have thought ordinary ground-dwelling creatures’ bodies could withstand. Not being particularly enthralled by the prospect of that plain-looking office building, we stopped here and spent some time examining the vehicle and its interaction with the tracks.

I had expected to find one of those arcane power sources - the kind that powered the aeormatons as well as many of the other high-demand arcane devices in the city - somewhere within the vehicle, but we took the thing practically to pieces and found none. Brumestone coated the bottom of the carriage where it met the tracks, which would explain the speed: if the vehicle was not touching the track, there would be no friction to slow it down. Signs pointed to an interaction between this stone and the track itself, the latter being part of a larger - perhaps citywide - network of power, now inert. Perhaps somewhere in what was the central spire of the city, we might find the source of this power, which I can only imagine would be on a scale beyond anything, even for its time. The excitement of this prospect was dampened only by the fact that we are fairly sure it must now be inert, and would almost certainly take resources far beyond what exists within our reach to revive it. Still, we took careful note of every detail of the construction of the vehicle itself and the associated tracks, concluding that, if we can’t think of any way for the technology to be turned into a weapon by the end of this trip, perhaps we will share it with the powers that be in our respective homelands. I would certainly like to see a transportation system like this at work in a modern city; teleportation is not always the best way to travel, especially if you only have one friend who can do it, and seven others who need to be all kinds of places all the time.

We never did make it to the building we were heading for. As we were excitedly discussing the possibilities of high-speed public transit, the rangers quietly informed us that there was a large creature ahead of us on the road, and another large creature where we had just come from, and no good routes to escape without alerting them. Neither creature had seen us yet, and the soldiers recommended hitting them now while we had the element of surprise rather than attempting to sneak away.

I refrained from asking how two creatures had managed to flank us so effectively with five rangers on watch, and we took their advice. My good mood did waver a little during the fight when one of the things - I believe they are called Nullifiers, by far my least favourite subspecies of the Aeorian Hunters - got one of its enormous hands around Caleb and pinned him to the ground, but it did give me the opportunity to be the hero and come to his aid, disintegrating the creature. I probably shouldn’t feel pleased about the fight, but nobody died and all the Nullifier Dust brushed off Caleb’s clothes without staining, so, all’s well that ends well.

With two creatures to deal with, and a few of the usual arcane mishaps (Cheszara lost all her hair, and was inconsolable despite all assurances that it would be back to its usual length in a day or two), we had used enough resources and taken enough injuries that we decided it was not worth the risk of going into a multi-story building blind, given that we could find anything inside, up to and including a nest of twenty more Hunters. So, we decided to return early to the Tower. We already had plans in mind to occupy our extended rest time: at some point in our earlier conversation, I realised that I hadn’t taught any more of my dunamantic spells to Caleb in close to a year - not once since we’d become close enough friends to simply share things with each other without making bargains.

I felt slightly less need to show off this time, but it was still more enjoyable to teach him by demonstration and discussion than to simply sit and watch him copy from my books. I enjoy watching the way he learns, the small natural variations in the way he casts - how he moves his hands, how the words sound in his accent - and yet the perfect precision, even upon a first attempt. It is a window into the way his mind works, the ways in which it is similar to mine, and the ways it is different: his memory, for example, dwarfs mine entirely, and while he claims he was simply born with the gift and that he doesn’t consider it an achievement, I still find it extremely impressive how little he needs to write down.

The comparison between the day I’d first let him copy an entry from my spellbook, practically keeping my thumb on the page the entire time, and the day much more recently when he dropped a handful of loose pearls into my hand simply to make sure I had plenty, is pretty stark. For most of my life, I have seen collaboration with other wizards as an occasionally necessary evil, to be approached with great caution and cunning when - embarrassing though it would be to admit - your own mind alone is too small or too blinkered for the scale of your goal. It was a matter of course to me that any pretense at actually wishing to help each other, or enjoyment of the process, was entirely an act, crafted for the sake of appearances and to milk as much as possible from your collaborator with minimal recompense. What do you call a bunch of wizards in one place? Caleb had said to me once, phrasing it like a joke, with a simple punchline: fucking trouble. And he was right. We are not a social species, and like many such species, bringing many together in an enclosed space is not good for anyone. Wizards are creatures of ego and ambition, and the likely result would be a devolution into one-upping and power-grabbing that ended in disaster. This is the truth as it is taught to us.

Looking back on the early days of Caleb and I’s collaboration, it is clear that he shared this expectation to at least some degree. It was not a first-time experience for either of us, both having been formally educated in institutes of higher learning, and both having had little choice but to work with our fellow scholars in those settings. Despite his almost year-long entanglement in the messily-oiled machine that was the Mighty Nein, he was visibly aware of the dangerous game he was playing when he asked me to share my knowledge - my power - with him. And even though I was, perhaps, all too quick to agree - even though, at times, a kind of joy in the act did break through that barrier of wariness - those first few steps were tense with vigilance on both sides, both of us on edge to ensure that we neither dropped our suspicion of each other for a second, nor gave the other reason to suspect us.

But those cracks in the facade, those glimpses of genuine delight in - for want of a more intellectual term which is perhaps less appropriate - playing together, stuck in my head. It was not an aspect of academic collaboration I’ve ever experienced. Perhaps, in being a prodigy (and, at least in my youth, a rather pretentious one) educated among peers who could never truly match me, I had never really experienced what it was to work with a real intellectual equal. Perhaps, having not experienced it, I had little choice but to assume it would be the way it is in the novels: a competition, his intelligence against mine, seeing each other with exposing clarity and then seeing which of us could use that to break the other first, before they were themselves broken. A power struggle between two creatures who, by their nature, crave power.

Something shifted a little, I think, when someone - Jester, perhaps, in her earnestness, or Fjord in his pragmatism - persuaded Caleb to show me some magical artefact which had stumped him in their latest adventure. It was, as it turned out, extremely simple: breaking the spell upon it, by the obvious means, revealed its secret. Caleb was duly embarrassed - his friends, ever sibling-like in their delight in teasing each other, would not let him be otherwise - but he was not rattled. He didn’t seem upset by the fact that I has succeeded where he had failed, that he had showed a weakness and I had proven myself superior; well, perhaps it was the smallness of the matter itself, but it occurred to me only then that it was possible to simply appreciate having a question answered, without it mattering who had answered it.

This experience, I suppose, drove me towards our next collaboration, which - as Caleb was keen to point out several times in his excitement - was a historic success. I have never known teamwork like it; a flow of question and answer, thoughts begun and completed, wordless additions to cohesive diagrams painted by three different hands, without care or even real clarity as to who had contributed what, as if our multiple minds truly were working as one. I had thought such things were reserved for stories and martial artists, but where there is openness instead of ego, respect instead of hierarchy, and - most importantly of all - enough fascination with the topic at hand to allow for these things to come out, it is indeed possible for wizards to collaborate with success. My own sense of accomplishment when the spell was finished was incomparable to Caleb and Veth’s, this being their long-time pet project, and so personal to them both, but they - Caleb, especially - were generous in their inclusion of me as an equal shareholder in its creation. I think that might have been the first time he hugged me: he was in that flushed, breathless state of excitement that I have only ever seen in him when he has accomplished something great - speaking in hyperbole, seizing upon anyone brave enough to stand close to him, eyes alight and full of a joy which seems all the brighter by comparison to his commoner state of melancholy seriousness. I was a little thrown by it, not being familiar with it yet, but since then, I must admit I have felt a desire to see it again, to be the cause of it.

Perhaps that is why I agreed to come to Aeor with him again. Where better to achieve such a goal?

“Seals,” I said to him outside the door to his room, just before he went to bed.

“I’m sorry?” He was blinking like a drunk man, and I recognised the daze that followed several hours of copying sigils.

“My favorite animal,” I clarified. “I thought about it. I hadn’t seen them until I first travelled north, at which time I saw many of them on the coast, and… I liked them.”

He leaned against the wall, folding his arms with a smile. “You liked them, eh? They’re cute.”

“Yes.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and after a few moments watching him smile in amusement, I simply told him so.

“Small talk takes a lot of practice,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I get the hang of it myself.”

“We both know you can turn on the charm when you need to,” I demurred.

“Do I need to?” he asked.

“No, of course not.”

“That's what I thought. Well - ” and he went into his room without another superfluous word, leaving me smiling outside.

I can’t exactly say that I have ended the day with a full inventory of my feelings, but today did feel like… an exhalation. I had no need to worry about my relationship with Caleb becoming more complicated or less comfortable after his confession last night. While my feelings may remain complicated, the only effect this newly revealed truth seems to have had between us has been positive. There are still some emotions within me that I cannot yet identify, but if today was anything to go by, I am confident that, from here, things will only get simpler.

Chapter Text

Day Seven

Things have got a lot more complicated.

This time, I will start at the beginning. The day began as it was to go on: unexpectedly. I was approached at the breakfast table by Vagar and Briva, the former looking nervous, the latter characteristically unperturbed.

“This could mean nothing,” Vagar began, the universal words of one about to say something that meant Something. “The other day, you were trying to figure out why the drow were the only ones who were sensing that, uh, invisible Thing? And what made the rest of us different? And, well…” He looked at Briva.

“Dreams,” Briva said, her tone pragmatic. “We’ve been having dreams. Bad ones, since our first night here. Last night, we asked Dagen and Nickel, and they’ve had bad dreams too.”

It followed. Only creatures capable of sleep are capable of dreaming, in the traditional sense. “And what are you suggesting this means?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Briva said, almost defensively. “We’re just giving you data. Figuring out what it means is your job.” Unmannerly as her tone was, she was not wrong.

At this moment Caleb entered, yawning and not yet dressed as though he’d only just woken up and realised what time it was. The persistent Gretchen already had a fourth coffee on the table for him by the time he’d sat down. He thanked her - he always thanks the cats, I’ve noticed, despite the fact they are creations of his own and, as such, not real.

Briva cut off his apology for oversleeping with the obvious question: had he been having nightmares as well? I gave him a brief recap of the conversation for context.

He tapped thoughtfully on the rim of his coffee cup. “I suppose I have,” he said. “But nightmares are not unusual for me, even four or five nights in a row.”

“What are they usually about?” Briva asked.

He gave her a long, tired look, and, guessing what the answer was, I felt a wave of indignant protectiveness. I told Briva, sternly, to rephrase her question. Evidently accepting that the question was too personal for her to get an answer, she accepted this with minimal frustration, and asked instead if the nightmares he’d had here had been different than usual.

“A little,” he allowed, and looked at me: “What do you think it could mean?”

“Except for one night,” I said, “We have slept here, in the Tower, the entire time we have been here. Nothing can get in here without your knowledge and approval. While we are in here, we are not even on the same plane of existence as the city without. If something has got into some of our heads, it must be a lingering effect, something that does not necessitate the physical presence of the creature while you sleep.”

This was about as far as we got over breakfast. We could not put our finger on exactly what was happening, or what was causing it - or if, indeed, these dreams were at all related to the unseen presence I have been sensing. But the new information would be percolating in the back of my mind as we continued with our day.

“It all feels a little too familiar to me,” Caleb said quietly to me, after the others had stepped away. “You’ll recall what else was able to reach us in dreams while we slept in the Tower, last time we were here.”

“It isn’t that,” I assured him. “It cannot be. Cognouza was destroyed. Besides, you would have recognised Somnovem dreams immediately.”

“I don’t like it,” he said, not seeming comforted. I understood: of all people, he has perhaps the most right of all to be paranoid about having his mind influenced.

To underline my point, I took the hand that he was nervously touching his face with and showed it to him, turned it so he could see the back and then the palm. There was no trace left of the red eye symbol that had appeared there after he had read Lucian’s strange codex, just as there was no trace of the one that appeared on my shoulder - just as none of them had left any trace on any of us. I was half expecting some kind of visible scar, especially on Caleb’s pale skin, but there was nothing. It was almost more unsettling this way.

“We’re alright,” I reminded him. “That’s over.”

He nodded and took a slow breath. “Yes. I know. You’re right.” He took back his hand, put it on my shoulder and gave it a little shake, a vaguely brotherly gesture. “Thank you.” Louder, and more upbeat, he said, “So, what are we doing today?”

We returned, with a reluctance that feels ironic in hindsight, to that blocky municipal building we had been heading towards yesterday; our expectations were low, and we were hoping only to move on from it as quickly as we could.

As we trailed behind the rest of the group on the short walk to the building, I asked Caleb why he’d overslept - was he alright? He gave a short, vague answer about having some things on his mind, which worried me. Kindness is not my strong suit, but I tried to make my voice as gentle as it would go (not very, unfortunately), and told him that I would gladly listen if talking those things over would help. He chuckled, probably at my clumsy attempt at sympathy, but thanked me, and told me he would, but not until he’d had more time to think about it himself.

Something about this brief conversation niggles at me, as though there were some veiled meaning to it that I ought to have been able to guess, but which was just beyond my reach. The feeling of knowing that you’ve encountered evidence of something, but not comprehending it enough to know what it is evidence of, is one of my least favourite feelings; it’s the frustration of it. The only thing worse than not being clever enough, an old teacher of mine once said, is knowing that you are clever enough, and you’re missing the answer anyway.

The conversation turned to brighter topics: he asked if I had heard from Jester recently. Perhaps this non-sequitur was another clue I ought to have caught and ruminated upon, but it is difficult to talk about Jester without being cheerful. She promised me a little while ago that she’d message me every day, and she has mostly kept to that, although since we have been here, she has been alternating between speaking to Caleb and speaking to me, checking in on two birds with one spell. I had not heard from her for a few days, but Caleb had, and he was amusing me by recounting her words until we reached the building, at which point all previous conversation was forgotten.

Because the building was a library.

Evidently it had once been several stories high, with no intervening floors dividing it, the shelves simply reaching unbroken up towards the sky - but during the crash, a large pipe had fallen from a higher layer of the city and bisected the back wall. The pipe - as wide across as ten people at least - sat on the crumpled wall like a great finger pulling down the slats of a blind to peer through, or the hand of a monk demonstrating her ability to break a stack of wooden blocks with one blow. The water it had been carrying must have poured into the library, and likely continued until there was none left. The moisture had now frozen, creating a thin layer of ice like frost underfoot, and hanging from the mouth of the pipe in great, toothy icicles. But it had not frozen quickly enough to prevent the ruin of a large proportion of the books. Even in the icy cold, there was a faint scent of mildew and paper decay. The city’s heating system must have remained active in this area for some time before failing, dooming many of the books to rot.

Caleb, as is his habit when excited, grabbed me by the shoulder and dug his fingers in so hard that it would have hurt if I was not wearing thick fur there. The habit must have rubbed off on me, too, because I did the same thing, going for his arm instead. We looked at each other, and laughed at the mirrored looks of delight on each other's faces.

The temptation to simply start pulling books from shelves like children in a candy store was difficult to resist - so we did not resist, all thoughts of professional dignity forgotten. Stories, histories, treatises on everything from physics to arcana to politics to the divine; instructional manuals from guides for beginner spellcasters all the way up to textbooks to prime graduates for their doctoral exams. We quickly found that the library was not catalogued to any system we recognised: it was not alphabetical, even by the Aeorian alphabet, so it must have been by subject in one way or another. Works of fiction seemed to be limited to the Eastern side, around ground level, shifting through biography and creative non-fiction into pure non-fiction on the West. Vertically, it appeared that more advanced texts in whatever field were placed higher, so that one would have to fly up several stories to reach them; however, there did appear to be the remains of a mechanised system, perhaps for an Aeormaton librarian to retrieve requested texts. Books for children lined the shelves below waist level.

“Did you ever see a more beautiful thing?” Caleb said after the initial flurry of activity had passed, sitting down with a satisfied huff on the ground and looking up at the high shelves as though they were the heavens.

“Than a library? Never,” I replied with a smile. “That, however…”

“Ah. Yes.” He turned towards the giant mouth of the pipe. “A tragic blight upon perfection.”

“Some would say true beauty is improved upon by its imperfections,” I said.

He began to trace out a ritual circle on the ground where he was sitting, which I recognised as his Vault of Amber spell. He taught it to me last night. For all his modest claims that his inventions were simply building upon the work of greater wizards than he, I would call this spell truly original.

“I’d like to think so,” he said in response to my statement. “We can’t all be as blessed as you.”

Years of over-exposure have given me an unusual, and perhaps impolite, reaction to compliments about my looks. “Oh, blessed,” I said dismissively. “Blessed with wealth only. We all look like this. Easy living, expensive skincare, trophy spouses for parents and artificers to fix your teeth as a child - one would be hard pressed not to be beautiful with all that going for them. I would prefer to look like I have lived a life, but all my youthful scars and their stories were erased with magic before they could ever form.”

“You don’t like talking about this, do you?” he guessed, not looking up from his work.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Interesting. Well, good to know.” And he dropped the subject for the time being.

With the spell ready to go, we began to fill the Vault of Amber with undamaged books to take away with us. We could not, after all, sit here forever and read them all in situ, however much we might have liked to. “Much as it pains me to be the one to say it,” Caleb said, “we can read when we get home.”

I was gathering books and indulging in a bit of self-pity regarding my impending lack of a home to go back to, when it came again: a prickle on the back of my neck, a paranoid, creeping feeling that something was just behind me, watching me.

This time, rather than being anxious, I was angry. Unbeknownst to my conscious mind, some part of my brain must have been ruminating on the dream theory, because I did not need time to think about what I was going to do. I whipped around and cast Mind Spike on the creature I could not perceive with my conscious senses, but which, for a split second, that prickle of awareness had located.

I hit something, and once I’d hit, I had it; it couldn’t hide from me. I still couldn’t see it - I had not expected to - but with the Mind Spike in, I could sense where it was.

Caleb came running to me the moment the spell went off. The others quickly fell into their combat formation. I could tell them where it was, but there was still no way to show it to them. We’d tried everything to detect it; True Sight, Faerie Fire, every trick in the book, except this.

A theory had come to me: we were dealing with a Dreamwraith. In moments when I had been feeling morbid or morose, it had sensed those negative feelings and tried to get to me, but had been unable to find any dreams to latch onto. It had, evidently, slipped into the minds of the dreaming creatures with ease, but left the rest of us with only a vague sense of its presence after its failed attempt. I do not think this is exactly how Dreamwraiths usually work, but if it had been stuck in Aeor for centuries - or worse, if it had been trapped in Cognouza, and slipped back through the Immensus Gate six months ago - who knows how such a creature could have been warped.

Perhaps realising that I was a poor target, I felt it leap for Caleb, and instinctively I stepped into its path, which was pointless; it was incorporeal, after all, and I felt the bizarre sensation of it passing through me without a trace. Whatever it tried to do to Caleb, it must have failed, because he didn’t react; or perhaps it was just placing more elements of itself into his dreams. He was standing close behind me, the front of his shoulder pressed to the back of mine, his hand on my other shoulder. Explaining would take too long. I trusted that he would trust me. I turned around to point to where it was now - behind us - and told him to throw whatever psychic spells he had at the place I was pointing.

Needless to say, it was a very strange fight. I did little except hold onto my Mind Spike and guide the others, particularly Caleb, who was close enough for me to physically move his hands in the right direction. Those it hit with its defence mechanism were badly hurt, including myself; psychic damage is, to me, the worst kind, especially now that it comes with unpleasant memories of the Nonagon. As far as we could tell, only psychic spells had any effect on the creature, which only barely existed on this plane. Irritatingly, I had not prepared a Banishment spell for today; how was I to know that it was not enough for one of us to have it ready? Caleb couldn’t see the creature to banish it. If it was, as I suspected, a Dreamwraith, marking it with an illusion would have been a bad idea; Dreamwraiths can hijack illusions, make them its own, and we just would have ended up with a worse problem.

It was Cheszara, in the end, who dealt the killing blow: a humble Dissonant Whispers. It took us all several moments to realise what had happened; I thought, at first, that I’d simply lost concentration on my Mind Spike after being hurt, and could no longer sense it. We only relaxed after Cheszara said, “I think I got it.” I am quite proud of my timid little assistant, and she will be getting a promotion when we return to the outpost.

