Chapter Text
The cliffside is steep. The opposite face of the ravine is a slanting wall of slate and stone, roots peeking out and dangling over the edge in a mess of crumbling debris and dirt. From a distance, it disappears beneath the wild bramble and shifting terrain, creating a dangerous pitfall for the unaware.
You’re overwhelmingly relieved that you had been keeping your eyes glued to the ground, scouring for herbs as you were. Dittany of Crete often grows near crags like these; but you hadn’t kept that in mind as your search turned to scour and dawn faded to dusk. A shiver runs down your spine. The chasm is dark and seemingly bottomless, but perhaps you’re simply letting your imagination run away with you.
It would be terribly difficult to climb out of something bottomless, you think distantly.
The dittany is carefully wrapped in a handkerchief and stored in your belt pouch. You brush the dirt from your pants as you rise from your crouch, leaning forwards in morbid curiosity. The hole is rather large compared to the others that dot the face of the mountain - nearly a dozen times larger, in fact. Closer to the edge, the ground is cracked and splintered, threatening to fall into the void. It wouldn’t be safe to go any closer than you are, but a glint of color grabs your attention and draws you forward.
It’s a healthy, golden yellow, and is swaying gently in the gusts coming up from the hole - a marigold, you realize with a start. You feel the earth shudder beneath your foot, unconsciously having taken a step forwards. You pull back and count your losses; a marigold would’ve been nice to take home, but it’s too far down the cliffside with too few handholds (and none that you trust) near it.
You turn, heading back.
Your home is a small cottage with moss between the stones and perpetually creaking floorboards. It’s half your own craftsmanship, and half the remains of your mentor’s old cabin in the woods. The ceiling occasionally drips when it rains a little too hard or for a little too long, and crows tend to sneak in even when the windows are closed and latched.
When you step inside the house, a new stack of letters is waiting for you, piled neatly in front of the door. You kick it off to the side to join a much larger and messier stack of unopened letters, weeks and months and for some, maybe even years old. Half of them are addressed to one name in particular, while the rest are dotted with a wide variety of aliases. No matter the address, they arrive at your doorstep.
As expected, a crow is found at your dinner table, a rather rugged square table constructed from the wood of the juniper tree that fell when your mentor passed. She loved it dearly, and though you used most of it to craft her an alter and offerings, you still had plenty left to use for yourself - thus spawning your table, your dresser, and the traveling altar you kept in your pouch.
The crow, meanwhile, drags its claws uselessly over the pristine surface of your table as it caws and flaps its wings. You sigh and the window nearest it rattles open, startling the bird into silence. It tilts its head, beady eyes fixating on you, before managing its clumsy way out the window. The draft blowing in is nice, so you decide to leave it open; it’s not as though anything that gets in wasn’t going to anyway.
You head for the apothecary room, affectionately dubbed the “violet room.” You’re quite proud of it, considering you’re not supposed to be able to grow plants. That superstition urged you to spite the locals with your rather petty attempt at defiance. Which, while harsh, is an accurate description; it’s not as though they’ll ever know of its (rather fitting, in your humble opinion) nickname.
The violet room is your favorite section of the house because of its wrought iron windows, split by black rods into a series of warped stained glass panes. It had originally been normal glass, but with a lot of dead plants and experimentation, you had discovered that particular shade of glass had worked perfectly for your aspirations - which came as no surprise, in the end, as it’s a very soothing shade of violet.
The light always fell directly on a collection of mirrors in the center of the room, angled to shine the light onto the plants which lined the walls of the room. You had belladonna, mandrake, and more than a few other related species, including a trellis of morning glory. An old and worn writing desk sat nestled off to the far right, surrounded on each side by a tower of pale-petaled aconite.
Ancient leather bound tomes, hastily compiled journals, and sheafs of paper and parchment splattered with ink stains and charcoal drawings litter the desk, along with a glass blown orb that sits on the highest shelf, sparks of light dancing inside its murky confines, crystals and stones and the occasional bone - but what you’re looking for is the mortar and pestle tucked in the nook of the lowest shelf, just behind the amber jar of bone-meal.
You swiftly unlatch the pouch with your pickings of dittany, tossing them in the granite mortar and letting the saliva pool in your mouth. You close your eyes, the violet light dimming to a tide of drifting color behind your eyelids, the occasional flicker of something else shifting beyond your sight. You spit into the mortar and return your attention to crushing the dittany, counting your breaths, steadying your heart, and humming the chant your mentor taught you so long ago.
