Chapter Text
Leknaat glides across the floor of the tower on Magician’s Isle, deftly avoiding the mess that Luc and Sarah have left. Baking. She had thought it might teach them a spot of patience, a bit of appreciation for the work that goes into food. She sighs.
She reaches the balcony and feels the cool wind on her face. Eyes closed, she points her face upward all the same, feels the gentle moonlight on her skin.
“I suppose you both decided that baking the traditional way was…boring?” she asks.
“How do you always know—” Luc starts to ask before Sarah cuts him off.
“Magic is a more efficient method of doing work,” Sarah says.
Leknaat smiles, hearing so certain a response. She almost envies Sarah’s sureness in what Luc tells her. Luc himself will doubt and will hesitate, will lie and cheat if he wants to. But Sarah will never see it, believes only in his best intentions. A bubble of the future threatens to intrude on Leknaat’s thoughts and she gently pushes it aside. There will be time for the future and all the heartache it will bring. Here, now, it is time for something else.
“That’s why the kitchen looks like a horde of skeletons rampaged through the cupboards?”
“Really, it’s not our—”
“It wasn’t a horde,” Sarah says, once more shielding Luc from digging himself deeper. “It was five skeletons.”
Leknaat huffs, keeps herself from laughing.
“And what happened to this not-a-horde?” she asks.
“Well…”
“They are contained in the bathroom,” Sarah says, “after their culinary skills proved…inadequate for our assigned task.”
Leknaat waves a hand, in the bathroom she senses the skeletons blink back to their home dimension. Frightening, how easily Sarah can summon them, even through the formidable defenses of the island. But she pushes that thought away, too. They both need to learn about responsibility and the value of work, though it’s not Sarah who needs the lesson more.
“Come inside,” Leknaat says.
She turns and moves back into the tower, gesturing with her hand. The mess blinks away, shunted into the other side of a gate. Someone else’s problem. She chides herself that she’s little better than Luc, then, has no place lecturing on responsibility and patience when she does not hesitate to use her magic, maybe even flaunt it. But she remembers the lessons she’s learned, the years in training, the time when it seemed like her hands would fall off from the bruises and cuts and callouses. When Wendy was her only friend and comfort.
An old hurt tugs at her and Leknaat waves that away as well. She steers herself to the hearth and the gentle fire, drawing Luc and Sarah in her wake.
“Story time,” she says.
Sarah doesn’t clap but Leknaat can feel a spark of excitement in her. She might act old and serious all of the time, but there’s still a part of her that’s young. A child. Eager for a story. Even Luc settles onto a couch without complaint. He might suspect a lecture here, a lesson he’s supposed to learn, but he knows too that Leknaat’s stories are rarely boring, and if there are lessons to be learned, he’s free to ignore them.
“Will you tell us the future?” Sarah asks.
“The future, the past, and the present,” Leknaat says.
“Are they true stories, then?” Luc asks as Sarah settles next to him on the couch.
“All true and all lies,” Leknaat answers.
“Riddles, then?” Luc asks, almost spits.
“Not at all,” she says. “Riddles have answers. Stories are never so definite.”
She turns to the fire and raises her hands. She can sense Luc and Sarah lean forward, expecting perhaps for images to appear in the rolling flames. But it’s only the warmth on her palms that Leknaat is after. She feel it and breathes deep, and then begins to speak, the only magic in her words the magic of all stories.