The fight over, I looked to Caleb, and we both said, “Are you alright?” to each other at the same time. I realised that, in that moment when the creature had seemingly escaped me and we were waiting for it to attack again, we had both moved to protect each other: he had stepped forward with his arm out across my chest, as if ready to push me back behind him, and I had reached my arm around him, underneath his, ready to pull him back and away from where the creature had last been. His eyes were diamond-bright with the adrenaline of the fight.

We held each other’s gaze for a few moments before laughing and disentangling from each other, but in those few moments, I felt a wave of that feeling which I have felt a few times this past week, but had not yet been able to identify. Affection, admiration, protectiveness, and this, this other feeling that encompasses and accompanies all of those, but adds an extra something I could not put a name to. This time it was stronger, clearer, enough so that it revealed new elements of itself to me: an ache similar to nostalgia, a flash of anxious excitement clenching like vertigo in my stomach, and a vague sense of desire without a clear object - a voice from within saying I want, I want, but refusing to elaborate, like a cat loudly expressing its dissatisfaction at a problem its owner cannot discover. And all of a sudden, it was familiar; now I saw the feeling for what it was, a well-known and oft-discussing feeling which I know the name of very well.

Thankfully, Caleb was too distracted to notice that I spent the next ten seconds frozen in place, staring at him in what may well have been horror; frowning, he looked around, and asked what smelled good. Everyone could smell it, now he’d pointed it out. Was it the books? They did smell nice - Old Book Smell - but no, not that. Was it the smell of the creature? A psychic effect? He looked back at me - I had just had time to school my features and appear, hopefully, normal - and asked if I was wearing some kind of perfume or cologne. I was - I am, I always do - and I tentatively offered my wrist for him to smell. Yes, he said, that was the smell. Nobody had noticed it before. It is not that strong. It must have been one of those strange magical malfunctions; olfactory side-effects have been noted before.* I have added it to the list.

We stayed and browsed the library a little longer, indulging ourselves, theorising on the cataloguing system, picking up volumes and calling out elements of interest to each other across the room. I think I was able to behave normally, mostly - there is little that could have distracted me as effectively from a personal bombshell as a horde of pre-calamity publications - but there were a few moments, between books, where I found myself staring at Caleb from afar, looking at him in a new light. He caught me at least once, and called it out; despite what recent evidence would seem to suggest, I am actually a fairly good liar, and I quickly deflected by telling him I’d just been staring into space, thinking, and he happened to be in my eyeline.

“What were you thinking about?” he asked.

“Possibilities,” I replied vaguely, and he did not press. He was too far away to notice me blushing.

It was only the growling of our stomachs - and, more ominously, a growling coming from inside the pipe, which a few of the rangers noticed - that convinced us to leave the library and return to the Tower at a reasonable time. Just before we did so, Caleb offered me the piece of amber he had used in the Vault spell to store the books, strung onto a simple piece of braided twine long enough to tie around a wrist.

“Do you want to hold onto this?” He asked. “It’s a fresh one. Not my usual piece.”

I could not help but assume that he had used a fresh piece of amber with the specific intention of giving it to me; there ought to have been plenty of room in the one he wears around his neck. I took it gratefully, aware I was now wearing two valuable magical gifts from him.

“Sorry it isn’t your colour,” he joked. “It only works with amber.”

“And you say you have no particular attachment to the colour orange,” I replied, making him chuckle.

Obviously, we spent most of the evening reading.

Perhaps this is not the place to say it, but I think we are well beyond any pretence of this account being a professional document free of emotion. I fear I must concede, in light of mounting evidence, that my feelings for Caleb have grown beyond the platonic.

It’s little wonder I failed to recognise the feeling: I have not felt it in a very long time, so long ago that it feels like a different life. My circumstances have changed so much - I have changed so much - in the decades since I last experienced this, that the same experience now feels like a new one. The thoughts, the worries, are entirely different: not so long ago, my first concerns would have been about what my mother would think - whether she would deem the object of my affection wealthy, powerful, or well-bred enough to consent to our union, and if not, how bad it would be if I defied her. I’d be wondering how difficult or otherwise it would be to hide the full depth of my research interests from them, or whether I could trust them enough to be truthful - or, worst of all, if they’d ignore the whole thing entirely, expecting me to drop my quirky little hobby and step gratefully into the role of dutiful young trophy husband. The concerns of a Kryn gentleman with unfashionable habits - the person I have been my entire life, and assumed I always would be; the life I must now leave behind, for better or worse. Perhaps I ought to be glad; even setting aside the convenience of having no secrets from Caleb (well, except this one), I can only imagine the cataclysm if I had had to introduce him to my mother. These old-life worries being rendered irrelevant, I am left simply with the commonplace concerns: what does he want, do I deserve him, in what fantastical way am I going to make a mess of this.

Unfortunately, like many things in life, now that I fully understand this (as much as it is possible to understand such things), a floodgate that ignorance had held closed is now open. It is as my brother once said about birds: the moment you start paying enough attention to one to find out what kind it is, you’ve paid too much attention to ever stop, and then you start to notice them everywhere, forever. I have paid too much attention and learned too much to be able to ignore my feelings now. Unwittingly, I have taken the forbidden book from the shelf, and the part of my brain that had been holding this information ransom - lips dutifully sealed but knees jiggling impatiently, like a gossip sworn to secrecy until the moment I figurd it out for myself - jumps upon me at the first sign of interest and floods me with further information. Not only do I have an embarrassing new layer of experience to colour every future interaction, I also have the mortifying pleasure of going back and re-examining every interaction from the last week - from the last six months, even - with a kind of editor’s commentary pointing out all the subtext I originally missed.** And just as we had reached such a perfect lack of awkwardness, too; so much for that.

I really have developed a terrible habit for acquiring new sentiments about people at exactly the most inconvenient moments.

What to do next? Nothing, I suppose. Nothing yet. Continue as we have been. Continue our work. I have to laugh; for a moment, I forgot we were here for a purpose beyond simply spending time together. I forgot that this journal was meant to be for recording our scientific endeavours. Perhaps this is my call to refocus on what brought us here, on the work. Ruminating on my feelings will achieve nothing, but we are here on a shared passion project; regardless of anything else, that is a wonderful thing, and not to be sidelined. I do not need anything more in order to treasure this trip, this time, this experience. I may not be able to ignore what I have learned today, but I will aim to behave no differently. I will aim, as before, to break new ground with one of the great minds of our time - with my friend.

I must end this entry here. Jester will likely be calling any minute. I have previously laughed off her suggestive comments as an endearing quirk of her own, but tonight I suspect I shall have a difficult time approximating a normal response. At least she cannot not see my face.

*translator’s note: the previously recorded ‘olfactory side effect’ observed while spellcasting in Aeor was a phenomenon whereupon ‘a smell beloved by the caster’ manifested alongside the spell, lingering strongly for several minutes. I do not like to speculate, but note that Thelyss mentioned he did not participate in the fight after the initial Mind Spike except to guide the others. Interpret as you will.

**translator’s note: I have nothing to add, I simply couldn’t resist adding a note here.

Chapter Text

Day 8

Today we did something ill-advised, and split the party. Cheszara returned to the library, with Vagar and Dagen to keep watch, to gather more books while the rest of us went to investigate a nearby building, which we noticed while leaving yesterday; an uninterpretable crest on the outside had piqued our curiosity. The building, just across the square from the library, is a low, wide structure, on the large side, but not large enough that it would take more than a few moments for one group to get to the other in case of emergency.

For the purpose of storing the books, Caleb spent some time this morning teaching Cheszara the Vault of Amber spell. When he told her she was only the third person ever to learn it, she was starry-eyed, and hung on his every word as he explained it to her. I wonder if I look like that when he teaches me? I hope I have a little more dignity, but I certainly enjoy seeing him look at me that way when I teach him - rapt attention, admiration, excitement. And he is a natural teacher, more so than I; we both have the requisite passion for sharing our knowledge, but he has a gentler kind of authority, better suited for nurturing student minds. More encouraging. Cheszara is the same age as me, making her close to a century older than Caleb, but watching them together was like watching a professor with a young pupil, and I could not help but smile; he has mentioned the possibility of teaching classes at his alma mater in the future, and I very much hope he does so. He looks so comfortable in the role.

I’m sure he didn’t look any different today, objectively, than he usually does. I’m sure he woke up this morning, put on the same clothes he always wears, tied back his hair the same as ever, and got on with his day. I kept thinking that he seemed different - that he looked taller, his hair redder, his skin more luminous - but it was only in my head. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder (a saying which I only learned was not about Beholders, as in the eyeball monsters, when I was older than I like to admit). It is my perspective that has changed, not him.

Leaving Cheszara hesitantly in charge at the library, the rest of us entered the low building, and I made some effort to return my attention to my surroundings. The first room was a simple foyer, with a door to the left and to the right. After the requisite safety checks, Caleb and I took the left door, and Nickel and Briva the right, leaving the remaining soldiers to stand watch in the foyer.

The left door led us into a moderately-sized hall with bleacher seating, and a raised area at the far end containing a few variously shaped podiums, not unlike a hall of governance, or a lecture theatre. As we entered, there was a sudden deadening, the white-noise hum of background magic turning to stark silence. It wasn’t just our surroundings, either; all the enchanted items we were wearing became unresponsive, and all the spells we had active dropped, including the one I use to float. I fell, taken completely by surprise, and Caleb caught me before I was fully prone.

“Interesting,” he said, after checking that I was alright and helping me steady myself. “An anti-magic field in a city where magic was exalted. Why?”

“I’m not sure if I feel less safe, or more so,” I replied.

Without letting go of the arm Caleb had given me to help me find my footing, I continued on with my feet on the ground, making the embarrassing realisation that my boots - which I had not chosen based on the idea that I’d ever need to walk in them - were extremely loud on the hard floor, in this silent and echoing chamber. I took one step, winced at the sound, and had no choice but to continue. I deliberately didn’t look at Caleb, trying my best to maintain my poise, but I could see him trying not to smile out of the corner of my eye.

A plaque on the highest podium at the front of the room read Judge Brenna, leading us to assume that this place was a courtroom, which would explain the anti-magic field. On the floor in front of the podium, on the raised platform, was a circle of wickedly complex Aeorian glyphs, which appeared to have a divinatory function of some kind. What fascinated me most was that the anti-magic field was still in effect, apparently extending all the way to the feet of the podiums - but it did not seem to be affecting this circle. I have known a handful of practitioners who were capable of sculpting their spells’ area of effect into complex shapes, creating pockets of exception to the effect, but I have only seen it applied to instantaneous evocation spells, like Shatter or Darkness. I, myself, am not unremarkable in my expertise for fine manipulation of powerful magic in divergence from its natural shape, but for something like this to last thousands of years? I could not immediately tell how it was done.

Caleb, in the meantime, was examining the runes of the circle itself. “I have a theory,” he said. “It should be easy enough to test it - will you be my guinea pig?”

My instinct was to say no, but that would have been a poor reflection on the trust we have built. Reluctantly, I agreed.

He put his hands on my shoulders and placed me in the middle of the circle, telling me to stand right there, and then stepped away to observe from a few paces back; he stroked his chin thoughtfully, and after some consideration, said, “What is your name?”

Confused, but assuming this must be some kind of control question, I told him. I felt a strange, tugging feeling as I did, as if the words were being pulled from my throat, but it was faint, and not unpleasant enough for me to interrupt the experiment.

“Right,” he continued. “And where were you born?”

I told him, waiting for the real question.

“Good, good… now, tell me an embarrassing anecdote from your youth.”

“The first time I tried to walk in high heels I tripped and broke my ankle,” I heard myself say, not of my own volition. “I lied to the cleric who healed me - I told her I fell down a staircase. I haven’t dared try again since. I invented the floating cantrip a few months later.”

He raised an amused eyebrow. “Really? That’s how that started?”

“Yes,” I continued, again, against my will: “I did not like that my little brother had grown taller than me. I was determined to rectify it, one way or another. I told him I was just experimenting with magic to further my own learning, but I think he saw through me.”

Caleb leaned back against the pulpit and crossed his arms and ankles, with one of those smug sighs one sighs when settling gladly into a position of power.

“Well,” he said. “This is a discovery.”

“A permanent Zone of Truth,” I said, eager to avoid more questions. “But with the added aspect of compulsion. It would make sense, for a courtroom. Spellcasters have been researching compulsive truth spells for some time without success - not that I should be surprised that the Age of Arcanum achieved what we cannot.”

“I understand now why Jester enjoys this spell so much,” Caleb said. “Think of the damage she could do if you couldn’t refuse to answer her.”

“I am too busy thinking of the damage you can do,” I said.

“Oh, I could be very cruel here,” he acknowledged, beginning a slow, predatory circle around the Zone of the Truth, which, embarrassingly, gave me a bit of a thrill. I was glad to discover that the compulsion to speak the truth seemed only to be triggered by the asking of a direct question. “I could ask for all your dark secrets. If I wanted to be particularly cheeky - ” he stopped circling, standing close enough for the toes of his boots to touch the edge of the circle, “I could ask what you were really thinking about yesterday, when you claimed you were staring into space. I won’t,” he added, seeing the look of alarm on my face. “I’m screwing with you, of course I won’t. It was good of you to play along for me. You can of course step out any time you choose.”

“Stepping out would look like I had something to hide,” I pointed out with a smile. “Or that I thought you were going to ask me something unfair.”

He offered me his hand. I took it - hesitating more than I would have yesterday, for no logical reason - and he pulled me out of the circle.

“One to keep close to our chests, I think,” I said as he opened his notes to begin copying the circle. “The aspect of compulsion could make a spell like this very dangerous, not only in the wrong hands, but equally so in well-meaning hands; it would be easy for an overzealous do-gooder to get carried away with something like this.”

“And the likes of you and I, of course, would never succumb to such temptations,” he said, presumably being sarcastic in his deadpan way. I am getting better at noticing it, an incredibly niche skill which I am more prideful about than is probably reasonable.

“It’s too late for us,” I said with a smile. “We’ve already discovered it.”

“Are you already thinking of all the questions you’d ask?”

Deciding that I could simply copy his copy from him later, I turned my attention to the podium, which held a sheen of magic so faint I would have thought the subtlety of it impossible had I been anywhere else. I let one half of my mind tackle the challenge of guessing what it was before resorting to an Identify spell, while the other half was free to continue the conversation.

“Strange as it may seem, given how relatively little I know about your life, I cannot think of many questions I’d wish to ask you specifically within the remit of a Zone of Truth,” I said, truthfully; the Gods only know I wouldn’t dare hear his personal feelings about me or anyone else, with my own recent revelation so fresh and terrifying on its own. “But you have never lied to me, I suppose.”

“Of course we’ve lied to you, Essek,” he replied gently, not looking up from his work. “We had a Cobalt Soul spy staying in our house in Rosohna, and we all lied to you about it. You're not the first person to hide things from people who might endanger a larger scheme if they knew about it.”

I was surprised for a moment, and then I wasn’t surprised in the slightest. I’d known the Cobalt Soul had eyes in the city, and that Beau was connected with them. The superfluous housekeeper, I suppose. It was obvious, in hindsight.

“Oddly enough, I’m comforted to hear it,” I told him. I had guessed that the slight sheen of Enchantment to the podium was intended to make the person standing in it marginally more authoritative, not unlike a common Cloak of Billowing, only much more transient. “But why do you ask? Are you thinking of all the questions you would ask?”

“I have a few in mind,” he admitted. “But, silly little anecdotes aside, I would not want to force you to speak against your will.”

“You could ask me now that I’m over here,” I replied automatically. It seemed the obvious thing to say, but after I’d said it, I immediately regretted it.

“Well,” he said after a pause, and I was suddenly extremely, anxiously aware that we were alone. “I suppose there is one mystery that has been niggling at me, which an answer might help with.”

I had three guesses in mind, and he deserved answers to all of them. I could hardly refuse. “Ask,” I said, ceding to the road this version of reality had taken me down. “I will be as honest as I dare.”

“Adeen Tasithar,” he said, which had been my first guess. It would be my father’s death, Yeza Brenatto’s imprisonment, or Adeen Tasithar. The man who had shouldered my fate in my place. No, that makes it sound like a noble sacrifice: the man I pushed into the dragon’s mouth to avoid being eaten myself.

“What did he do to you?” Caleb asked.

I chuckled, humourlessly. “You assume he must have done something to earn his fate?” I said. “He could not simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a convenient scapegoat presenting himself when I needed one? It had to have been personal?”

“Was it not?”

“It was,” I admitted.

“What did he do?”

“He took a mote of trust I had placed in him,” I said, “and turned it into a sword to hang over me.”

“I didn’t think you trusted anyone,” Caleb said. “Before us, I mean.”

“Before you. After Adeen. This was a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

I had confirmed my theory about the podium with Identify, and would have to wait until Nickel was finished with my instruments before I began to gather data on the impossible lightness of this everlasting spell. Caleb would not be finished copying for some time, and, given that he had honoured me with an unpleasant story from his own past recently, it seemed only fair that I should regale him with one of my own, partly by way of unburdening myself, and partly to keep him entertained as he copied. I am pleasantly surprised with how poetically the story came out, so I will recreate the way I told it as faithfully as I can; if I ever have to tell it again, I’d like to tell it exactly like this.

“Den Thelyss is the third Den of the Dynasty,” I began, feeling I must set the scene before he could understand the situation. “Den Kryn, of course, are what you might call our royal family, and second only to them in age and power is Den Mirimm, with Thelyss close behind. Now, in theory, status within a Den is supposed to be based upon merit, but in reality, birthright still holds some power - thus, I hold significant sway within my own Den as the son of our Umavi, and likewise highly ranked within Den Mirimm there was Azida Mirimm, the daughter of their Umavi, Abrianna. Are you with me so far?”

“I’m with you.”

“Azida Mirimm was one of the wealthiest women in the city. I was raised in great wealth myself, but Azida… the entire fortune of the richest person you’ve ever met, Azida Mirimm could afford to lose at cards in one night. And my mother - well, officially speaking, an Umavi is a perfect soul, incapable of any wrongdoing and above any material concerns, but unofficially speaking, she owed a great deal to Den Mirimm, in both favours and in gold, and she needed to find some kind of repayment in order to repair the heavily tipping balance of power between the two Dens. This is how the Dynasty runs, after all: the ruling houses, balancing each other out - Mirimm’s military might grappling with Thelyss’ scholars and clerics.

“What mother owed was far more than a common cross-Den marriage could pay for, but luckily for her, she had been blessed with two uncommonly beautiful sons, and one of them was of age already. Given that she had obtained something so valuable at the low cost of her own bodily pain, she was only too happy to part with it in exchange for a return to balance. And to Azida, as long as I was what my mother promised me to be, I was an asset more valuable than mere gold, which she had little use for, and whose idea of a large sum was beyond Den Thelyss’ means anyway.

“I, as you can imagine, was none too pleased with this arrangement. I tried everything possible to make myself undesirable to Azida. Any time she was around, I showed my truest and most unflattering colours - I was stiff, rude, blasphemous, disobedient, I even cut off all my hair - but she laughed it off. Who I was was of little concern to her; a pliant and pious character would have been a perk, but who needs a good personality when one has everything else going for them? Beauty, wealth, status, lineage, with just enough in the way of elegant accomplishments* to be adequate, a bright future in the Queen’s favour, and set to inherit an estate almost comparable to her own. So what if I was unpleasant towards her? She would have a lifetime to hammer out these little dents. I’d need to do worse than that to outweigh what I was worth to her.”

“And this is where Adeen Tasithar comes in?”

“Yes. Adeen was… not a friend of mine. An acquaintance, at best. He was a minor noble, close to my own age, and also on his first lifetime, and as such we had been thrown together many times growing up. I did not like him, mostly out of stubbornness, because there were not many others our age, and I was expected to like him - you may have noticed, I am not keen on doing what is expected of me. At that time I simply thought of Adeen as… nothing, much. No real personality, talent, or strength of character. A bland sycophant whose only hope of advancement in society was to ride the coattails of others. But that is not a crime, and I did not hate him for it; I had no feelings at all about him, back then. I was foolish enough to assume he was unassuming - that, given the chance to do a favour for someone so superior in potential, he would simply do as he was asked and be glad of the opportunity. But he was slyer than I expected.”