The rest of the ritual passes in a haze of familiarity, the steps well practiced and no longer needing your full attention. You scoop the nearly complete ointment onto a sheet of rice paper, wrapping it and sealing it with the blessing emblem.
The window closest to you is already cracked enough for you to reach out and set the finished product on the pane. You manually shut the window and latch it despite the futility of it. Sighing, you press the heel of your palms against your eyes until you see stars.
It’s been a long day, and it’s about to feel even longer. You can’t sleep just yet. You need to make a run into town (as much as you dread doing so) and attend the latest meeting. After your graduation from apprenticeship, your mentor had been almost appalled at the realization you rarely (if ever) attended the meetings after your first. Almost, because she had been of a similar mindset as you when poked and prodded about her true feelings about her soulmates, but despite that little confession, she had been a professional above all else - or at least carried the appearance of being so, and had never missed a meeting herself. You attend them every blue moon, and that’s only if you’re forced - it has to be monumentally important for you to work up the effort to head into town.
Because town, despite being situated at the bottom of the mountain, is a rather literal time consuming endeavor.
The shimmering veil of lights overhead is an enjoyable sight as you plow through walls of tree limbs and foot-snatching bramble. You can’t help but recall the pitfall from earlier, and force your eyes to scan the ground rather than the sky. The forest floor is nothing spectacular; simply dirt and fallen branches, moss-cushioned stones and the occasional mushroom.
You swear you pass the same stone with an odd pattern of moss on it for the third time in a row, and you feel a migraine building behind your eyes.
The sky remains a blanket of darkness and stars and ribbons of emerald greens and pale aquas.
Your breath rises in plumes in front of you, and despite only shrugging on a thin coat before shouldering your way out the door, the cold didn’t touch you. Your feet are sore, though, and your steadily growing irritation with your luck has started to wear on your nerves. Of all nights for a long walk, it had to be tonight - but you had prepared for such an occurrence. The meeting was two days off when you left. If you’re as unlucky as you suspect, you should still make it a day early.
But when the forest starts to ease out into a somewhat recognizable path, and the sky begins to creep into hues of red and pink, you feel a coil of dread building in your chest. Ebott is within full view now, the gate unmanned and easily passed through. You keep to the less traveled roads, dashing through the dawn-quiet village with a racing heart.
The basilica is looming over you, all pale grey stone and wooden doors. You grip the door handle, tugging, but it doesn’t budge. You try it again, certain that you simply hadn’t put enough force into it.
“It won’t open,” says a voice from behind you. The frustration of the day (days?) slams into you like a landslide. You close your eyes out of sheer desperation to keep it all locked in. “You missed the meeting,” they continue. “We expected better of you this time. I was certain I put enough emphasis into the message how important this session was.”
“Justice,” you greet, turning around. You let your back press flat against the door as you meet his yellow gaze.
“Perseverance,” they return with a nod. Their hands are clasped behind their back, and the skin around their eyes is pinched. Whatever it was they discussed, it must have been important.
“I left two days early. Surely you can see the effort I put into making it this time.” You glance at the sky, judging the faint glimmer of stars that have yet to fade into the crisp blue of morn. “How long has it been? Since the meeting.”
“It commenced yesterday at dawn and concluded during late noon. And no matter the amount of effort you put into arriving, you nevertheless did not attend.”
A prickle of cold washes down your spine. Though it’s not by much, Justice is being unfair to you. You could expect that out of the others - maybe not Kindness, or Integrity - but for Justice, this meant whatever they had discussed had most certainly been a big deal. Your awful, no good curiosity sparked with a vengeance. You hastily pushed it down.
“I apologize, then. Could you catch me up to speed? I want to help, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what’s going on,” you say. Justice glances away, internally wrestling with something from what it looks like. They eventually seem to settle on a decision, though their face is lined with unease, rather than their normal bland expression.
“This shouldn’t be spoken of in broad daylight such as this - but,” they bite their lip, “the Favored Child has gone missing.”
Your heart plummets into your stomach.
Justice shares your grim expression, shaking their head, one hand running through their hair.
“That’s - serious,” you say, unable to express more than that in simple words. Very serious indeed.