“What did you ask him to do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Not really, anyway. I did what I needed to do; all I asked of him was to corroborate my story. I spread a rumour about myself. I knew it would have to spread throughout the Firmaments - if it could be kept between the two Dens, it could be swept under the rug - so it could not be anything bad enough that it could get me thrown out of court. It had to be a crime that would affect my professional reputation as little as possible, but which would have a big impact on my desirability as a marriage candidate. There was one obvious answer.”

Caleb guessed it before I said it. “Make everyone think you were hooking up with someone else.”

“Exactly. And, given our similar age and vague social connection, Adeen was the obvious candidate. It was believable, and his position was just enough beneath mine that it was considered a disgrace, but not so low that he could be entirely ignored. The plan worked, of course - as you well know, I am not married - but what I did not consider, in my youthful naivety, was just how much power I was giving to Adeen, or indeed how capable he was of leveraging it.

“Ever since that moment, he held this bargain over me. He still bragged about our imaginary tryst years later. He’d tell anyone he liked anything he liked about me, and I could only deny it to a limited extent without revealing that the whole thing was a lie. He leered at me any time we were in the same room, called me patronising little nicknames like sugar and sweetheart, even in formal court settings, as long as my mother or the Queen were not around. And what, for all my superior power and status, could I do to him? Technically, he had done as I’d asked, and he could always confess to the lie if I ever gave him trouble about it. If I ever gave him trouble about anything he did.

“Can you blame me for seizing the chance to rid myself of both the Queen’s suspicions and Adeen Tasithar in one fell swoop? I know it was a terrible thing to do, and yet…” I shook my head, and I could hear the savagery in my voice as I said it, “I do not regret it one bit. I regret many things, but not this - this felt good, start to finish, and it still feels good now, thinking of him rotting in a dungeon somewhere in the Empire, if not dead already. My only complaint is that I did not get the chance to gloat. But I hope that somewhere, deep down, he still knows it was me that did this to him - that I wasn’t such a sweetheart after all.”

Caleb was silent for a few moments. Then, to my surprise, he simply asked, “Why not frame Azida Mirimm, then? Her part in it seems more insidious than his, although I would not downplay how much of a dick he was, too.”

“I had no need to do anything about Azida Mirimm. She was a soldier; the war killed her months before I got to the point of needing someone to frame, and, given that it was my war, I suppose I can take credit for that. Not that the Queen would have let someone as powerful as her go down for treason, of course; the court would have seen through her to me immediately. Nobody liked Adeen Tasithar; everyone was quite happy to accept his guilt without too much question.” I had, of course, altered his memories to bolster my claims, too, but given Caleb’s past, that was not a point I wanted to remind him of. I’m not sure I could have made myself mention it if I wanted to. But he knew.

Caleb nodded slowly. He was looking intently at the circle he was copying, but his pen was not moving.

“You can judge me as you will,” I said, aiming to keep my voice neutral, not too defensive nor too ashamed. “That I am willing to sentence a man to death for the crime of doing exactly as I asked in a creepier way than I would have liked is not the most flattering colour on me, but I will not pretend to be otherwise. I am not saying I think it was right. I am simply saying it was satisfying regardless.”

He was silent a while longer, and then he said, “I can see how it may look this way - the way I have spoken to you in the past has done nothing to disprove it - but please do not mistake me for your moral arbiter. I am no saint myself, not now, not ever. I hope I can help you to grow, as I was helped to grow, but the last impression I wish to give is that I think I’m better than you.”

“You should think that. You are.”

“I am one year of love and affection ahead of you,” he said firmly. “One year. That’s all.”

“It might take a bit longer than a year for me to match you, what with a century of evil under my belt.”

“Evidence suggests otherwise.”

I wanted to say, and are you offering to provide this love and affection yourself? But of course I knew the answer - that it was meant to be a group effort. Not just Caleb’s companionship, but Caduceus’ wisdom, Fjord’s steadiness, Beau’s honesty. Seeing Jester once every few months would probably be enough to soften me by itself, but not to melt me entirely. One person is not enough to sustainably build a whole new life around, despite what the poets might say. For all that Caleb is especially dear to me, the rest of them are far from incidental. I did not miss only him, in our time apart. I missed all of them, especially as a group: the way they played with each other, bothered each other, effortlessly helped and covered each other - the easy closeness they had, and how infectious it was. Their affection for each other made an observer feel affection for them too, and to be welcomed into the group was to become part of a family. A privilege I do not deserve, but we so rarely get the families we deserve.

It is not that I did not believe him - he was right, the evidence of my change since meeting the Mighty Nein is undeniable - but I felt that I had a lot of growing left to do just to repay the love and forgiveness they have already given me, let alone earn any more.

I looked at the circle, the Zone of Truth. “Do you think,” I conjectured, aware that the change of subject was jarring, “that if we both stood in it, we could ask each other questions and it would work? Or does the asker have to be stood outside of it?”

“One way to find out,” Caleb said.

The circle was large enough to fit us both without any forced proximity. I was both relieved and disappointed.

“After you,” Caleb said. “Only fair.”

I could think of only one thing to ask, something I was just about ready to hear an answer to - if only because I’m was increasingly sure that the answer I had imagined for myself was probably the worst possible version of it, and I suspected that whatever he told me would be comforting overall, if a little painful to hear from his own mouth.

“In the time after the peace talks, before you came north the first time - I don’t want to assume you were thinking about me, but, given the circumstances, it would be a logical assumption to make. I would like to know what was going through your head in that time. And to be clear, I ask for your thoughts only - you need not expose your feelings.” I felt immediately that adding that final caveat had exposed my own paranoia too much, but I did not regret adding it, for the sake of his privacy.

“In the immediate aftermath, I thought about you a lot,” he said, and I could hear a slight difference in his manner of speaking - a lack of hesitance, presumably caused by the spell taking effect. “Of course, it wasn’t long before dragon turtles and volcano gods that stole memories refocused me on more immediate problems, but I did think of you a lot at first. It usually made me think about myself. In your shoes. My past reflected in your present. I thought a lot about what I said to you, on the ship - I was panicking, I said whatever I thought I needed to say to stop things from going belly-up - but I doubted afterwards if it was the right thing. Was I honest, was I misleading, should I have been harsher, should I have been kinder…”

I wanted to tell him he could not have been kinder, but the spell would not let the words come out. I thought I believed it, but perhaps not. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t interrupt his speech.

“I never came to any coherent conclusion, not before we saw you again. I went back over every memory, trying to pin down a verdict, but I found enough evidence to support both sides: your dark side, your lies, but also your genuine moments, your true friendship. I was willing to never trust you again, to add you to the list of enemies to take down, if that was what it made sense to do, but I didn’t want to. I was angry, but I defended you when the others erred on the side of severity - some part of me couldn’t help but take it personally. I couldn’t help but think, there, but for a twist of fate, go I. And I did not want to lose the only person I’d met in a decade who understood, you know? But I never knew what to think. Not until we saw you again, and then I knew. I didn’t know if we could trust you there and then, but I knew that something had changed - that you’d started down a better path. And I told you then: all it would take was time.”

Time. The leitmotif of my life, reprised in a minor key for a twist of irony in the second act. But if I think about it too much, my mind will drop down through the city into the Genesis ward, and stay there running through scenarios instead of resting tonight.

“Did you miss me?” I heard the question come out before I even knew it had come to mind. I cannot say if it was the spell that made me say it, or simply my own stupidity. I hated how pitiful it sounded. I may have been making a point to bring down some of my walls, but I don’t think it's unreasonable to want to maintain some pride.

“Not for long,” he said, and grimaced, clearly unhappy with the answer. “What we discovered on Rumblecusp, the things that happened, were a pretty strong distraction: anything out of sight was easily put out of mind when there was so much happening in front of us. And the group had always been without you before, so the empty space was not conspicuous. A part of me was glad to be able to forget you, since thinking of you had been painful. But I did miss you, when you were on my mind - all the more for believing there was a chance we would never see you again, at least not as friends. Perhaps I missed what we’d had before - a bond I thought was broken. Sorry,” he added, the compelled answer complete. “You probably should not have asked.”

“I did not intend to - I apologise. But I am not unhappy with your anwer; I appreciate that you thought of me with anything but ill will. And now it is your turn,” I said, eager to change the subject, and then a second later, terrified of what he might ask. Not that I believed he would be cruel enough to ask something truly private, but it would not be so difficult for an innocent question to brush up against a secret he did not intend to hear.

“Well, I could ask the same question,” he said. “But I’m actually more curious to hear your plans for the future.”

Thankfully, I have not yet processed yesterday’s revelation sufficiently to have extrapolated anything concrete enough to incorporate into my visions for the future. Had enough time passed for me to have formulated any hopes, or made even vague plans for what I might do with my feelings, I would have been in a great deal of trouble with this question - but the shock is still so fresh that it has not yet permeated into any other parts of my brain. It exists only in the present, and a little in hindsight, but it will take more time and thought for it to grow long roots and branches in every direction.

My lips began to speak of their own volition once again. “My future is almost as terrible to think of as my past,” I said. “I have always lived in Rosohna, and the idea of leaving it behind forever is terrifying - but I cannot think of any other way to survive. I am not a traveller. I have never lived ‘on the road’, as it were. How will I do it? Where will I go? Will I ever see my brother again? Will I even be able to go home and gather my things before I lock it up for good? I try to avoid thinking about it: it is a black hole that would suck me in if I gave it the chance. I fear my future cannot take any kind of shape until my present has a more coherent one - until I can put together some picture of who I am now, now that I am not who I was. My desire for greatness has not abated, but recently, for the first time, I have begun to desire happiness also - a desire which, while it does not necessarily eclipse the former, perhaps balances with it. My research may need to take a new path for some time. It is not that my fascination with the Beacons has faded, but there are some unpleasant memories tied to that now, and it may be some time before I can take out those notes again without feeling a little sick to my stomach. I will return to it, perhaps. But I hope there are plenty of other avenues for study - there is plenty of inspiration to find here, is there not? And I have time - a very long time - for study. Less time to enjoy the company of those I have so recently found. Yours included, if you are amenable. Yours especially. Perhaps most of all.”

Thankfully, I stopped here. He just smiled, and I was relieved, not only to gather that my answer did not make him suspect me of secret-keeping, but also that, despite my awkwardness, I have been able to convey how highly I think of him well enough that he was not surprised to hear it.

I was relieved to leave the circle and the courtroom behind, but, despite having got away with it today, I fear my feelings will only grow more difficult to hide - or rather, I will grow worse at hiding my feelings. It is always the way: I am an excellent liar to begin with, and get worse the longer the lie goes on, the higher the stakes get. The more I think about it, the more it is at the forefront of my mind, and the forefront of my mind is dangerously close to the tip of my tongue. It can become perilously easy for me to accidentally say something out loud, simply because it sounds so loud in my head I forget that nobody else has heard it yet. I must try to think of it less, not only for the sake of focusing on the task at hand, but for the sake of avoiding a slip of the tongue that could put me in a mortifying position.

Speaking of secrets - as I was passing by the dining room on my way to my room tonight, I heard Briva and Nickel inside, telling Cheszara about the day we had had. Not, to be clear, the day they had had, but the day Caleb and I had had. In quite some detail. One of them must have peeked in on us while we were in the courtroom, although they do not appear to have heard much; thankfully we had the sense to speak quietly. I heard mention of some kind of a wager, which I did not like the sound of, but I decided against confronting them - I would rather keep my knowledge of this moment to myself, and use it to gather more intelligence on the situation. I have my eye on them.

*In Kryn high society, young gentlemen - especially those who are not deemed to have a military path ahead of them - are generally raised and educated in the interest of becoming good husbands to other nobles. The ‘elegant accomplishments’ considered pertinent for this role include skills in music, poetry, calligraphy, and fine art; a complete knowledge of etiquette, including the right way to dress and hold oneself, to set tables, to and serve tea; social skills such as formal dancing, letter writing, and hosting; and a working knowledge of history, philosophy, culture and current events - just enough to hold an interesting conversation without appearing more intelligent than one's audience.

Chapter Text

Day 9

Today we came to the disconcerting realisation that we have spent over a week of our voyage on just the surface-most ward of the city, and regardless of the fact that there is still a vast expanse of the ward we have not explored, we deemed it necessary to move on. This is the easiest part of the city to return to, after all: while we have the means to camp safely for multiple weeks, we should focus on getting to the deeper parts of the city - those parts we passed by entirely on our first visit, which have never been seen by modern eyes before.

The difficulty with this is, of course, that we do not know where these places are, or how to find them - with the exception of the Genesis Ward, which, without discussion, but by some mutual understanding or shared sentiment, Caleb and I decided ought to be among our final points of exploration. I am not sure why he wished to delay it, but perhaps he felt the same trepidation, the same desire to delay the inevitable, as I do. I choose to view this as a good sign, although certain happenings later in the day have, as shall be seen, swayed my assessment of where he stands on this point.

I suggested we follow the tracks of the arcane transportation system, in the opposite direction from the Genesis Ward: in theory, we would eventually arrive at some sort of hub which would presumably have signposts or maps of the city (which would not reflect the shattered mess of what remains of this place, but would give us some idea of direction), or, failing that, would at least put us on what ought to be a short and convenient route away from where we currently are. Regardless, it gave us a place to start, and so we started.

“It is time like these,” Caleb said, “that I miss our little metallic guide. Well, not so little when we left him.”

He was referring to the fact that, somewhere here, at least one Aeorian citizen still walks the city: Devexian, the living machine which the Mighty Nein nicknamed ‘Charlie’. Last we saw him, he had been venturing out into the ruins in search of others of his kind, which (whom?) he could repair (revive?). I am mistrustful of these beings - the people of this city were not, after all, known for their purity of heart - but I would be curious to see him again, and find out whether he has amassed a community yet. Curious, but nervous; on balance, I would rather continue to avoid anything we notice moving while we are here, as it is far more likely to be foe than friend.

Following the tracks was not as easy as it sounds, the roads having been heavily damaged, and in places destroyed. But it was not dull, not with good company. After an extended and surprisingly absorbing process not unlike following a torn string through a maze, we came to a small building, more of a shed than anything else, which the tracks passed through; the wall showed a simplified map of the city, the tracks colour coded in a way which unfortunately made no sense without the presence of the vehicles passing through, which presumably would have displayed the colours. We were, however, able to figure out the compass orientation of the map relative to our own position, and continued walking for some time until we came to what looked like a checkpoint, marked Ars Ward. This is not a ward we have heard of.

The security on this checkpoint was much less intense than it was at the checkpoint leading to the Genesis Ward, and we were able to open the gate (which was almost on its side) with some simple arcane lockpicking. Immediately, we were in a different place.

Most of this ward looks to have been destroyed; the ground is at a steep tilt, tipping towards a sheer wall of rock that marks the western-most edge of the impact crater. The rest of the ward is probably in some other site, flung afar on impact; I have made a note of our bearing, so that future explorations can go in search of it if so desired. But what remains is far more beautiful than any of the other places we have seen: the Praesidis Ward was municipal, the Genesis Ward was sterile and scientific, but this ward was decorative in a way none of the rest of the city has been. The buildings were shapely, embellished and painted, with trellises bearing the frozen and petrified remains of what must have once been verdant flowering vines. The streets were arched over with further trellises and arbours, the pavement under our feet decorated with glittering pieces of glass tile. A ruin now, but with the faded remains of what must once have been colourful, ornate, and luxurious. But it did not remind me of the likes of the Firmaments, a purely residential area for the wealthy to live surrounded by beauty - there is an atmosphere here of industry. Perhaps this is an older ward, a part of the city created before sensibilities (or policies) made a turn for the plainer. Nickel, I am sure, will get to the bottom of it.

Despite the fact that this ward is even more ruined than the previous one, something about being here feels closer to being on a real city street. Even in its current state it has something like an atmosphere, in the complimentary sense. One particularly well-preserved street, lined with decorated storefronts and a variety of street art, was the first place in Aeor where we have felt inclined to stroll, like tourists at our leisure - I had a ridiculous impulse to link arms with Caleb, and although I don't think he would have minded, the idea felt so silly I could only laugh at myself. When he asked what was funny, though, I did tell him, and he saw the humorous side as well, as I had hoped he would. Hopefully, he saw only the humorous side.

On this street, we found a building with a sign reading - though it may be a slightly clumsy translation - Laboratory of Dreams. Ominous as the message felt to me, in context, it would have been a crime against our scientific interests to walk past without investigating something so perfectly titled to draw us in.

Inside, the building was a strange, clinical mixture of a laboratory (as the sign suggested) and a luxurious spa. According to some leaflets that Nickel found, the place was offering ‘a cutting edge new development’ for customers to enjoy, for a per-use price that I would guess (knowing very little about Aeor’s currency or economy) was extortionate, promising a ‘personalised experience’ designed to ‘relax and uplift’. Venturing further inside - expecting, perhaps, to find evidence of various strange health treatments - we discovered several small rooms containing nothing at all but a single comfortable chair and, on a pedestal in front of it, a spherical crystal with a myriad of complex internal facets, setting it sparkling weirdly when our lights hit it. Rather unexpectedly, it was giving off an aura of mixed illusory and enchantment magic, both in incredibly dense concentrations. An Identify spell corroborated what the leaflet had said: upon touching the object, the user would experience a pleasant illusory scene unique to themselves, as well as a calm and cheerful emotional state. Harmless enough on the face of it, but the magic we sensed from the crystal was incongruously powerful for such a simple function.

“We should probably not touch it,” Caleb said, in a tone that clearly implied he wanted to touch it anyway, and was hoping to be encouraged.

“Probably not,” I agreed. “That being said, it would appear that members of the public were using them regularly, so it stands to reason it could not be particularly dangerous.”

“True.”

We looked at each other from opposite sides of the orb, silently daring each other to go first.

“Together?” he suggested.

On a count of three, both of us put a hand on the artefact.

And then, for the second time today, I found myself in a different place entirely.

Quite where, in hindsight, is unclear - the memory is imprecise, and does not seem to make as much sense as it felt like it did in the moment. In the moment, I felt that I was in Rexxentrum, but in hindsight, it looked far too much like Rosohna for this to be true, and I was not nearly as anxious as I ought to have been, standing completely undisguised in the heart of an Empire that encouraged killing people like me on sight. I was looking at a house which seemed perfectly ordinary at the time, but looking back, was a strange caricature of Zemnian architecture blended bizarrely with the more familiar Kryn forms I had grown up with.

I looked up at the house, feeling no surprise or confusion whatsoever; in fact, I would reckon my emotional state in this moment to be better than it has been in… well, better than it has ever been.

I was carrying a box. I could hear voices inside. I ignored the closed door in front of me, passed through the garden gate, and came to a pair of patio doors flung wide - it was as if I knew they’d be there. On the other side of the doorway, Fjord and Beau were sitting on the floor with a dining table on its side, screwing the legs on. Through an archway on the far side was a kitchen, where Caduceus was cooking and Jester appeared to be making a mess under the guise of helping. Everything looked a little bare and half-finished; clearly someone was just moving in.

“Hey,” said Beau, by way of greeting, “where have you been? We thought you’d be here already by the time we got in from Zadash.”

“I was sent on an errand,” I replied, waving my free hand to flip the finished table upright and placing the box on top of it.

“Right,” Beau said. “So if someone fetched his own shit, you might’ve been free to teleport us in.” She directed the someone loudly over her shoulder, which caught the attention of the people in the kitchen. Caduceus’ calm greeting was lost in the sound of Jester shouting my name and running to hug me; I accepted the hug with an ease I have never managed before.

Jester’s shout had attracted further attention: a door on the other side of the kitchen was opened by Caleb, wearing just a shirt and trousers, with a dab of paint on his face. Behind him, I could see Veth standing on Yasha’s shoulders, painting the cornices in what looked like the living room.

“Here you are,” he said. “You got it okay? Sorry to send you on a detour.” He opened the door wider to give me a better view into the room beyond. “Well, what do you think of the place?”

“There’s a family of gingerbread people at the door,” I replied. “They say they want their house back.”

I heard Beau laugh somewhere behind me.

“Yeah, it’s kind of a mess, I know, but I have a perfectly good tower that will serve until it’s in shape. And we’re making good progress already. The kitchen is working, obviously.”

“I have dumplings,” Caduceus said, producing a platter right on cue.

Kingsley came down the stairs, holding a screwdriver. “I think I fixed the sink,” he said. “Emphasis on think. Do not hold me to that.”

Caleb came over to open up the box I’d brought. I wiped the paint off his face.

Jester watched over his shoulder as he opened it, bouncing a little: “Ooh, what did you get, what did you get?”

He lifted a small but well-crafted index card cabinet out of the box. “It’s not bad, right?” he said, apparently to me. “Not perfect, but pretty good. Antique. And it’ll be a much easier way to store my more extensive notes than in a single book.”

I produced a small pack of label cards from the pocket of my tunic; the weather was too warm for a cloak. “You’ll have a lot of drawers to label.”

He gave me a starry-eyed look, as if I had just asked him to be the guest of honour at a royal ball. I could not help but chuckle.

“Oh, and when you’re done writing all the labels, I can add some little matching pictures on them all!” Jester volunteered.

“You’ll definitely draw appropriate pictures?” Fjord - who was lying on the floor, apparently exhausted from constructing furniture - asked her. “No dicks?”

Jester giggled. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“Is a house really a home without a few hidden dicks from Jester?” I said with a smile.

“Caleb,” Beau called from the kitchen, having just finished three dumplings in less than a minute. “Give us something else to build, we’re bored.”

“How about the piano stool?” Caleb called back.

“Upstairs or downstairs?”

Caleb turned to me. “Where do you want the piano?” He asked me.

“Where do I…?” I didn't understand why he was asking.

He gave me an unnervingly blank look, blanker than I have ever seen on his intelligent face, and suddenly I felt a strange sensation, not unlike the moment just before one faints - the world momentarily ceasing to be, gravity everywhere and nowhere, just for a second before my vision came back. But my confusion, and his, were now gone. He was facing a different direction now, a discrepancy I am only noticing in hindsight.

“How about the coffee table?” Caleb said to Beau, who was suddenly back in the dining room.

“Sounds good. Come on, man,” Beau said, offering her hand to Fjord.

“I’m just gonna take a break real quick - ”

“Nope. Lots to do.”

“No, I think we’re done, actually.”

“Up and at ‘em.”

He groaned, but took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. They went through to the living room, passing Veth, who was ordered to wash her paint-covered hands before handling the dumplings, a phrase which made Jester giggle. Meanwhile, I was beginning to feel a niggling sense that something was off.

Caduceus handed me a cup of tea with my customary half-teaspoon of sugar. “What do you think of the plants?” he asked me. “I brought a selection that I thought would do well here.”

“Plants?”

Caleb turned me towards the open patio doors. Outside, the garden was a patch of overgrown grass with a sad, lopsided bird bath in the middle. Standing near the back fence was a small cluster of saplings and plants in pots, some of which I recognised from the blooming grove.

“You should know that every plant I’ve ever owned has died within weeks,” Caleb said, “so I’m hoping you have a secret green thumb.”

I opened my mouth to reply, and then stopped. The plants - something was off about the plants. They were in full leaf, and the flowers in bloom.

I turned around. Yasha had come through to the kitchen as well, and was washing her hands, and splashing water on her face. That wasn’t right, either. I thought again about Fjord lying on the floor, tired and sweaty. Caleb’s lack of sweater, my own lack of cloak.

Why was it so hot? Caleb moved into his new house in winter. This past winter.

This had happened already. But I was not there when it did.

Once again I felt that horrible, dizzy sensation. I turned to look at what remained of the group in the kitchen, eating dumplings and half-fretting, half-laughing about the fact that the bedframe was looking worryingly small compared to the mattress that was waiting for it. They all seemed to have forgotten I was there. I stepped into the room, already anticipating what was going to happen with a pit in my stomach.

Nobody reacted to my presence. I tapped Jester’s shoulder. She did not react, continuing to tell Caleb that actually if the mattress didn’t fit that was okay, actually, because if he left it on the floor then he could jump on it without breaking anything - and yes, she said ‘actually’ twice, which was unnervingly true to the way she speaks, making the fact that this was not really her even more disturbing.

A feverish sense of confusion and unreality came over me, hot, sickly, and red around the edges. There is little that frightens me more than being entirely at a loss for what is happening, to be entirely in the dark.* Thankfully, like many people with very particular fears, being confronted with it kicks my brain into a kind of defensive overdrive; after a few moments of intense focus on my memory of the past day, on where I’d been before I was here, the fog began to clear, and I remembered: I was in Aeor, and I had touched something I should not have.

This did not necessarily reduce my degree of panic to zero, but the advantage of knowledge soothed me. I know how illusions work, in particular how illusory realities and magical ‘dream states’ work: my mother uses them extensively in her work with returning souls, and in testing candidates for consecution. In theory, my brain was playing its own part in creating this reality, and, while I could not simply think the spell away, what I believed to be true could become truth.

I went through the living room - which was unnervingly empty of Beau, Fjord, the coffee table, or the fresh coat of paint - to the front door. I now knew that there was no city on the other side of this door. I was going to step out of this door and out of this entire reality.

I opened the door to a soft, black void not dissimilar to the pocket realm inside a Luxon Beacon, or the top floor of Caleb’s tower. I ignored the vertigo that shot from my sternum to my toes as I stepped up to the ledge, embracing instead the more comforting rush of confidence in my own capabilities, and, with an absolute trust in my decision which I have felt far less often in the past few months than I used to before, I stepped out.

The next thing I knew, I was standing at the foot of a small, gentle hill, surrounded by tall grass blowing in a soft breeze. At the crest of the hill was a little farmhouse which looked much more authentically Zemnian than the patchwork construction I had made of Caleb’s new house in my previous dream. This time, however, I knew I was not really here. I also knew that, being outdoors, it would take something other than opening a door to escape this layer of the illusion.

About ten yards ahead of me, I could see Caleb standing with his back to the farmhouse, looking out over the view with a soft smile. Much like myself a few minutes ago, he looked lighter and more content than I have ever known him to be in reality. Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder to see what he was looking at, and was struck with a beautiful view: mountains lit with golden evening sun, the distant shimmer of a lake, a little village down below, and all around, as far as the eye could see, verdant arable fields bursting with crops beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who had grown up surrounded by the scrubby wastes of Xhorhas. It was abundance on a dizzying scale, even by the lavish standards imposed upon me by my prosperous upbringing. The bright specks of wildflowers and the cooling shade of great sprawling trees dotted the dense green-and-gold patchwork of farms. I would call it much closer to a typical utopian dream than my previous vision, although the brightness of the sunset was incongruous to my own comfort. Why was I here?

I turned back towards the farmhouse. Caleb was standing alone, looking at the view, but as I took a few steps up the hill, I could hear voices - some familiar, some not - and see more figures, closer to the house. Jester was playing tag with a little boy who I could only assume, by his appearance, was Veth’s son, Luc, to whom Caleb had become a late-entry godfather. Caduceus was shelling some kind of pea or bean pod into a little bin by the door. Yasha was setting up some chairs around a small, rustic table next to the house.

I could hear a male voice I didn’t recognise, speaking with a Zemnian accent somewhere inside, the words too muffled to make out. The silhouette of a human woman with her hair braided in a crown around her head was visible in the window, washing something at a sink.

I realised where I was. This was Caleb’s home - his childhood home, in the Zemni fields. I had stepped out of my own dream and into his.

I knew immediately what I needed to do, but I did not want to do it. It would require tact and empathy, which do not come naturally to me, and even if they did, it would still be painful to see the pain I caused him by doing it. The very idea of shattering this idyll weighed heavily upon me. I wondered what would happen if I simply stayed out of sight, and let the happy scene play on. Perhaps it would end of its own accord, coming to some logical, pleasant conclusion. Perhaps, back in Aeor, the rest of our party would break the spell and we would be rescued.

Or perhaps it would play on forever, until our living bodies in Aeor starved to death. Or perhaps it would evolve into a horrifying nightmare from which we could not escape.

He would forgive me for it. Reluctantly, I called his name. He looked down and saw me.

“Essek?” He called back. “But you…” he looked over his shoulder, towards the house and the others, and then looked back at me. “How did you get there?”

His confusion, I gathered, arose from having just seen an imaginary construct of me go into the house, and now here I was again, approaching from the opposite direction. My entrance could not have been more perfectly timed: this was reassuring confirmation that I was indeed present in his vision of a perfect life, but I did not have to actually see the version of myself that had been generated by his mind - I did not have to see what I looked like to him. I do not think there could have been any iteration of that that I would not have found discomforting. He could not, I am sure, have got me perfect - although even if he had, I think that would have been quite a fearsome thing to behold in its own way: there is such a thing as being seen with too stark a clarity. But naturally, if his recreation of me was unflattering, my vanity would have been a little wounded, and as for the alternative… well, being perceived as beautiful is not always a compliment. Beauty is empty, and it eclipses whatever is behind it. People seeing it means little except that they do not care to see past it. I would be disappointed if his mind had embellished me, equally disappointed if it had diminished me, and shaken if confronted with a laser-accurate copy of myself. Thankfully, I was spared any of these experiences - although that is not to say I will not keep myself up at night wondering.

I took a few steps up the hill. He looked nervously over his shoulder again, as if considering running away, and I discovered how much I hated the sight of Caleb being even slightly afraid of me. Strange - I usually enjoy making people at least a little afraid of me, even people I like.

“Caleb,” I tried to begin as gently as possible: “where are we right now?”

“What do you mean, where are we?” I was hoping that this small prompt would be enough to start unravelling the fragile reality constructed here, and save me the need to be more pointed, but no such luck. “You know where we are. You’ve been here before.”

“Think about it,” I pressed. “Where were we this morning? Where were we yesterday?”

“Yesterday? We were… we came in from…” He frowned, and staggered slightly where he stood. I guessed that he must have been experiencing the same dizziness as I previously had, but as I began to step forward to steady him, I, too, felt the ground tip for a moment, and almost fell myself. It stands to reason that this reality, being controlled largely by whatever was going on in Caleb’s head, would itself blur when his perception of it did.

But the world righted itself a second later. “I was here yesterday,” Caleb said. “I’ve been here all week. You rounded everyone up and teleported in this morning. What are you talking about?”

That probably would have been the end of his doubts, if the spell had been able to alter me, too - but I was real, and unmovable. I closed the rest of the distance between us.

“Doesn’t any of this feel wrong to you? Doesn’t anything feel… off?”

“You feel off,” he allowed. “I don’t understand. It’s a perfect evening. Why are you so determined for something to be wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling painfully guilty despite the fact I knew I was doing the right thing. I took his hands, but I’m not sure if I was trying to comfort him, or myself. “I really don’t want to make you think about this, but it’s our only way out. Caleb, this house is not here anymore. It has not been here for a decade. We cannot be here. This is not our reality.”

I will not dwell too much on his expression as he began to realise I was right. I hope to forget it. He looked over his shoulder, but already, the house was beginning to look hazy. Ominous clouds had gathered in the sky above, and the gentle breeze was picking up, whipping his hair into his face.

“No,” he said, still fighting the truth, but with a great deal of doubt in his voice. “No, we were just…we were…”

I decided it was a good idea to bring his attention back to me - the image behind him had already turned from idyllic to distorted and incorporeal, and I feared that if he kept looking, it might morph into a representation of how it had looked last time he’d seen it: in flames. Not something I wanted to see, and certainly not something I wanted him to see.

“We’re in Aeor,” I reminded him. “Far away from this. This is just a dream. You’re in control of it. You can end it.”

Again, I will avoid describing his expression. “I don’t want to end it,” he said softly.

“I know. I’m sorry. But look around you - does this still feel like the safe haven it was a moment ago?” To punctuate my point, there was a crack of thunder from the sky above, which was now charcoal grey and swirling.

He cast his eyes around us, looking torn, and for a moment, I did not know what he would do next. Then, a great gust of wind began to build somewhere far behind us, sweeping loudly through the trees and turning the tall grass into a rippling golden sea - at first figuratively, and then literally. The soft brush off leaves and seed-heads began to turn to cold liquid around me. The solid ground dropped out from beneath me, and before I knew it I was underwater, sinking into fathomless amber depths.

I had only a second to panic before I awoke, gasping, on the floor of the little empty room where we had begun. Caleb was sitting up too, next to me - one of his hands was still tightly clasped in mine. He stared at me.

“What was that?” he asked, breathless and oddly windswept, as if he really had been standing in a storm a moment ago.

After standing and catching my breath, I offered a theory. Elsewhere in the city, evidence has been found that there was a team studying dreams - they even went so far as to ask citizens to ‘donate’ dreams for their database. I suspected that this crystal orb was one outcome of that study, if only a side-project from their real, presumably loftier, goals: an artificial daydream, tailored by your own subconscious, especially for you. But, like a dream, it can be hard to wake yourself from the inside.

Before any more could be said, Cheszara and Caldax came into the room, the former to ask if we had found a similar item in this room as she had in the one next door, and both looking so unbothered that I was prompted to ask how long we had been out of their sight. They looked puzzled. As it transpired, only a few moments had passed.

Saying no more, we warned the others not to touch the orbs, and continued on down the street. But we were distracted, and discovered nothing else of similar interest today.

Caleb, predictably, was quiet and thoughtful through most of the evening. I did not intrude upon his reflections, until - at the fire in the Salon, far from whatever noisy game the others were playing - he spoke:

“Tell me about your parents.”

I realised I was not at all surprised by the question; it was almost as if I was expecting it. Considering I had already resolved to discuss my father with him, I answered without hesitation.

“You have already heard enough about my mother to judge her by,” I said. “Powerful, patriotic, pious, with her sights set on much higher matters than family. Sometimes bordering on tyrannical in her zealotry. One does not need to be the figurehead of a religion for long to begin to feel that one’s own authority is indistinguishable from that of their god, and she has been such a figurehead for an unfathomably long time. I like to think of myself as the antithesis of her, but although our beliefs and our goals exist in very different spheres, I fear I am a lot more like her than I would prefer to think of myself.”

“Do you look like her?” Before I could answer, he added, “Perhaps that is a stupid question, in your culture. The body she is in now could be entirely unrelated to the one that created you. She could be a goblin by now, for all I know.”

“My mother has not been reborn in half a millennium,” I told him. “Many of her previous lives - and she has had many - were comparatively short and tumultuous. She is well over a thousand years old, but only in the last few centuries has she had leisure to marry and mother children.”

“Your father - they did not meet in a previous life? This was their first go around, so to speak?”

“Indeed. My father was… honestly, not a very interesting man. I cannot say how attached they were to each other; it is difficult for me, personally, to imagine feeling anything particularly strong for such an unremarkable person. They were companionable enough, and my mother was genuinely upset by his death, but I would not propose them to be soulmates. He was… a suitable choice. Suitably religious and devoted to upholding tradition, and suitably small in his ambitions; he would never eclipse her, never get in her way. If I am being ungenerous, I would suggest that a renewal of their relationship when he returns in his next incarnation would depend heavily upon the body he appears in. Without meaning to sound vain, it is him that my brother and I look most like, and I daresay his appearance was a factor in her choice.”

“May I ask how he died? I know you once implied that you felt responsible. You angered him, or something?”

“More than angered him, really. I baited him. He baited me, as well - this was the kind of relationship we had. I did not see much of my mother as a child, she was a busy woman, but my father was her representative in the house - always there to remind me of all the traditions I was failing to honour. This was the day that I had refused consecution, and you can imagine the fight I had already had with my mother about it, so by the time I saw him, I was already angry, and things escalated at a steeper rate than usual. He eventually got to the point, as he often did, of telling me to get out of his house, but that command was not the trump card it had been when I was a child, and I was not in the mood to simply take the opening and escape. So, in response, I reminded him that I was the firstborn son of the Umavi, a celebrated scholar, inventor and pioneer in my field, and - as of just a few days previous - the Queen’s Shadowhand, while he was nothing but a trophy husband who had achieved nothing, who did nothing, who had nothing except what had been given to him by the family he married into, and given that I now outranked him in every conceivable realm, both within in the Den and within society at large, he was welcome to get out of my house. Rather to my surprise, he did.

“Perhaps he had expected me to go after him and take it back. Perhaps I should have. But I did not. I did not see him for some time. My brother was in Bazzoxan at the time, still early in his military training, but already writing to us regularly with great excitement about the opportunities for glory in that place, and how he dreamed of returning someday as a commanding officer, to one day reclaim it from the demons that plague it. Whether my father originally went there simply to see his other, more obedient son, or whether it was those tales of glory that drew him there, I cannot say, but I suspect it was my disparaging comments about his lack of achievements that led him to join an excursion into the infested temple. He had trained as a soldier once, so the leader of the expedition had no real reason to refuse him. Of course, he did not survive. Apparently he heard the maddening cry of a Gibbering Mouther and fell off a cliff edge. I do not think it was a particularly noble end.”

“You don’t sound too upset about it.”

“I did not like him,” I said honestly. “I do recognise that I ought not to have said what I said, and I do regret it, to an extent, but at the same time… my life certainly improved from not having him around. Not that that is an excuse. A man still died through my actions.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” Caleb said.

I have not necessarily carried any particular guilt about what happened to my father - or at least, not that I have been consciously aware of - but when he said it, I felt like a small fraction of the general weight that has been upon me these last few months had been lifted. Whether I felt genuinely absolved was not immediately clear, all other feeling being momentarily overwhelmed by a rush of affection for Caleb, but now, I think I do. This is the first time I have confessed to what I did - I dared not tell my mother or my brother, of course - and it was a great relief to hear someone whose judgement I trusted tell me I was not to blame. I hope that this was how he had felt when I told him the same.

“I will allow it,” I said, aware I may have been overstepping, “if you allow yourself the same.”

He did not respond, but in this case, I consider no reaction to be a good reaction; I only intended for him to consider it, and consider it he evidently would.

Again, he was quiet for some time. I was waiting for him to start telling me about his parents - I had assumed that this was why he had asked me about mine - but, in the interest of tact, I did not presume to invite him to speak about them directly. He did not, however, mention them at all. Instead he said:

“I want to ask you what you saw, in the illusory world today - but I realise that is an intrusive question. You do not have to tell me.”

“I saw what you saw, against your will,” I reminded him.

“You didn’t see everything.”

“So I will not tell you everything.” I kept my description deliberately vague: “I was among friends, in a new home. It was simple. Peaceful. Not unlike what you saw.” I did not mention that the home I saw was his, or the fact that, for a moment, the spell seemed to have floated the idea of me living there with him, before registering that that was beyond what I could reasonably believe and recalibrating accordingly.

He nodded. “I’m surprised,” he said. “At both of us, actually. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe we are both men of ambition, yes? What of our grand designs? I’m not suggesting that a peaceful existence surrounded by loved ones is not something I desire - I desire it very much, of course, everybody does - but if it is dreams we are speaking of, I am surprised neither of us saw anything more reflective of…” he struggled for the right word or phrase, and settled upon, “Wizard ego. World-changing discovery. Power, achievement, enlightenment.”

“Perhaps that was not how the spell worked,” I said. “I do not think it was not meant to excite. I think it was meant only to soothe.” I hesitated to add it, but shortly remembered that keeping my thoughts from Caleb was foolish and against my better interests, and added: “Or perhaps we do not know our own happiness as well as we think we do. Perhaps the deeper parts of our minds that put forth the representations of perfection we saw today are wiser than our ‘wizard egos’, as you put it - perhaps the roots of our desires are far more ordinary than we like to think.”