“Very serious indeed,” echoes Justice, causing you to full body shudder. They give you a wary glance before plowing on. “Bravery has left to search wherever he deems worthy of his time - I wish he had given us a better estimation than, ‘I’m heading into the woods,’ but alas. Patience is checking over with each of the neighboring towns, and the others, while busy with their duties, are using their spare time to search their delegated areas.”
“And - what about beyond the neighboring towns? What about the cities, or the mountain?”
Justice gives you a slow blink, as though what you had said was particularly dim of you. You sink into your usual coping mechanism: apathy. “I doubt that they would have any interest in going to the city. And with their view on magic there, there’s a high likelihood that no one from the city would have any interest in kidnapping them.”
You intend to leave it at that. Don’t let them patronize you further. But it slips out in an instance of that terrible, dreadful curiosity - would they say it? were they just the same as everyone else in Ebott? “And the mountain?”
They laugh. “Everyone knows not to go on the mountain unless they have a death wish.”
You shrug and grunt, passing them by. “I’ll keep an eye,” you throw back, to which the response to goes unheard, drifting on the wind heedlessly.
Passing through town, you note that not much has changed - the youngest generation of soulmates stick to the courtyard, playing under the supervision of Kindness. She gives you a smile and a wave, easily spotting you despite your gravitation to the sidelines. The children are playing without a care, as though their soulmate isn’t missed in the slightest.
You both are and aren’t surprised. The Favored Child is indeed shown a greater amount of favor than the rest - separated from the rest for individual teachings, special lodgings, and given an almost worshipful sort of treatment. You knew as much from your earlier memories. Determination had been a spoilt brat when he was a kid. He grew out of most of it, though he’s still a bit stuck-up. The current Favored Child you don’t know much about. You know they’re an orphan, though that tidbit is often kept hush-hush. You know that they’re just as small as those children running gleefully around, and are just as fragile as the rest of them.
But they’re also a Favored Child, and you can’t help but hate them for that.
You reach home in a record amount of time. It seems that for all the time the trek to town had robbed you of, this journey had been cut much shorter for. Traveling up and down the mountain had always been a surreal experience, even for one as accustomed to magic as you. The temporal discrepancies are interesting to say the least, and a pain at most.
But the familiar crisp air of the mountain and coziness of your home seem to make all the burdens of the day fall away.
The thought of the Favored Child lingers, however, and you can’t but remember the chasm near the dittany, and the danger it presents.
No one wanders up Mount Ebott. It didn’t pose any danger to anyone but yourself. But the worry festered in your mind - a sign, you think, just to warn people; but there’s no one to warn… And as the thoughts stack up like a tower, they all go toppling with one sudden sense of unease. You trust your intuition. You read omens in birds and clouds (when you were in town; the mountain didn’t have clouds) and the stars. Your tea leaves tell you when your luck is good or bad. Your gut tells you when something needs to be done.
And right now it’s urging you to visit the crag that cracked the mountain.
You pull on your good coat before heading out, throwing your cloak on top of it. The Favored Child surely hadn’t gone up the mountain. But unlike the others, you know there are exceptions to every rule. It’s best to cover every base. You’d keep an eye out for the child, and while you’re at it, take a second look at that hole.
There’s something about it, you’re sure, but you just can’t put your finger on it.
Your hands flex subconsciously.
It takes you a bit to retrace your path to where you found the dittany, and during that time you spy neither hide nor hair of anything living. The forest is always silent and still, save for the echoes of your own movements, so you’re utterly certain the child is not anywhere you’ve passed.
The chasm seems different in fluctuating light of the aurora, almost bigger. You approach it carefully, minding the edges. But as you get closer, you realize it is different: the spot you had stood days ago, that trembled under your weight, it’s gone.
The ground is crumbling, a large chunk of the earth missing. Crouching, you hesitantly slide down it, closer to the edge than you would prefer. But you have to check… have to know if the child, by some blessing, is still holding on or stuck along some edge…
You don’t see the marigold. You don’t see anything, really. It’s an endless void of darkness and quiet. Disquiet. You don’t know what to feel. What to say. You’re numb. Is the child dead?
Your grip on the earth slips. You start to slide forward, even as you attempt to clamber backwards. You slip off the edge in a tangle of awkward, flailing limbs as you clutch at the cliffside, falling back into the abyss.
You know it’s going to hurt, but you’re more worried about how you’re going to climb back out.