I had come to this conclusion, but my first thought had been similar to Caleb’s. I was surprised at how mundane my vision was. Not only was it a simple domestic scene, without a hint of anything grander going on, but the setting itself was so humble. The house was small, unfinished, and apparently had dubious plumbing - a far cry from my multiple towers with their shining stone walls and spotless rooms - and yet I felt so content there. I can attribute a lot of that to the spell, I suppose, but it is definitely a dream that I will return to in my own mind, and inspect further. In a way, it makes some sense - without getting too deeply into it, I am aware that at this time in my life, I am more preoccupied than I generally have been with such things as friendship, acceptance, companionability, and, on an even more primitive level, safety. If my greatest fears, right now, revolve around the fragility of my newfound friendships and the equal fragility of my continued survival - if I am currently swallowing an impending meltdown about losing my home and going into hiding, and everything that might mean - then what else would my brain choose to soothe and cheer me but a scene of simple comfort, of myself as an intrinsic piece in the shared life of my friends, of a new and different home being made? At my core, I may still dream of greatness, but perhaps, with all the fear and confusion and uncertainty that has plagued me these last few months, a taste of the mundane is exactly what I crave most.

“Thank you,” Caleb said suddenly to me, outside the door to my room as we were both heading to bed.

I was taken by surprise. “For what?”

“Snapping me out of it,” he said. “In the Dream Sphere.” I capitalise it in acceptance of the name he has given it. “I do not know if I would have… well, I don’t know. But thank you anyway.” He was not meeting my eye, but I did not get the sense he was avoiding it deliberately - he was distracted, not looking at anything outside of his own head.

“I am sorry to have had to do it,” I said. “I wish I could have just…” I was not sure how to end the sentence. He knew what I meant.

“Yeah. Well.” He was looking off to the side, not at anything, but beyond everything - half here and half lost in thought. “I guess it’s lucky you were there. Did you, ah, stumble in, as it were, or did you come looking…?

“No,” I said. “I stumbled in. I would not have intruded intentionally. And I would not have broken the spell so harshly if I thought there was any other way to keep us safe.”

“You don’t need to apologise for something I’m thanking you for, Essek,” he told me.

“Alright, I won’t. But I am still sorry that it happened. It has been… quite a day.”

Distractedly, and without shifting his gaze from whatever he was seeing three feet below the floor behind me, he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. This was his only response, but I understood that it was meant to reassure. And with that, he went to his room.

I am, of course, worried about Caleb. If I am up late thinking about my silly little vision of chores and errands, I can only imagine how he must be feeling, having seen his parents again ten years after their deaths. I did not see them, and I am not sure if I wish I had or if I am glad I did not. I wonder if they looked ten years older - older than they will ever be - or if they looked the same as they did last time he saw them, probably hardly older than he is now.

I had believed - had hoped, admittedly - from what I had observed of him and heard from him recently, that he had of late been feeling less tempted by the contents of the T-Dock. He has spoken with warmth about his new home and the new life he is building. But this evening, he looked as haunted as I have ever seen him. His mind was far away, in a different timeline, a timeline closer to the one he saw a glimpse of today. I fear the happy scenes he saw in the Dream Sphere have struck his heart more painfully than any nightmarish visions might have. I fear that it was a stark reminder of the other life which, of late, he has been busy enough and content enough to have almost forgotten. Just as he seemed to have been putting his past to bed, coming to terms with his life as it is now, letting his path diverge more and more decidedly from the one he had begun on, back comes that old dream, out of the blue - how could he not be pulled back in the other direction?

And yet, selfishly, I find my thoughts repeatedly returning to a question of my own, unanswered in my brief foray into Caleb’s utopia: what did I look like there? I am ashamed to even wonder, given how much more important practically every other aspect of what he experienced today is. I do not know why I am so fixated on the thought. I cannot tell if it is vanity, or the opposite. But this has always been how I’ve felt about my own appearance.

I am reminded of a memorable conversation I had had with Marion Lavorre, in the few days I spent there visiting a handful of the Mighty Nein a short time ago. In fact, it was shortly after Veth and Beau had given me their older-sister talking-to. Ms. Lavorre** was not somebody I had expected to feel a connection with, despite having heard many tales of her voice in the past twenty or so years, and admiring her greatly as a musician. As it happens, she has had the high society gossip rags smuggled to her from Rosohna (along with every other city in Exandria, for the sake of staying informed on any point that may come up in her less musical line of work), and she, too, had admired me from afar for some time, if only for my frequent appearances in the fashion plates after various holiday functions. She also, apparently, prides herself on being able to tell with a single glance if a person can sing, and, having identified me accordingly, we spent several hours across the course of the weekend - usually after everyone else was asleep, the two of us both keeping unusually late hours in comparison - exchanging favourite songs and admiring each other’s talent (that is to say, I was in genuine awe of hers, and she was very polite in pretending mine was comparable).

She also professed to be able to tell a lot about a person by their song choices. After finishing one which, perhaps, was more telling than I had expected, she gave me a long, penetrating look.

“Beauty,” she said, “is not always the blessing some people think it is, is it?”

“I don't know,” I hedged, toying with the piano so as to avoid her eye. “You've built quite an empire with yours.”

She gave a perfectly charming laugh. “Oh, I like that - an empire of beauty! What an amusing turn of phrase. Well, perhaps - but don't pretend you have not learned to turn your own curse to your advantage. You would not look like you do if you had not.”

With a smile I reminded her that the face she was looking at was not my real face. She knew what my real face looked like, of course, but we were technically in public - in the Lavish Chateau around closing time, with staff and stragglers still milling around - so at this moment it was hidden behind an illusion.

“Exactly,” she said. “If you resented your pretty face so much - if you did not want or need it - you'd take this opportunity to wear an ordinary one, to blend into a crowd. But you have chosen another just as beautiful as the original. If you did not wish to be beautiful, you need not wear all the finery you always do. You could try to hide, but you don't.”

I did not know what to say. She narrowed her eyes perceptively.

“It is strange, isn't it? How frightening it is to walk through the world, minding your own business and yet affecting people regardless - breaking hearts and making waves you never intended to, simply because of how people react to something you carry with you always, something out of your control.” Then, she leaned in and added in a conspiratorial stage whisper: “But isn't it even more awful to hide your face under a plain veil, and walk down the street without seeing a single child gaze up at you in awe as you go by?”

She had perfectly captured a feeling I had never even thought to put into words, the strange paradox of going through life as an object of desire to people you had no desire to captivate: the coexisting dread of catching someone looking at you with hunger, wondering if they’re calculating in their head how much they'd be willing to risk to get their hands on you - alongside a habitual dependence upon being able to slide through any barrier with a well-timed smile and a well-chosen perfume. The longing for someone to ignore your exterior and see a value in you that is more than skin deep, and yet the impossibility of untangling your own self-worth from the crutch of your looks. The strange addiction of beauty, of resenting it and all the unwanted side-effects it brings to you and the people around you, and yet being too intoxicated by the sight of your own face in the mirror to ever give it up. I held Marion's gaze, and in each other we saw someone who knew that depressingly shallow truth: beauty is power, and like any power, it is as dangerous as it is irresistible, and it most commonly falls to those who can do the least good with it.

But I fear my reflections are growing too abstract and maudlin even for this journal, which I recognise is not the methodical academic record I intended it to be, but which I will attempt to at least keep focused on the present day. What else happened?

Ah, yes - after sitting down to write at the desk in my room tonight, I realised I had come to the end of my supply of non-spellbook-grade ink, and, upon going down to the salon to get some more, I overheard some of the party arguing inside:

“...letter of the law, maybe,” Nickel was saying, “but it’s clearly not in the spirit of what we said.”

“The letter of the law is the law,” Briva replied, and I would describe her tone as somewhere between excited and smug. “Technicality or not, we win.”

I was surprised to hear the monotone voice of Caldax, who so rarely spoke: “It’s not a contract. It’s just a stupid wager. It isn’t about the wording. We all know what was meant.”

“He’s right, Briva,” said Cheszara, sounding a little nervous to speak against her. “I don’t think this is fair.”

“It’s not our fault if Nickel didn’t think this through. We win. Pay up.”

The group dissolved into crosstalk, and I could not make out anything for a few moments until I heard Dagen’s voice:

“Alright, everyone pipe down,” he said. “I’m making a ruling: the wording of the bet was lazy, it’s true, but I think we all understood the implications of what was agreed. Briva is trying to pull a fast one, and frankly, she’s ruining everyone’s fun. I rule no win. The bet continues.”

Once again, there was some argument, but Dagen’s authority appeared to be respected, and it quickly abated into grumbling acceptance.

As they all came filing out of the salon, I had the gratification of seeing them react to finding me standing outside. They froze, silent, waiting for me to speak.

“Good evening,” was all I said.

They looked warily from each other to me. I am reassured, however, by the fact they looked more embarrassed than actually scared (with the exception of Cheszara, who is more easily frightened and probably considers the prospect of embarrassment to be a disaster worth fearing). I am, therefore, convinced that whatever they are up to errs more on the side of impertinent silliness than malicious betrayal - and, having known Jester for close to a year now, I am not as ill-disposed as I once was towards the former.

I simply stood aside and let them pass me. I must admit, I took some morbid pleasure in discomposing them - did I not say I rather like making people a little scared of me? I do not feel it is an unreasonable punishment for whatever it is they’re doing behind my back - which, undoubtedly, would discompose me.

I returned to my room with the ink, which I have used to write this especially long log entry. It is late: I must end here, and try to get some rest.

[at the bottom of page, apparently added later:]

Caleb has now kissed me once on my forehead, once on my cheek, and once more on the one bare knuckle between the three rings on my left hand. I’m starting to wonder if he has to fill a full bingo-card of innocuous body parts before he kisses me properly.

*translator’s note: ‘in the dark’ is not, of course, a phrase used in Undercommon to describe the state of not knowing something; I have paraphrased here for clarity. The original phrase translates more literally to ‘head buried in the dirt’, which, in Common, would carry implications of deliberate rather than involuntary ignorance: evidently, in the Underdark, it was a lot more usual to have one’s head buried against one’s will than it is here on the surface.

**translator’s note: I translated the title here to what I believe to be Marion Lavorre’s correct title to be - namely, ‘Ms.’ - because Undercommon has a much more complex system of honorifics than Common, particularly for women, and few of them translate directly. The one the author gave here is generally used as a courtesy title for a woman who has no noble title, but, for whatever reason, the speaker considers her deserving of the same level of respect as an aristocratic lady. The closest comparison I can think of would be adding ‘esquire’ to the name of an esteemed professional.

Chapter Text

Day 10

If yesterday’s happenings could be said to have ruffled me, today’s were twice as confounding, albeit in a very different way. My mind is so full I hardly know how I shall set all my thoughts down. But I shall do my best to lay out the events of the day in the correct order, before I indulge in any lengthy personal soliloquies.

At the beginning of the day, Caleb and I were both quiet, occupied with our own, separate inner turmoils. I had expected it of Caleb, but I, too, was still reflecting on yesterday’s experience: I had forgotten to think of my own vision last night - I was too full of concern for him and his - but when I woke up this morning, it all came rushing back to consume my thoughts. I tried my best to forget about it, to stay in the present, but it was putting all sorts of ideas in my head. The whole thing was auspiciously timed: did I not write here, only the day before, that I had been too frightened and overwhelmed to consider my future, least of all a future that accounted for my feelings for Caleb? And the very next day, I was forced to confront it - or at least, one idealised version of it, too optimistic to give credence. But it had not made it any easier to come to any kind of conclusions, or make any kind of plans: it had only given me more to think about, and left me even deeper in the weeds.

But when Caleb began to speak again, I took this as my cue to throw us both harder into the work, which served both to force me out of my own head and (I think) improve his mood further. We spent the morning on a kind of scavenger hunt, identifying and cataloguing all the small and mostly non-functioning glamours that adorn this ward: illusory flowers that had once bloomed on the trellises through all seasons, spots on the road that would light up at night to show the path only when someone approached, murals where birds flitted through swaying painted branches. We theorised as to how these spells had been maintained, and slowly, Caleb’s mood began to lift - slowly, he began to come back into the present reality from where he had, no doubt, spent the night lost in dark pasts and alternative futures.

At lunchtime, we sat down and ate our rations at some tables we found and righted outside what once must have been an al fresco cafe; it felt almost like a date as close to civilised as we had come in weeks (outside of the Tower, that is). The mummified Aeorian bodies inside the half-crushed cafe did dampen the mood somewhat, but I had my back to them, so the disturbance was minimal for me.

I don’t remember what we talked about, now; what happened this afternoon has overshadowed the finer details. I should emphasise that it was not just Caleb and I having lunch together; it was all of us sitting around these tables, speaking as a party - although I still have not broken into the group entirely, and I am rather in the habit of focusing my talk on Caleb. It would be fair to say that my own growing feelings are probably a factor in my singling him out to speak to - not that that is necessarily a good idea. As predicted, it is growing more and more difficult to behave normally around him, to keep myself in check. I thought I had become an expert in keeping things to myself, but Caleb is particularly hard to lie to: much like the last secret I kept from him, this one (if it deserves the title of ‘secret’, in comparison) appears to be autocatalytic to its own destruction, falling apart faster and faster the longer it remains locked away. My brain has begun responding to his questions with its own stupid romantic response first, and then I have to think of a normal one to actually give him: Essek, will you do something for me? he asks, and in my head a chaotic little voice says, anything, whatever you ask, and then I have to ignore it and say, yes, what do you need? - like a sane person, you know. I wonder if there's a noticeable pause. I live in dread of the day I get it the wrong way around, and think the normal response to myself while saying the stupid one out loud.

Towards the end of our lunch break, however, a new distraction came to release me from the human one in front of me: I noticed a tall pole, which I had initially taken to be a street light, but now realised was certainly not. Unlike the Praesidis Ward, the street lights here in the Ars Ward are decorative: they overhang the street, with the lighting element itself shaped like an insect, its abdomen glowing in a representation of a firefly. Few of them are glowing anymore, but enough are still alight to show that they were a variety of colours. The pole I had noticed, however, stood straight, and much taller than the others, with a flat cap at its apex. It stood on top of a cylindrical platform, like a large pillar box. Caleb had noticed my eyes going to it a few times, and by the time he asked what I was looking at, I was already getting up to inspect it. Assuming correctly that our rest was over, the party followed.

The pole did not carry a magical signature, but it carried what I would describe as the scars of magic: something like a riverbed, entirely dry itself, showing signs of having been worn down by the flow of water through it. It was made of solid silver, and had the faint remains of intricate but highly unspecific carvings upon its surface. My immediate hypothesis was that it was a giant arcane focus, meant to channel magic like a wand or staff, but on a huge scale.

There was a seam on the pillar box platform. Caleb and I looked at each other.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

We broke the box open, to reveal one of the most complex networks of sigils, artefacts, and components I have ever seen. It was so wickedly convoluted, such a myriad of inter-reliant enchantments, it would take hours to even work out what it was for, let alone how it worked. It was a treat beyond my wildest dreams; I felt like a magpie in a jeweller’s shop, and no words or looks were necessary to know that Caleb felt just the same. We did not hesitate to get stuck in.

The box was larger than I had first realised, easily large enough for a person to work on the machinery - or two, if they didn’t quibble too much about personal space. As we worked, the rest of the party dispersed through the little square; Nickel commandeered a reluctant Cheszara to help them properly catalogue the various possessions upon a particularly well-dressed Aeorian corpse, and the rest traced lazy circles around a small perimeter surrounding us all, keeping an eye out for danger. Gods, in hindsight it seems like a laughably obvious crucible.

At length, we ascertained that the device was some kind of arcane power generator. We continue to believe that much of the city’s centralised arcane effects, like the transportation system, were powered by one large, central power node - probably the size of a small village, and likely damaged well beyond repair - but these smaller generators appear to provide more local effects, and perhaps act as low-power backups should the area become cut off from the main supply. The pole above channelled and dispersed the magic overhead, forming a network with several others - which we are now noticing everywhere, like Verin’s proverbial birds - to distribute it throughout the neighbourhood. This one, like most of them, was damaged, and although we were far from reaching a full understanding of how the device worked, we had a notion, in our excitement, that we could fix it.

And fix it we did. We fell once again into a trance of work, the same flow state that had carried us through the final stages of Veth’s permanent transformation spell all those months ago, back in my Tower in another life. The feeling is impossible to imagine for those who have never worked in perfect harmony with a fellow genius: a bizarre conjunction of crazed monomania and absolute order, simultaneously wild and calm, like water over rapids - chaotic from the outside, but following a path as sure and as logical as a staircase to anyone with the means to understand it. It was as though the two of us were one person, one mind, all of our thoughts in common; perfect understanding, perfect cooperation. I could hardly have told you which of us said what, did what: his words, his hands, might have been mine, and I would hardly have known the difference. It is a rush I can only assume most people pursue by taking stimulants at parties.

It ended predictably, in hindsight. All of a sudden - and it seemed to sneak up on us, to have arrived without any build-up - everything seemed to be in place. All that remained now was the moment of truth: to activate it, and see if it worked - and what exactly ‘working’ looked like. It seemed only fair that we do it together: with my hand over his - I was too swept up in the academia of it all to feel self-conscious about it - we counted down from three, then pressed our hands to the glyph and channelled just enough magic into the system to kick-start it.

It was immediately clear that it had worked. The machinery around us sprung to life, the glow of it under the effects of my Detect Magic spell almost blinding. The background hum of atmospheric magic became an audible buzz; it was so potent I could even taste it on my tongue, could smell it, sharp and ozonic, in the air. There was a cry of surprise from outside, and through the half-closed door we could see the environment brighten as all the street lights began to glow.

Still in that dizzy haze of exercised intellect, we celebrated in the close quarters of the pillar box, which had now grown uncomfortably hot with the rush of power. The memory is fuzzy, but I remember laughing and gripping each other’s arms, and then, flush with victory and clearly not thinking about what he was doing - in an escalation of his usual excitement and lack of boundaries in such moments which in hindsight seems inevitable - Caleb took my face in his hands and kissed me.

It was the work of a moment. If I had not been so entirely blindsided by it, I would not have let it end so soon. But I could not move to do anything about it, and after less than a second, it was over. I had barely another second to stare at him - and certainly not long enough to read the expression on his face - before Nickel was appearing in the doorway, telling us excitedly that it wasn’t just the lights: they could hear music, and the sounds of mechanics whirring to life.

My shock was too great for me to fall back into the thrill of the work as quickly Caleb seemed to - or perhaps he was deliberately drawing attention away from me, giving me a moment alone to compose myself. I stayed where I was, frozen, for a little while after he hurried out with Nickel. It was not too long before I followed, and not too long before I was fairly well distracted by the various fascinating phenomena that had revealed themselves around us, But the flow had been broken. I was too preoccupied to muster my previous level of enthusiasm as we got out the instruments and studied the radius of the heating effect which the generator had created, and examined the tiny moving parts of the little mechanical birds that had begun to hop and peck around the fountain, and searched for the source of the music, which never seemed to get any louder or quieter anywhere within the generator’s range.

If I had expected a conversation, or at least an acknowledgement of what had happened, in the Tower that evening, I was not gratified. We finished our work late, and had plenty still to discuss and theorise over during dinner. After dinner, Caleb was pulled into a complicated dice game with the rest of the party, and at length - with some hesitance - the invitation was timidly extended to me. I could do nothing but agree, and the party seemed pleased, if not necessarily with my company than at least with their own courage in asking. I might have been pleased too, if I had had the capacity to feel anything about anything besides the hollyphant in the room. I played poorly and remained mostly silent, too lost in my thoughts to make conversation.

I turned my expectations to those final few moments before we went to our rooms, after the game was finished; it would not be the first time he had caught me outside my door at the last minute, and said something important right before going to bed.

We went up. I hesitated outside my door.

“Goodnight,” he said, after a moment’s pause, and continued to his own room.

So, that is where we stand. Quite a statement, considering that it is entirely in question; I have no idea where we stand. Is today’s incident to be ignored? Caleb certainly seems to be ignoring it, but is he pointedly ignoring it, to make a deliberate statement about what he wants (or does not want) from our relationship, or does he simply not consider it a notable occurrence? Out-of-character bursts of affection are, as I have already observed many times, his habitual reaction to such great successes: I would not be the slightest bit surprised if he has done the same to many - perhaps most, perhaps all - of his other friends over the course of their adventures. Or perhaps he does intend to discuss what happened, just not tonight - perhaps he wants some time to consider first. To talk himself into, or out of, whatever comes next. To work out how best to make his suit, or how to let me down gently.

It occurs to me only now that perhaps I should have said something, or done something: perhaps it was unreasonable to expect him to have done so. He kissed me, after all - I did not have the time or the capacity to kiss him back - so perhaps that puts the proverbial ball in my court. But what would I say? I have nothing to tell him, no speech prepared. I have not decided what I want to say - what I want to do - what I want at all.

I am not stupid. I do know that the attraction is, to one degree or another, mutual. Nor do I think he is stupid, and I am sure he knows this as well. I may have been erring on the side of wilful ignorance, but, similar as we are, I do not find him all that difficult to read; although, different as we are, I suspect we came at it very differently. Like fire and ice, Briva said once, and it does ring true: I am glacially slow to move, while Caleb’s feelings catch quickly and burn bright. I dare not wonder how much earlier he arrived upon it than I did. I do not mean it as a compliment to myself, but I do not think it outside the realm of possibility that his feelings began, in a small way at least, upon our very first meeting; I remember the tone of his voice the first time he said, Fascinating, to something I told him. He has the capacity for it, in a way that I do not: in the past year or so alone - according to Jester and Beau and my own eyes - sparks of some kind have existed between himself and half a dozen people (if you count those of them who have taken turns in the same body as more than one person), and that is more than I can say for myself in my entire century and a half. Of course, when I think of that, a quiet voice in the back of my head asks how I can possibly hope, being one of so many options, to be the one he chooses. Perhaps in my slowness to bloom, the moment has passed, and someone else’s claim has taken precedence. But my wizard ego is not entirely vanquished, and still has a voice of its own, albeit quieter than usual; if I let it, it takes an inventory and reassures me that I am probably the best option, or close to it.

That likely speaks more of his questionable taste than it does of my merit.

No, I am certainly not afraid that he does not feel the same, but despite what some may think, that does not leave me with nothing to fear. He may feel more for someone else. He may feel against his will, and choose to reject those feelings. He may be advised away by others. He may find that the life he wants to live does not have room for everything he wants, and compromises must be made. His logical mind may make a different choice from what I will generously call his heart (generously to myself, anyway). The simple phenomenon of two people feeling similarly towards each other does not make everything else fall away; life is many-faceted, and circumstances must align, choices must be made consciously, with consideration for the ripple effect they will have. To want something does not always lead to choosing it; perhaps he is as much at a loss as I am, and perhaps brushing over today’s little accident was his way of doing precisely what I am doing - buying time, delaying the decision.

I do have some cause for hesitation. I am aware that all my friends - the friends for whom I have knocked my entire life out of orbit, the only people besides my brother who care about me at all (and I’m only 95% sure the latter will stand by me once the warrant for my arrest goes out) - are, essentially, Caleb’s friends, and some of them have made it very clear that if I do anything to hurt him ever again, I’m out. At a stretch, a particularly affable few of the Mighty Nein - Jester and Caduceus, probably nobody else - might stay on casual speaking terms with me, but frankly, if they didn’t stand by their original brother over me, I’d lose a little respect for them. I am not going to say that friendship is easy, but it is less volatile than romance; there is always a chance, a fairly strong chance even, that it would go off the rails, and I would end up losing not only the most important person in my life right now, but also six of the next seven people on that list, and there is not an eighth.

Well, perhaps it is worth the risk. I have never been one to pass up opportunities due to the danger of failing, and it would be nice to hold on to at least one part of my identity in this time when it has become so fractured. My last gamble did not exactly end well, but this would be less of one: from my experience of life so far - limited by my standards, but longer than Caleb’s entire lifespan - I would go so far as to posit that, if I am capable of seeing it through with anyone, I could see it through with him. I have never met someone so much like me, and yet different enough not to chafe, or amplify each other’s worst traits: he brings enough that I lack into my life to draw me out of my comfort zone, but his way of thinking is so comfortably familiar that I feel entirely at home with him. He has all my rosiest traits without their thorns: he is as studious as me but more playful, as ambitious as me but more humble, as introverted as me but has broken the habit of isolation. He is good-hearted without being holier-than-thou, intelligent enough to be my equal, and most importantly, he is almost as fucked up from his past as I am: he is just imperfect enough to make him entirely perfect.

But I shouldn’t think about this sort of thing too much until I’ve made a decision; it only makes my heart ache, and makes me more inclined to follow it. I must remember that there is a good chance I simply can’t see it through with anyone.

Something to think more on. Something, ideally, to discuss with someone else - although I hardly know who. All of the present party are out of the question, of course. So, too, is Jester: much to my surprise, she spoke to me again this evening - she usually alternates between Caleb and myself, so I was not expecting her message, and I had not rehearsed a calm response to her question about what I’d been up to today. She guessed the cause of my fluster with startling accuracy, albeit in the same playful tone of voice with which she always makes such conjectures: oh my gosh, you two totally kissed and now you’re in love and you’re getting married and I’ll be your bridesmaid even though you aren’t a bride (those last two words are assumed, as she had gone over her word limit, and the spell cut her off). Thankfully by then I had composed myself enough to deny it. She must have run out of spare spells for the day - or perhaps redirected her messages to Caleb, who might be more likely to confide in her - because she did not push back, though I am sure she did not believe me. Under normal circumstances I might have confessed to her, but the uncertainty of it all makes me hesitate: she would certainly be pleased to see us together - too pleased, perhaps - and I do not want her to get ahead of herself if it is not to be. It would pain me to hear the excitement in her voice, knowing she may well be let down.

If it is a less interested party I seek, then perhaps I would like to talk to Verin about it. He would spend the first ten minutes making fun of me, of course, but still, on those rare occasions when I have desired company in my misery, it has always been my brother I have gone to. He is who I went to the last time I was in limbo like this, waiting to hear where I stood with those I cared for: not long after the peace talks off the Menagerie Coast, I arrived at his quarters in Bazzozan, no doubt looking about as haggard as he had ever seen me, and he was content to simply take my word that I was upset, I’d done something wrong, I didn’t want to get into it, and I wanted to drink with my brother. I stayed for a week, and I barely have any memories after nine on any of those evenings: soldiers party quite intensely, and work hard during the day, leaving me plenty of time to agonise in private.

My brother is a comforting presence, but he is not exactly helpful, especially in matters of love. That week he amused me (unintentionally) with his tales of his latest One True Love, whom he spoke of with the same certainty as he had of all his previous One True Loves, without noticing the irony of it. I do not mean to imply that he is a philanderer of any kind; he is a Romantic, and quite genuine in his hopes and his feelings every time, and he does not seem to have learned anything from any of his experiences. Well, perhaps that kind of optimism is what I need - but, romantic values aside, he is not the most brilliant of conversationalists in general. One night, after I asked him if he ever thought about all the other versions of himself in all the other realities that exist, and wondered what proportion of them are better than him and what proportion are worse, and whether it would be better to know that this version of you was one of the best versions of yourself, or worse to know that on balance there are more worlds in which you're evil than good, and he told me that sometimes he thinks about the time he woke up and found an open bottle he'd left on the counter the day before, and he debated whether he should finish drinking it or pour it away, and he decided to pour it away, and when he did it turned out to be full of dead bugs, and he thinks about all the versions of him in all the realities where he decided to drink it, and how gross that would have been. I appreciated his company, but not so much his insight. If I asked Caleb the same question, I think he'd tell me that if possibilities are truly infinite, and if there are as many realities as there as possibilities, then the sheer entropy of probability on such a scale would balance it all out, and there would be just as many good versions of myself as there are bad. And I have answered my own question.

Caleb, I suppose, would be who I’d want to discuss it with. How ironic.

I hope nobody else saw what happened between us today. I do not think they did, especially - and, forgive me my disorderliness*, I am just realising this now as I write - especially as I am almost certain this is exactly what they have been placing their clandestine bets on, and I would have noticed the winners celebrating and the losers commiserating. Have players on either side been trying to engineer their desired outcome, by setting up or interrupting our moments alone? I have not noticed, but I am not known for my keen-eyed social deduction. Well, while there may be many reasons for me to dislike how spontaneous today’s incident was, at least it means I can be fairly sure that it was not a result of anybody’s scheming.

Anyway. This is a revelation to consider further when I am not already reeling over something else. I am going to bed, before some third thing occurs to further unsettle my mind.

*this appears to refer to a splatter of ink on the page, where the writer may have dropped or fumbled his pen.

Chapter Text

Day 11

A third thing has occurred to further unsettle my mind.

I feel rather repetitive, beginning every entry of late by declaring that something dramatic has happened - but, dramatic things continue to happen, and they only seem to be getting more dramatic by the day. Today’s was rather more mortal, however, than simple personal turmoil, and certainly makes me feel very silly for all the fuss I made here yesterday.

I ought to have seen it coming, or at least been prepared for it, but I was not. In the days we have spent exploring the eerily beautiful Ars Ward, one of the eeriest and most beautiful things about it has been that it is so still. It is not necessarily silent, which has perhaps disguised the stillness; many of the buildings have little bells and chimes on them, and of course there is the music and birdsong which our restoration of the generator triggered. But, in the Praesidis Ward, shifting movement could be heard all around, albeit distantly - some of it was probably the buildings crumbling, but much of it was likely to have been the creatures of Aeor, moving out of sight. But it seemed, this morning, that there were no such creatures in this part of the city: no mutated local fauna or visitors from beyond the Immensus Gate, no twisted creations built to fight gods. Just bells and ever-distant music.

It was far too good to be true, and I ought not to have let my guard down.

Another slow, deceptively peaceful morning - during which we continued to study the function and effects of the repaired generator - lulled me to let my focus on my surroundings drift, and occupy myself with the inevitable internal war triggered by yesterday’s unexpected encounter. Caleb had been among the last to wake up today, so we had not got a moment alone yet, but I knew one would come eventually, and I needed to decide if I was going to say something. The kiss had filled my mind so full that it was almost impossible to get any work done - this, I am reminded, is precisely why I have always avoided this sort of entanglement before. True, I am not particularly disposed towards romance by my nature anyway, but that is not to say that no opportunity has ever arisen which I have chosen to push aside in spite of some inclination to pursue it. I have rejected most kinds of personal connections for the sake of focusing upon my work. Collaborating with Caleb has been proving extremely productive, of course, and I have come close to being swayed entirely to the other side of the argument, but I am beginning to believe there is a bell curve: working entirely alone is perhaps less productive than collaborating with an intelligent and respected colleague, but attempting to work with someone who is monopolising more and more of your waking thoughts begins to decrease your output exponentially - especially considering that, since a yesterday’s incident, my thoughts had mutated into such embarrassing forms that I kept making myself blush at random intervals.

But, beside my own inner turmoil, the first half of the day was pleasant enough. This afternoon, however, we made the mistake of going through an invitingly foreboding door.

It was one of the few that was entirely unmarked, and it seemed to be pressed between two buildings, in a space only just wide and tall enough for a door. Either it was going to lead to a narrow storeroom, or it was going to lead down, and our curiosity to see what kind of ruin had been made of the underground spaces was piqued upon opening it to a shattered staircase. We have already used some up-thrust broken road to study the strata of what we have been calling the ‘ground’ here in the city (given that it was a flying city, that is rather a misnomer) - however, we had assumed that there were no basement structures, considering that underneath each neighbourhood was a different neighbourhood. This staircase must have either led into a kind of crawl space between wards, or directly to a ward below this one: either way, ‘down’ was bound to be intriguing.

To our credit, we trod extremely carefully as we descended - the rangers first, listening for any sounds, placing each foot with caution - but the stillness of the ward had fooled us into assuming that we were alone, and we were focused only on the precariousness of the broken space, and the meagre foundation on which it stood. The pretty face of the Ars Ward had fooled us, and I of all people ought to have known that many a pretty face hides a serpent heart. We did not know what lurked in the darkness until we had already climbed down.

The space was surprisingly large, but badly ruined, a forest of broken beams and floorboards. In spite of our assumptions, it did look to have been some sort of basement room, although there was little else we could tell about it in its current state. The only thing that stood out, far on the other side of the space, was something glittering with a powerful enchantment under the effects of our Detect Magic spell.

We began to make our slow way across the space, towards whatever that was, when something moved. It was more than a shift of debris: it was something alive.

We all froze in place. It would have been amusing, in different circumstances.

The sound stopped, and it was silent again for some time - but it was a different, tenser silence than there had been before. We all exchanged looks, wondering if it was safe to move again. I could not have pinpointed where the sound had come from, but the rangers had zeroed in on a spot not far from the glowing item: there did not, however, look to be anything there but a tangle of snapped woodwork.

Just as I was about to rule that the sound must have been falling rubble after all, and call it a false alarm, a figure rose up from among the debris. It was humanoid in shape, but larger and distinctly fiendish, its appearance otherwise difficult to pin down; I got the distinct impression it was beautiful, but it was almost as though my eyes could not quite focus on it. To my surprise, this was familiar to me - not from our experiences here, but from my brother’s tales from Bazzozan. A rather unexpected, out-of-place monster.

“That’s not an Aeorian Hunter,” Caleb said as the soldiers readied their weapons.

“I do not know what they are called in Common, but in Undercommon we call them Desire Demons*,” I said. “They adjust their appearance to whatever their prey will find most inviting. Numbers are our best defence - if we cluster together, it cannot single out any one of us, and its form will remain undefined.”

I was surprised at how willing and able the party were to draw close to each other - for Cheszara to put her arm around Briva and press her to her hip, for the enormous Vagar to gather the slender forms of Nickel and Lyrrian delicately to his chest, for Caldax in all his stoicism to perch on the arm of Dagen’s wheelchair so he could pull closer to the group. Meanwhile, Cheszara, who was closest to me on my right, hovered at my shoulder, taking care not to touch. The subtle hesitance would not even have registered to me, except as a good thing, a few months ago, but now I knew what a party was, and recognised when I was not included; even Caleb was embraced by those standing behind him. He also, however, laced his fingers with mine and pressed both our arms to both our chests - which, I admit, comforted me more than I care to acknowledge.

“I’m familiar with the type,” Caleb said. “I fought a succubus in Asarius.”

“And how did that go?”

“I threw fire at my friends.”

“Let’s try to avoid that this time.”

Our technique worked: the creature’s form shifted continuously - always humanoid, but one moment large and the next small, now masculine and then feminine, sometimes with horns or a tail or a sweep of long hair, its skin rippling with shades of red and brown and green and peach, like light playing across water. But every time its eyes locked with mine - though I tried to avoid it - they were a piercing, penetrating ice-blue, and seemed to bore into my very mind, glittering with playful accusation at whatever it saw there.

It should have been a much easier fight than it was. It was difficult to fight a monster without any personal space. Those who preferred to fight in close quarters with their enemy could do nothing without either leaving the group or drawing the more vulnerable into danger with them, while those of us who preferred to fire from a distance had to avoid hitting each other, either with our projectiles or with our elbows. It did not help or that the creature kept summoning imps and mephits to distract us, or that we were worried about an overly aggressive spell bringing the ceiling down.

“The artefact,” Caleb said to me, two or three injuries in. “It has to be what’s been anchoring the creature here after all this time. That’s how it’s summoning its friends. If I can reach it to deactivate it, perhaps it will return to the hells.”

I held his arm to stop him from doing anything stupid. “There are nine of us and only one of it,” I told him. “It will return to the hells when we kill it. Stay close.”

After a moment, I let go of him, but I should not have. I could see that glint in his eye: a wizard's avarice, the equally deadly cousin to a wizard's ego. He had no evidence the item was anchoring the creature, for all that it made some logical sense; he was driven only half by the heroic impulse to protect the party, and half by the temptation to claim the item's power for himself. When I attacked the creature - distracting both me and it - he bolted.

As soon as he was away from the cluster, the demon darted for him with supernatural speed: it had a hand around his throat before I could so much as blink. I tried my best to do him the courtesy of not looking at the form it took, but I caught a glimpse of an androgynous drow figure; I was far too frightened, however, to feel smug about it.

Without thinking, I went to dash after him. It would have been stupid, of course, but I am a little proud of the impulse nonetheless: I am usually a lot more cowardly. But Dagen and Caldax had anticipated it, and held me where I was by an arm each. Instead, the fighters pressed forward, apparently judging the risk of leaving the rest of us behind to be outweighed by the risk to Caleb if they did not.

Without his voice, I could see Caleb attempting to cast a spell with no verbal component - it was clever, and would probably have worked, had not the wild magic of Aeor thrown it off, erupting instead in a pretty but harmless burst of tiny glowing butterflies. As the fighters drew close, the demon threw Caleb to the ground, at which point I used the opening - and the surge of anxious anger it gave me - to crush the creature with Magnify Gravity. Then I went straight to Caleb, who had remained where he’d fallen on the ground.

He was even paler than usual, bleeding badly from a wound on his throat where the demon’s claws had punctured his skin. I did not want to touch his injured neck with my unpracticed hands to feel for a pulse, but I could not see him breathing. Despite having just killed a demon, I felt utterly helpless, and far more scared than I had during the fight. I called for Caldax, my voice probably a little less composed and professional than it ought to have been; Caldax, luckily, was composed and professional, and more equipped than me in my state to determine that Caleb was alive, and easily stabilised with a simple Cure Wounds.

I am sure my relief was very visible, probably embarrassingly so, but given that I did not simply collapse sobbing into his chest, as I felt inclined to do, I think I showed admirable decorum and restraint. When his eyes opened, he looked straight to me - my face was probably quite a picture - and, to my surprise, grinned. He lifted his closed fist, and opened it, to show me a flat disk with a pulsing red crystal embedded in it: the object that had been glowing from across the room.

I did not know whether to laugh, cry, or hit him. I think I settled on some combination of all three. I smacked his shoulder; he winced in pain, I apologised, and then I smacked him again on the other shoulder, and told him he was an idiot. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was never to do anything that stupid again, no matter how shiny the rock he wanted was. I was being hypocritical, I know, but this would not be the first time that seeing Caleb do something had given me a new perspective on my own actions.

He promised he had learned his lesson, but my anger did not seem to have upset him. I suppose he knew, as I did, that it was simply my fear and love for him coming out in disguise.

Deciding that we had all (or at least, that I had) had enough for one day, we decided to wrap things up here and head back to the tower to study the red gem in a safer environment. It was indeed a means of summoning and anchoring demons, as Caleb had guessed; there is plenty of evidence that having captive demons was a bit of a trend among the people of Aeor in its later days, so it is not all that surprising that artefacts like this existed. I will not speculate as to what a desire demon was doing anchored in a basement in a ward that appears to have catered to the pleasures of Aeorian citizens - Nickel’s notes, I am sure, will state all the colourful possibilities which I would rather not.

Not that I particularly care about the artefact. In fact, this may be the first time I would rather not have got my hands on a powerful magic item. I hold it in great contempt for what it almost caused. I still get heart palpitations every time I look at it.

We were, of course, very aware of the dangers involved in coming on this trip. We have, of course, encountered many such dangers since we have been here. We have, of course, brought with us the means - in the form of both potions and people - to heal major injuries magically. And I have, of course, seen Caleb in much worse states on our last visit to Aeor, so perhaps my fear today was an overreaction. But I am now keenly aware of our lack of resources for revival, should the worst happen. The only person in our party who is, technically, capable of casting Revivify is Caldax, who is a paladin - but he is a paladin of the Luxon, and, given that the process of bringing back the dead is one already moderated by the Luxon itself through the process of consecution and rebirth, it is not common for its followers to equip themselves with such spells. Even if I ordered him to do so, I would still have to source a diamond of appropriate size and quality, and while I certainly have 300g worth of diamonds on me, the value is spread between several small ones. I ought to have come more prepared.

I have seen Caleb brush with death - sometimes more than brush - before, and it always felt terrible, but never more so than today. At least in the past, he had been fighting for some loftier goal, for which dying might be worthwhile: this time, I was painfully aware that if he had died, it would have been for no reason other than our shared ambitions. It was my idea to come back to Aeor, my idea to open the ominous door, my failure to hold him back - if he had died, I would have blamed myself for it for the rest of my life. Not only that, but I do of course feel differently - and much more strongly - about him now than I did previously. I have never lost a friend before - not to death, anyway - and I can only imagine how terrible it would be, but to lose Caleb would feel worse than that; it would feel like losing… well, I have little to compare it to. Only the death of my brother could compete, but like most high-ranking soldiers, Verin is consecuted, and Bazzozan has a Beacon, so he would be back in a couple of decades; not to mention that he is a soldier, so I am well accustomed to the idea that he could die at practically any time. The idea of Caleb suddenly vanishing from the world forever, right here and now, was unthinkable yesterday, and all I can think about today. And to think, I never even would have told him - he never even would have known that I -

Well. It does no good to think about the what-ifs. We are here at our own risk, and this is no time to lose our stomachs for danger. He is alive, and I will be more careful to keep him that way in future. To keep us all that way.

Insisting that it would be fine in the morning, Caleb refused to have any more resources ‘wasted’ treating the wound on his neck. The wound was partially scabbed and no longer bleeding, but it was not gone, and it looked ugly; it reminded me of another time I had seen an enemy cut him in the same place. It had been my fault that time, too; while I stand by my decision to let him speak to the scourger I had taken prisoner - his candid vulnerability about it so early in our friendship had been impossible to refuse, albeit that both his vulnerability and my acquiescence were designed to manipulate each other - but I was entirely to blame for allowing the woman to somehow get her hands on a sharp implement in her cell. It is an odd memory for me, both good and bad; bad for the obvious reasons, of course, but there was a strange kind of satisfaction in stepping in to protect him, and a strange sense of intimacy in the way I glanced at him, with the scourger held in the vice of my magic, hesitating to do as my instinct dictated and kill her, only for him to give me the signal to go ahead and do so. Perhaps, even back then - even while I revelled in the dark pleasure of asserting my power - I held a hint of shame within me for my evil in the face of the Mighty Nein’s good, a shame which was soothed by the discovery that, for all his crafted innocence, Caleb was no angel himself.

“You should at least keep your hair out of it,” I told him, not without some misplaced annoyance, the third or fourth time I saw his hand go to the wound (seeing, in my mind’s eye, the way he’d pressed his hand against the scourger’s precise cut to stem the gush of blood - and also the sight of him on the ground, just a few hours previously). “You’ll get dirt in it.”

“I can braid it like mine for you, if you like,” Cheszara offered; her hair was up in a crown around her head. I quietly commiserated that I had not thought to offer the same myself. And then, as if remembering something, she added with an uncertain stammer, “Although, actually, um, my hands are still a bit numb from the cold, so. I’m not sure I can.”

Clever girl - do not think I have forgotten that my respectable assistant has money on this.

Half the room turned expectantly to me - which, as I pointed out to them, made little sense, considering that almost all of them had braided hair at that very moment, and I was the only one (besides Vagar) with hair too short to braid, so I had no reason to even know how.

“You didn’t always have short hair,” Cheszara said. “When we were students, you wore it in very fine braids.”

The cat was out of the bag. Caleb turned to her with curiosity.

“You two were students together?” He said.

Cheszara blushed guiltily. “Together is too strong a word for it,” she deflected. “We were there at the same time. I saw him on campus sometimes.”

Seeing Caleb once again scraping his hair away from his neck (he had not thought about it when he turned to look at Cheszara, and it had fallen right back into the wound), I gave in and went over to braid it for him. Not acknowledging me - perhaps for the same reason one tries not to react when a shy animal approaches - he asked Cheszara, “What was he like?”

She looked nervously at me. While it is true that we had not crossed paths much in our student days, I had no doubt she had still seen and heard enough of my youthful ventures to embarrass me: questionable outfits chosen when I was still trying to keep up with the crowd, opportunities taken to make a show of myself before I had learned the art of subtlety, popular boys kissed at parties just because it was the thing to do and I felt I ought to get it over with. I gave her a stern look.

“The same,” she lied. Briva scoffed her disbelief.

Caleb could not turn his head towards me without pulling his hair out of my hands, but I could see a glint of blue where he was looking at me from the corner of his eye. “I find that hard to believe,” he said. “But I also find it hard to picture you as a regular student, so.”

“I was like any young person,” I told him, keeping my response deliberately vague. “Finding my feet in the world.”

“I think Chez should be allowed to tell us one embarrassing story,” Briva said. “As a treat.”

“She doesn’t have anything to tell,” I said, hoping it was true.

“Come on, one thing,” Briva pressed. “And then we’ll never ask about it again.”

Thinking back to the uneasy distance between myself and the rest of the party earlier today, I decided that it was time to relent. What little aura of intimidation I may have successfully maintained on this trip thus far had surely died today, when I'd come very visibly close to falling to pieces in front of everyone. Besides, the last thing I wanted was to show Caleb the coldest and haughtiest side of myself, after all this time spent lowering my walls.

“One thing,” I allowed.

Cheszara looked uncertain, but the encouragement of the group made her smile. After a moment, she said, “Well, I do remember you wearing those red leather trousers, with the lacing down the sides.”

I let everyone laugh at me, and it didn’t feel like as much of a problem as I’d feared it would. The Mighty Nein have accustomed me to it. “It did take me a little while to develop the good taste I have now,” I allowed. “Everybody takes the opportunity to wear something their mother wouldn't approve of when they first leave home - only later do they realise that their mother may have had a point.”

Cheszara looked extremely relieved, and I reminded myself to thank her later for not choosing a worse anecdote.

I had finished Caleb’s hair, and reluctantly let it go. I wished it had been longer, so that I could have taken more time with it, but I had already made the braid more complicated than necessary, and could hardly drag it out any more without it becoming painfully obvious that it was just an excuse to touch him.

“Thank you,” he said, running a hand over it. “Oh, that is fancy.”

“I used to do my brother’s like this, when we were little,” I admitted. “We had people to dress us, of course, but he would pull it all loose at school, and I would re-do it on the way back so he wouldn’t get into trouble.”

He gave me a strange little smile, and I think he said something, but I did not hear what it was; the softness of the smile, after everything that had happened today, had wiped every coherent thought from my brain in an instant, and I felt a bizarre urge to cry, although I am not sure why.

Long after Caleb had gone early to bed - on medical orders - I was surprised to find Dagen in the foyer as I went up to my own room. Whether it was pure coincidence, or if he had waited for me, I’m not sure, but if he had been waiting, he need not have: he was only going to tell me what I was already thinking.

“Hey,” he made me jump as he caught my attention. “Can I ask something that’s none of my business?”

I advised him to tread carefully if he was going to. He pressed on, although perhaps his wording was - to his straightforward mind - careful.

“What exactly is stopping you?”

I did not need to ask what he meant, but I did the demure thing and pretended not to know what he was talking about. He just pointed his chin upwards, towards the bedrooms where Caleb (and, I suppose, Nickel and Briva, but I cannot imagine a misunderstanding great enough to have led him to indicate either of them) was sleeping.

Narrowing my eyes at him, I made a guess, and said, “Why, do you have money on it?”

He laughed. “You’ve caught the wrong guy, boss. I don’t throw my gold away. But I don’t tell on those who do, either.”

“So there are those who do?”

“Nice try, changing the subject. I saw your face today, after he got hurt - I thought it might be the wakeup call you needed. And I’ve seen how he looks at you, too - you gotta know it’s a sure thing. But, here you are. Are you scared or something?”

I probably should have refused to talk about it, but I did not want to further fuel the fire of my own unapproachability. “It’s complicated,” I told him.

“That’s what they all say. That’s what he said when I asked him three days ago.”

I resisted the urge to react predictably to that reveal. “There’s a lot you don’t know. About both of us.”

“I’m sure. Welp, like I said, none of my business. You’re free to brood as much as you like. Just - you should have a reason, even if you won’t tell me what it is. If you don’t… just kinda dumb, I guess. Anyway. Have a good night.”

With that, he left me standing there.

I hate to admit it, but he has a point. I can tell myself I am simply going wisely and slow, following the allegory of the three brides**, but that has never been my approach to anything: the truth is I am scared, and I have been running from what scares me. After today, I have no more doubt as to what I want: seeing Caleb on the brink of death, I saw not only he himself slipping away, but also the prospect of everything I could have had with him, all the things we could have done, and never even begun upon because of my stupid hesitation. Can I let something as comparatively ridiculous as my own anxieties rob me of a possibility that I could not bear to let death itself take from me?

But, I must consider what is good for Caleb as well as myself, and on those grounds I have reasons enough to satisfy Dagen, reasons which my brain repeats to me every time I come close to saying something: that I should not put him in an awkward position, that he would rather have someone else, that he should have someone else, someone good for him, someone good in general. That I have given him nothing but hurt and bad ideas and reasons to worry, that after everything he’s been through he deserves something pure and simple and uncomplicated, not a project that will take years of work to be made sound, not someone who will continue to tempt him into danger and neglect to look after him and remind him of all our lowest moments. That he deserves better than the worst person he knows, and that being with me would just be another excuse for him to belittle his worth, another years’ hard labour for his crimes.

Returning to my room and standing over the sink, I looked at my hangdog face in the mirror, and felt a sudden surge of anger. In a way, this is the same cycle I have been in for the past six months or so: first, I sink myself in self-hatred and self-flagellation, let the regret and misery shrink me small and colourless and pathetic - I see nothing around me but a world of things I don’t deserve, a world made ever worse by my existence in it. Then, inevitably, just like anything, animal or chemical, that has been crushed into too tight a prison for it to retain its form, it explodes back out, reestablishing itself and breaking whatever has confined it in protest. My ego reasserts itself in a burst of rage, stands me up straight, puts the colour back in my cheeks and my eyes; all of a sudden it is only that sad, pathetic version of myself that I hate, and I think, how could I let this become of me? What happened to the man I was? I had drive, I had confidence, I was willing to take risks. I cannot let all that fizzle into nothingness.

Sometimes I believe that in that smallest of states, that chamber of unsustainable pressure, there is potential for transformation - it is true of plenty of other things, animal and chemical - and if I could only let the misery consume me, it could crush me into somebody else, somebody better. But so far, I have snapped back into my usual self every time it has happened: and, given that I feel so much more myself in the latter moments, I confess it is difficult to find proof for the former conjecture. Caduceus would tell me - as I would tell Caleb - that no matter how possible it feels, one cannot hate oneself into a better person.

Perhaps these surges of self-preserving indignance are good for me. Perhaps they are revealing a core aspect of myself that cannot - should not - change, a fire I should not extinguish. Perhaps this is what I ought to build upon, the voice I ought to listen to. My worst moments have come from taking big risks, true, but so have some of my best; is the lesson to be gleaned from all my regrets really to be less, do less, try less? To learn how to give up and shy away from everything? Certainly I ought to curb my arrogance, my pursuit of personal glory, but I ought not to overcorrect, and start considering myself as worthless and undeserving as possible. I cannot make amends by simply fading away. The resources I have within me are in no way tainted by the evils I have previously used them for, and, powerful as I am, I have every capacity to do as much good as I have done bad. Having burned everything down, am I to remain lying with the ash, leaving the scorched earth barren as an awful memorial to an unmitigated tragedy, or am I to rise like a phoenix, let something good grow from what was lost, like the flowers from the corpses of the Blooming Grove? It is what Caleb did, after all, and by his own admission, he sees me following in his own footsteps. By his example, opening up to love was precisely what set him on the path to redemption, and all his attempts to lock himself out of such pleasures in forfeit for his sins were summarily dismissed by everybody else - and I am sure he would dismiss my attempts to do the same.

But then, of course, there is the temptation of what waits below, in the Genesis Ward. Is that the best option? To go back, unburn the burnt, unkill the dead, undirty my soul so there is no mess to clean up in the here and now? To pre-purify myself, and hope that everything is easy without all the baggage? Is that one of those high-risk, high-reward choices that define me? Or is the risk too high even for me? I am not yet sure.

I have a deadline for that decision, so, I give myself a deadline for this one, too. My mind is all but made up, and there is no logical reason to delay: I only do so out of fear, or out of a self-pity that is unbecoming of me. I must tell Caleb how I feel before another disaster befalls us, and it is too late: whatever else he may or may not deserve, he deserves the truth, and the chance to do what he will with it. The Mighty Nein have taught me - as they have clearly taught Caleb in the past - that it is not my place to decide whether I am worthy of someone’s love, if they choose to give it; they are a party of people who insist upon loving each other regardless of whether it is deserved, encouraged, or (in my case, at the beginning) desired. I must give him the information he needs to make his own choice: I will tell him, and let whichever of the multitude of potential futures that may come of it come as they will. If there is anything I ought to be an expert on, it is the concept of manifold possibilities.

Yes. I must tell him tomorrow.

Or at least the day after that.

*This manuscript is written almost entirely in Undercommon - even the dialogue, which must be translated in places, because Professor Widogast did not speak Undercommon at this time - and I have translated it entirely back into Common, including this word. It is unclear, given the way the author has translated his own speech, whether he said the demon’s name in Undercommon or whether he, too, translated it. I must confess, I rather wish he had kept the dialogue in the original Common, and saved me a lot of work.

**The allegory of the three brides is a fable taught to children in the Dynasty; it tells the story of three sisters who were due to marry three brothers. The day before the wedding, the brothers were presented to the brides, all three dressed identically with veils covering their faces. Their mother explained that each sister must prove herself worthy of marrying one of her handsome sons by correctly identifying which of the three veiled figures was her fiancé. The oldest sister confidently chose the middle brother, because he was the tallest, and she knew that her fiancé was taller than his brothers: but, when the veil was lifted, she saw that she had chosen the wrong man - he had been wearing lifted shoes as a trick. The middle sister feigned a sudden pain and fell to her knees: the brother on the right rushed forward to help her, and she declared that he must be her fiancé, for he was the one that cared most for her. However, the veil was lifted, and once again, it was the wrong man: the soft-hearted youngest son had pitied her, while her more discerning fiancé had not fallen for the trick. The wise youngest sister stepped forward last, all of the grooms’ identities having now been revealed by her sisters’ failures, and easily claimed her own fiancé. The moral of the story is that no amount of confidence or cunning can trump patience, and that if one simply waits, the answer may reveal itself without any need to work for it - although some have been known to interpret it as a vindication on letting others fail for your own gain.

Chapter Text

Day 13

Readers keeping track of the numbering of these entries will notice that I have skipped a day - although, considering the kinds of things I have written here, I now highly doubt that anyone but myself will ever read this account, so there is little point apologising. Regardless, what follows should serve as explanation for the omission.

First, I must confess that I did not do as I promised at the end of the last entry, and our twelfth day of exploring ended with a simple goodnight, after a long and awkward pause while I tried and failed to gather my courage. I spent the next several hours in my room, oscillating between kicking myself and wallowing in self-pity, until, finding that I could not bring myself to admit my failure in writing, I decided to take my rest early, and attempt to pick up my pen later.

I am not sure why I expected to feel differently when I woke, but I did not. Continuing to avoid my writing, I skipped to the next stage in my evening routine, and went downstairs. Even on tumultuous nights - perhaps even more so - I have been broadly sticking to the routine I outlined earlier in this account: I was right in thinking that music would provide a welcome rest for my mind, and out here, the only way to hear any is to make it myself. In the past week or so, I have begun to recover a little of the skill I learned in my childhood, although I doubt I will ever be as adept as I was when I still had weekly tutors. By that night, I had got to a point where I could make it all the way through a song without mistakes more often than not, as long as I kept it as simple as possible.

I was here a little earlier than usual, but it was still past three, and nobody else seemed to be up and about. I usually closed the door anyway, just in case someone woke up thirsty and decided to walk to the kitchen instead of sending a cat servant, but that night, fortuitously, I forgot. So the door was open, and anyone who happened to leave their room would hear me. It was a remarkable confluence of coincidences.

Because, as it happens, Caleb had risen around the same time I had - four hours early, that is, barely half way through his usual sleep cycle - and, having failed to find sleep again, decided to spend some time in the salon instead. But when he opened the aperture between the bedrooms and the communal areas, he heard music, and instead followed his curiosity to me in my little music room, with the door wide open.

He was polite enough to wait until the end of the song to scare me half to death by announcing himself.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I tried to think of a way to do that without shocking you, but I don’t think there is one.”

I’m not sure if it was the serendipity of it, or the promise I had made myself, or the rarity of finding such complete privacy, but I was immediately certain that this had to be the moment. Whatever conversation we needed to have was going to happen here and now, regardless of whether I said anything or not, because if I was stupid enough to let this opportunity pass, Caleb would not be. One way or another, I was not leaving this room without having spoken my mind, and it would be better for my self-esteem if I did not simply sit there like some witless debutante passively receiving the overtures of a suitor until asked a direct question, so I was determined to be the one to broach the topic.

My heart sped up so much so quickly I would not previously have thought it possible in a healthy person. I was suddenly very aware that he had caught me half-dressed for the first time ever: I had woken and come straight here, entirely unadorned in just a shirt and trousers. I looked like I’d just rolled out of bed - because I had. My hair was still wet from having washed it. Well, at least I had washed.

“I didn’t know you played,” Caleb said. His hair was loose - earlier in the day, he had still had it in the braid I’d put it in, and I was a little disappointed to have seen the last of it, but he had to wash it sometime. “Jester might have mentioned something about it when you were in Nicodranas with everyone, but you know what her messages are like: she rarely gets all her words in.”

“Music lessons were the norm for highborn children in Rosohna,” I told him, glad to have something innocuous to talk about. “I would not have kept it up, but a teacher of mine told me that it was a good skill for wizards to practice: translating symbols into precisely controlled movements to rarified effect - you see the similarity. The piano was never my strongest suit, however - I found singing much easier to improve in, but I found it awkward to just stand there and sing, staring at a wall. I wanted something to do with my hands, so I tried to retain just enough piano to accompany myself. I have not practiced in many years; a beginner could easily surpass me within a few weeks of lessons.”

As I was speaking, he sat down on the piano bench next to me. The bench was long enough that there was still a generous gap between us, but regardless, it felt intimate. Appropriately, considering what I was telling him, I kept my eyes fixed strategically on the keys, making a half-effort at playing simple scales.

“Well, I am no judge of music, but I think you sounded very good.”

“Thank you. I suppose singing in the shower has been enough to keep me from losing the skill entirely.”

I could feel him looking at me. “You’re avoiding my eye,” he accused, not without a note of amusement.

“I’m concentrating.”

“Why?”

I decided to begin easing into the truth-telling segment of the evening. “Perhaps I feel a little self-conscious in my nightclothes. If I had expected to be seen, I would have readied myself.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand you,” he said, which was just about the last thing I wanted to hear from him: Caleb is the only person I’ve ever met who I believe does understand me, at least more so than anyone else (a low bar, considering nobody else has understood me at all). But he said it with a little smile which assured me he was not serious. “Last week in the library you made it pretty clear you don’t care to be considered good-looking, but now you don’t even want me to see you unless you feel like you look good enough. How does that work?”

I told him what Marion Lavorre had said to me, sitting beside me on a piano bench just like he was now: that even the gifts that come with curses can be difficult to part with.

“It all sounds very complicated,” he said.

“Does anyone have an uncomplicated relationship with their own appearance? I’m sure yours is not simple.” I almost added nothing about you is, but although I meant it as a compliment, I was not sure it would come across as one.

“Hm. It was certainly strange, after my lost decade, to see myself for the first time in ten years, having aged into adulthood without witnessing it,” he said. “At the time I was just glad to be unrecognisable - all the better to hide, you know - but it took me a long time to get used to the idea that this really was my face. That so much time had passed by without my notice.”

“I’m sorry, I did not think of that.”

“No, no - I am agreeing with you. Everyone probably feels a little weird about the way they look, for one reason or another. The thing is, nobody else cares that much.”

“Very true.”

“So will you look at me? Or do I have to talk to your hair all night?”

I took my hands off the piano and turned deliberately to face him, with a little roll of my eyes to try and deflect the tension.

“Hideous,” he said, deadpan as usual but clearly being sarcastic. “Mirrors must crack in your presence.”

“Stop flirting, you're making me blush.”

He gave a surprised little laugh: it was admittedly a rather out-of-character thing for me to say, and I am quite pleased with it. Then, his body language became nervous, and he averted his gaze.

“Ah, speaking of which,” he said, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to beat me to the punch after all - but instead, he looked at his feet and said, “I… should apologise. For kissing you the other day. I wasn't thinking, and I shouldn’t have done anything like that without knowing that it was okay first - ”

“It was okay,” I interrupted, spurred on by the thought of losing the race in the final stretch.

He actually looked surprised, and I wanted to laugh; I can only assume he was more surprised at my saying it than by the fact itself.

“Was it? I wasn't - your reaction didn't seem the most positive -”

“The reaction I had all of two seconds to compose? I was surprised, Caleb, I wasn't upset. It may not have been the ideal circumstances, but… no, actually, I think it was. It was fitting, for us.”

“Then why didn't you say anything? It's been three days.”

“Because I'm a coward,” I said simply. “And for all I knew, you wished it undone: your actions afterwards were hardly encouraging, either. Why didn't you say anything?”

“...The same, I suppose. I wasn’t sure what to say. I have never actually kissed anyone who hadn't kissed me first.”

“And I have never been kissed by someone who I hadn't kissed first.”

“Really?”

“I'm good at dodging. Why, don't I look like somebody who takes the initiative?” I wasn't sure why it was suddenly so easy to flirt so shamelessly - perhaps it was knowing that the truth, or some of it, was out; perhaps being alone in this little room at this time of night, outside of our usual schedule, felt a little unreal; or perhaps it was his nerves that had made me bolder by contrast.

“Well, I was going to tell you,” he said: “I honestly don't really think about what you look like. I know it probably sounds like I'm just blowing smoke, but it's true. Your mind…” he said the word mind with reverence: “after I'd seen that, why would it be your appearance that captivated me? It's the least interesting thing about you, to me.”

I didn't know what to say to that, but I did know what I wanted to do, so I did it. I kissed him.

I am not a romantic novelist; I do not know how one is supposed to describe a kiss. If you think too much about it, the physical act is quite disgusting, so I suppose it is best to describe the feelings it elicited instead. I felt great relief and satisfaction, mixed paradoxically with an equally great yearning and frustration - which I suppose makes some sense, considering that I had exactly what I wanted, and yet wanted more of it. I wish I could say I was cool and dignified, but no part of my focus was diverted to concealing my eagerness in that moment, all of me being too busy with the eagerness itself. Strangely, the clearest sense-memory I have of it is the cold spot where his ring of evasion touched my neck.

Then, suddenly, he drew back, touching a finger to his mouth: “Ow.”

With a slightly delirious laugh I asked, “Did you bite your tongue?”

“No. I forgot your teeth were sharp.”

“Sorry. I forgot others’ weren’t.”

The moment was not broken, exactly, but this pause - as does any pause in such proceedings - drew our attention back to the reality of what was happening, and invited us to decide whether to ignore it and carry on, without giving ourselves time to think, or to do the mature thing, stop, and talk about it. We looked at each other, both, I think, expecting the other to be the sensible one. For a moment I was sure that, if I went to kiss him again, he would laugh and stop me, forever establishing that in this first encounter, he had kept his head level while I had lost mine, and I would never live that down. But he saved me the embarrassment, and kissed me again, and I was content (if a little worried) in the knowledge that we were each behaving as recklessly as the other.

It was another minute or so before a second natural ending presented itself, and while ignoring the first can be charmingly laissez-faire, ignoring a second would be genuinely shameless. Unfortunately, the second was not as endearing as the first: reality, having been pushed so rudely aside, crashed down upon me all at once, and I sat up (I am embarrassed to admit I had tipped back to lie almost flat on the bench, and pulled him with me) with a sudden gasp, as if startled from a trance, and managed to headbutt Caleb as I did, adding a second kissing-related injury to his tally for the night. The moral of the story is: when life offers you an amenable exit, take it, because the next one might be a rougher landing.

“Ow,” Caleb said for the second time in as many minutes.

“Sorry.” I was not sure how to excuse my sudden reaction to, apparently, nothing. For some bizarre reason, my mind landed on ‘change the subject’ as a solution. “Your lip is bleeding.”

He dabbed it with his finger. “Ah. So it is.”

The awkwardness which I had been so smug about having avoided came down upon us now with a vengeance. In fact, awkwardness is probably too gentle a word for it. Externally, it looked like a textbook awkward moment - the nervous little laughs and embarrassed clearing of throats, the fidgeting and adjusting of clothes and seats - but internally, I was experiencing full panic. Why had I thought this was a good idea? What was I supposed to say now? What happened next? Why had I not planned this far ahead? Why had I not rehearsed some kind of speech? Did I even know what I wanted to express, let alone how to say it? I had told myself that all I had to do was tell him the truth, and let him do what he liked with it - I had forgotten that it was not that straightforward. He could not, and should not, simply tell me where we were going to go from here, and leave me with nothing further to decide. He had not rehearsed this moment either, and I was not sure why I had expected him to come to it self-assured, well-prepared and eloquent, especially considering that he is not particularly known for being any of those things.

But, as has often been the case between us, my evident discomposure moved him to try and compose me. I wish it could have been different - I wish that, for once, I could have been the solid ground to steady him - but he remains well in the lead on that front. Well, at least I can say that I technically made the first real move, even if he had had to take the reins almost immediately afterwards.

“Well,” he said, “is it time for us to talk about what we've been avoiding talking about, or do you need a minute to freak out?”

I probably should have said yes to the latter, for both our sakes, but I was too surprised by what he'd said to answer the question. “You've been avoiding it too?”

“Ah, so you have been avoiding it.”

Caught like a deer in the claws of a roc. “Touche.”

“I am not sure why I am so unprepared,” he said, once again echoing my own thoughts exactly. He was flexing and curling his fingers reflexively, a nervous tic. “It is not as if I haven't been thinking about it. A lot. This isn't exactly how I thought this would happen.”

“No? What did you expect?”

“Honestly, I thought we would be on the Ninth Floor,” he said. “I didn't even know this room existed, or that you had any use for it, until today. I couldn't possibly have pictured us here.”

“You had a whole scene pictured in your head?”

“Not a whole scene. An idea. Like you said, it was fitting for us.”

“You seem to have been very certain it would happen.”

“Was it a surprise for you?”

“I just thought… well, I knew I was an option, but I assumed you had better options to consider.”

With a ghost of a laugh, he said warmly, “I am not sure what options you mean, but to me, there was only one that made sense.”

Unfortunately, a lifetime of being defensive by default has caused almost any strong emotion I feel to turn into defensiveness. I said - rather sharply, in spite of my feeble attempt to make it sound like a joke -

“Well, of course it makes sense: who else could your terrible self-esteem consider bad enough for you, if not the worst person you know? Anyone else would have been too good.”

This may sound like quite the non sequitur, and I will not pretend it was not an absurd thing to say, but on reflection, I can see the train of thought it came from. I know that Caleb and I think alike, feel alike, and have been through similar things, and in my own guilt and self-censure, I have laboured under the belief that a terrible person like me does not deserve a good man like him: so, I expected - in fact, I had evidence to suggest - that he would feel the same about himself, and this similarity comforted me. But his readiness to believe that we would surely end up where we were now had surprised me, and I was struck with the horrible thought that maybe Caleb agreed with my own assessment of myself: that he was able to be confident in the matter because, with someone as awful as me, he would never have to doubt whether he was worthy of me; he would never have to doubt whether he was good for me, for he could hardly make me any worse. Which is all true, of course - he had joked himself, before, that he enjoyed not being the worst person in the room, and at the time I had been perfectly glad to hear it - but right then, it touched too close to my own worst thoughts about myself. The thought of him thinking less of me than I did of him - despite knowing that he should - was painful enough to make me cruel.

As soon as I said it, I regretted it, but I fear I have not yet learned how to admit fault; I might even have stood by it, against all logic and my own inclination, had he argued. But he did not. He looked at me for a long moment before saying softly:

“Is that what you think?”

“No.” I was relieved to hear myself say it. I felt too outside of myself to have been sure of what I was going to say. “No, of course it isn’t. I don’t know why I… these are my own doubts. I should not misplace them. You think far better of me than I deserve, I know that well. I just - I might be panicking a little.”

“Understandable. If misplacing our feelings about ourselves onto each other is a crime, I think we are both guilty.”

I accepted his acceptance with silent gratitude, and tried to gather my thoughts. He leaned back, bracing his hands around the edge of the bench, and looked up at the ceiling: I had not noticed it before, but it was decorated with swirling stars and moons, like a stereotypical wizard’s robe.

“I used to think a lot about what I deserved,” he said. “What I didn’t deserve, mostly. But the things I didn’t deserve kept coming to me anyway, and no divine hammer came down to punish me for it, so…” he shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone really gets what they deserve. Or maybe what a couple of assholes like us deserve is each other.” He bumped my shoulder with his. “We can be a couple of assholes together.”

“Forgive me,” I said. “I don’t really know how to… I am not good at this sort of thing.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“One of us probably should be,” I said, and we chuckled.

“We will have to muddle through, I suppose. To be fair, you and I are only the second most socially inept pair of people I know, and the first are Beau and Yasha, so clearly it must be possible.”

“Have you ever…? Before?” There is no need to finish sentences when I speak to Caleb. He knows what I mean with little need for explanation.

“Once, when I was a teenager. You met Astrid and Eadwulf. Sort of.” I wasn’t surprised: he has hardly had much time for such things, outside of the time he spent at school. “You’ve heard the story: I don’t need to tell you how bad our situation was, and I’m sure you can guess how it turned out, even without me telling you that that burn-scar on Astrid’s neck was from me. It was no model relationship, but messy as it was, it was a much-needed spark of light in the dark, and I am glad to have had it. We were as happy as we were able to be, given the circumstances.” It sounded - not rehearsed, exactly, but extensively thought out, as though this was a concrete conclusion he had come to after months or years of thought.

“As happy as we are able to be given the circumstances is no more than I would hope for. It is better than what I have achieved in the past.”

“What have you achieved in the past?”

“Not a lot. I am sure that comes as no surprise. Any time I have felt anything for somebody, I have always made a point of putting as much safe distance between myself and them as possible before anything can happen - and conversely, I have only ever allowed anything to happen with people I felt nothing for.”

“Well, I am glad you have changed your mind - at least, I assume.”

“Evidently so. But I have little more to offer you now than I ever had to offer anyone - far less, in fact. A year ago, I did at least have wealth, fame, and noble connections; now, I cannot even offer any assurance where in the world I might be in two months’ time, if I am lucky enough to still be alive and at liberty at all.” I turned to him, holding his gaze with some seriousness. “Time and fortune are not on our side.”

“Don't you think so? I can't speak to time, but fortune has worked remarkably for us. The chances of us meeting at all were extraordinarily slim: the odds have been against us from the start, but we have kept beating them.”

“You’re really not worried you're making a mistake? For how far you have come, and how new I am to this journey… I am very much a work in progress, and will be for some time.”

“If Caduceus was here, he would very wisely tell us that everyone is a work in progress, and we're all progressing at our own pace. Actually, you know what he said about you last time I saw him? He's a bit of a fixer upper, but he's got good bones.”

“That sounds like his brand of optimism. But fixer upper is an understatement. I think I need rebuilding from the ground up.”

“Well, I don't hear you asking me to do it all for you. Without meaning to draw from Caduceus’ aphorisms again, why would I pass up a front-row seat to watch something beautiful growing before my eyes?”

“I love you.” I said it reflexively, and although I did not try to stop myself, because I had promised myself honesty, I do not necessarily think it was the most sensible thing to say, or the most logical moment to say it; I don’t regret it, but I wish I had done it more elegantly. “I just don't really know… how I will do that.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” I allowed. “I have been told I am a quick learner. I suppose I ought to start making some kind of plans for the future, now that I’m fairly set on trying to have one. But perhaps not now,” I added as he yawned. “You should go back to sleep.”

“No, I’m alright,” he said, around a second yawn. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“No, no - the last thing I want is for you to be eaten by a Reverser tomorrow because you’re too tired to concentrate. The irony alone would be unbearable. We have plenty of time ahead of us for conversation, assuming we both survive the week.”

I stood up and offered my hand, giving him little choice but to take it and be pulled to his feet. It felt almost strange, leaving that room, on such different terms than we had entered - like getting out of bed without waking from your trance. The hall felt bigger than it had before. I felt like a different person than I had an hour ago.

We made our way slowly and lazily back upstairs - if one can say upstairs in a building without stairs; back to the upper floors, anyway. In stark contrast to the preceding conversation, we talked about small, insignificant matters, talking for the sake of talking, mostly to stall our progress. But eventually we reached the door to his room - it was further on from mine, but I insisted on seeing him to the door.

“Essek,” he said, after I had already started to walk away, and I turned back with a stab of fear: if he invited me in - with the obvious connotations - I would have yet another heavy conversation on my hands, and I only had the energy for one tonight. If he hadn't read me well enough to know not to ask, I would have some rather awkward explaining to do.

I need not have worried. “I love you,” he said.

With none of my usual dignity, I rushed back to kiss him. After that, he said goodnight and closed the door.

So, that is what I was doing instead of writing this account last night. I would rate my performance as middling: I could have done better, I could have done worse. I may not have been completely master of myself, and I definitely made some mistakes, but I did not need someone to hold my hand and do everything for me, so all in all I do not believe I shall think back on it with too much self-censure. Going by the usual metric against which I measure my own bravery or feebleness, I do not think I did badly enough for my brother to call me a pussy, and that will do for me.

This morning was a second trial, of course. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not think that the first hurdle is the only hurdle in such matters, nor that the second is lesser: an intimate moment in the early hours of the morning does not always translate smoothly into the cold light of day*, and what came easily in a dark little music room may seem unthinkable at a breakfast table with your coworkers. It is the final push of establishing a romance, and I think it can be a treacherous stumbling block. It is all too easy for a special moment to remain a special moment, rather than becoming regular.

We crossed paths on the fifth floor, and for a moment I feared I could not do it, that it was simply too strange, too out of place, in the bustle of the start of a workday; that I would succumb to the siren call of familiar routine and simply greet him as usual, and not have to acknowledge that anything was different. I would go so far as to say this moment was more frightening than any I had faced the previous night: at least then, if I had failed to kiss him or to express my true feelings in some way, it would only have been myself I was letting down, and only I would have known of my failure. But this time he was in front of me, and he knew to expect it of me, and I was aware that every second I hesitated, the closer I would come to ruining everything. Once again, I cannot help but reflect on the importance of sticking the landing: everything else comes to nothing otherwise.

But no such disaster occurred. When our eyes met, he gave me a warm, comforting smile - have I seen him smile quite like that before? Perhaps I have, and I have simply failed to recognise its significance. I have certainly seen him smile at others like this, a smile so full of tenderness it borders on sadness. I could not help but smile back, and the rush of affection I felt inspired just enough courage for me to offer him a hand. He took it, pulled me close, and kissed me.

This penultimate layer of ice broken, my fear vanished, replaced, for the moment, with perfect happiness. Once again, I felt that there were no barriers between us: that we understood each other perfectly, and that there was nothing I could not say to him. All felt right with the world - or at least, all felt entirely right between us.

I say penultimate, because there was still the rest of the party to consider. We had agreed to keep things to ourselves: it felt inappropriate - not to mention premature - to make an announcement, as it were, and neither of us are particularly keen on public displays of affection, so it would require no real effort to maintain normalcy around them. But, while this was definitely my preferred course of action, I must admit, I do not like the idea of the wrong side of our little betting pool profiting on false pretences; it is always a little offensive to me when the mistaken come out victorious and correct answers go unrewarded. I have resolved to quietly ask Dagen to crown Briva and her cohort the winners shortly before we all part ways at the outpost; this, I think, will be appropriately dignified and mysterious, without withholding information that money is resting upon. This evening, I did get the opportunity to apprise Caleb of the situation: he was predictably amused, and the idea of toying with the party was appealing enough to his sense of mischief that I suspect they will be finding breadcrumbs leading them in all kinds of directions over the next week or so.

Speaking of mischief, keeping things from our current companions for the remaining part of our journey is a small matter compared to keeping things from The Mighty Nein - specifically Jester. To my relief, Caleb was the one to request secrecy, at least for a short time: it would have been my preference as well, but it is not for me to tell him what he can and cannot share with his family, so if he had been keen to tell her, I would have swallowed my discomfort. Much as we both love Jester, I do not think either of us have the constitution to withstand her reaction to news like this: against all reason and plausibility, I believe she would manifest in the room with us to shower us with questions and excitement. But all this is only a temporary measure - of course, if everything goes to shit in the next month or two then it is a moot point, but otherwise, we will have to reveal all eventually. Well, a problem for the future: for now, all we have to do is avoid Jester’s suspicion, which should not be too difficult considering that her means of communication with us is entirely auditory, and she will not be able to see our faces.

We had planned to leave the Ars Ward today, which seemed rather a shame now: it might have been nice to have spent some more time in this romantic place, now that we ourselves were - well, in this romantic place. But it will be a cold day in Avernus before either of us let our personal matters get in the way of progressing our research.

This being said, we did not accomplish much today - it was a day of navigation, attempting to find our way to a new ward. We were not looking for any particular one, but still, finding one’s way anywhere in a multi-layered city with no maps, no living memory of the place, and which has been shattered and crushed into an unrecognisable shape is a challenge akin to solving a jigsaw puzzle with no picture and broken pieces.

The best I can say about our efforts in the morning is that we did not go around in circles, or get so distracted that we stalled completely. But, as we stopped for a late lunch, we had to admit that we had no idea if we were closer or further from the nearest threshold, and we may or may not have wasted our first five hours. After some light argument, we decided that the devil we knew would probably be better than the devil we did not, so we began to retrace our steps and navigate our way back to the large crater that conveniently lays bare the layers of the city, which we used during our last visit to reach the Genesis ward.

Finding our way back to where we had begun was easy enough, with Caleb’s memory leading us, but it took us the best part of the afternoon, especially with the detours we took to avoid ominous sounds of movement. Well, perhaps an uneventful day was called for; it gave us plenty of time to talk, and while Caleb and I could not talk about anything too significant, everything we spoke of felt more significant anyway. I felt a little childish, walking around with a secret, but it was not rational to feel as though we were putting on some kind of show: there was no artifice to our behaviour - apart from a stumbled lie when someone asked how Caleb had cut his lip - and I do not think we would have behaved much differently had everyone known the truth, but I felt like I was being scrutinised, like everyone was looking for signs of something. There was still the bet to consider, so maybe I was not entirely wrong. With Caleb taking the lead, we walked several steps ahead of everyone else, discussing aspects of our own histories which we had heretofore failed to share, as well as thoughts and observations on various aspects of society, philosophy, and the arcane: the kinds of topics of conversation which greater levels of intimacy unlocked a new interest in.

Having slept so poorly last night, and having walked so far today, Caleb yawned most of the way through dinner, and was falling asleep in his chair by the fire afterwards. Once again, he insisted he wanted to stay up, and once again I insisted otherwise: once again, I saw him to his door, kissed him goodnight, and returned to my own room. Hence why I have had the time to write all this - and compose myself enough to be able to write all this.

I suppose I should end with some kind of summary of my thoughts and feelings, as usual, but what is there to say? I feel a lot of everything all at once. Mostly good things, with a healthy dose of terror - the kind I get from doing things my brother thinks are fun and exciting, like racing moorbounders. But I was scared before, anyway, so at least now I can be scared and happy. And while I may be in uncharted territory - appropriately, considering where we are - I only half believe Caleb’s claim that he is equally at sea: perhaps this particular type of relationship is not his forte, but I have seen him with his friends, and there I have seen plenty of evidence that he is very, very good at loving people. And, as I said to him, I am a quick learner - especially with a good teacher.

With this matter somewhat closed, there should now be more room in my head - and in this account - for academia. This being said, my evenings are likely to be busier and less private, so we shall see how much time I have to write - I would like to say ‘hopefully plenty’, but honestly… I rather hope not.

*Naturally, ‘in the cold light of day’ is not an idiom that exists in Undercommon: this is my substitution for a phrase which literally translates to something like ‘taking it from the nook to the thoroughfare’.

Also, let it be known that I cheered at my desk after reading this entry. I am a professional, but I am not made of stone.