Chapter Text
(n.)
1. (In Physics) Two wavelengths with conflicting maxima displacements will cancel each other to an amplitude of zero1
2. (In Arcana) Two magical spells cast with conflicting reality displacements will cancel each other, conferring no effect2,3
1. Philiom, Z., Waccoh, T., Illein, R. (796 PD). Constructive, Destructive, and Partial Wavefront Dynamics in Dunamis and the Material World. Marble Tomes Conservatory.
2. Thelyss, E. (804 PD). Illusory Interference: Extending the Graviturgic Wave Model to Light and Arcana. [Dissertation, Marble Tomes Conservatory]. MTC Archive, Rosohna.
3. Thelyss, E. (804 PD). The Applications of Dunamantic Wave Theory to Illusions. Marble Tomes Conservatory.
For every one of Verin's tutors, Essek had three.
One for arithmetic at first, which became advanced mathematics once he'd started rewriting theorems in simplified script. I don't understand why you don't just do it like this — little reedy voice, scribbling on his slate day after day until someone noticed and and fumbled and turned to Deirta with panic in their eyes.
One for history, politics, diction, literature; things that bored him and made him slant his eyes out the window to watch people mill about cobblestone roads, everyone occupied in their microworld — the smallest unit of experience: that of an individual. (Yes, he still did well.) (No, he did not do much but doodle.)
One for arcana, which was a little pointless. (Long hours staring into a little glass beaker, willing the drop of salt in it to move, to do anything; beetles’ blood, rabbit’s foot, frog eyes, ew; cauldrons of stinking hot tonics, syrupy and sublime and thrumming with power; This will all be yours if you put that brain of yours to practice, Master Thelyss.)
He sure quieted them. At his first very attempt, dunamancy came to him like flame to a wick. Better to silence the rabble in awe than to allow their doubts to sink in, no? And he was, really, quite good.
Thankfully for him, he wasn't just a good mage. He was a good scientist.
After all, what was magic but the science, the manipulation, of reality? And what was physics but the magic, the unseen scaffolding, of science? Two worlds of matter and energy in counterbalanced harmony, whorls of power backthreaded through all of time; his education was critical to understanding both, not one over the other, and it was luminous. Exciting stuff, teeth-gritting, radiant on his chalkboard when he’d made the connection at twelve; it was with this assessment he'd prided himself, blown a few minds, wished he'd invented dunamancy to begin with. He'd have written the core texts in a much easier hand, for that matter.
Once he’d started teaching his own tutor, it was a bit of a wrap.
So of course, he'd graduated quite early. Instead of bracing the noise of lectures, he began work rightaway at home, to the chagrin of his mentors; at seventeen years old and a few months to spare, he was very much a child in a big man’s pair of shoes. What could he possibly contribute, having not yet earned title of High Dunamancer? Drow matured quick as humans but plateaued for eons, and so there was little chance anyone would take the leap to publish him before he crested even his first century.
But he was stubborn.
Personal research, then. In a while, conservatory-funded research. Learning the weight of the keys to his private laboratory — a graduation gift, which he never asked for, usually allowed others to keep guessing — and with it, undoing the secrets of the universe, getting himself into juvenile trouble; dinner, forgetting dinner; futzing fingers on a piano just to hear the broken arpeggios climb up into the sound of the cosmos; walking the five-six-seven steps to his chair to trance when he could no longer keep his eyes open, and returning to the same exact routine the next day. For Essek, the years ticked by.
Mythically bound to his journal. An aspiring archmage. A scholar unlike I’ve ever seen. Genius.
He explodes the wallpaper off his walls. He forgets to eat again. He’d be brilliant if he could slow down. Idiot.
He was comfortable with this cycle for as long as he presented only one side of it.
And he was young. What a crime, no? Always too young, never ready, never hewn enough; belittled, needled, denigrated, tittered at over tea, the source of a roomful of laughter; once called ‘besotted by learning’ which was apparently different than the noble esteemed ‘pursuit of knowledge,’ oh, fuck them — and the anger and spite from this ridicule fueled his nights awake and near-trembling in front of a book, and so did the Marquet caffeine imported by the crateful in the weeks before defenses, proposals, in preparation for asinine days spent standing in front of congresses of beady-eyed arcanists, proving with steel in his teeth that he knew what the hell he was talking about.
There were also the nightmares, as though he didn’t already feel childish enough.
His mother’s library had its share of bogeymen tales. None of them were very clean. Nearly all were wily and dark, murky with drow history; webbed walls, caves dripping with damp heat, claws out — and of course he’d read them all at maybe six? Seven? — and it felt good. They were locked away but nonetheless brought out and cracked open, chilling him to the bone, declaring to no one but him an early earned maturity that synced very nicely with his curriculum. If he could take everything else, then he could take this — even if it meant a few nights awake. Or a lot of nights awake. (Really, they were quite vile nightmares.)
It was with this same destructive fervor that Essek navigated his career as a mage. Cool and aloof, moving others out of his way like a primordial glacier to fleets of minnow-like ships; and yet, still yearning to be one of the elders, to have their unquestionable mein, well before he had the height to even sit in their chairs. The council of his mother’s peers and their giddy praise, shining light in his chest; Now he’s a bright one, isn’t he? — head rubs, hair musses; You can handle the Dirichlet of Illusions, yes? It’s a heavy read for your age, but you’ve got the eye for it!
And he wasn’t an — asshole, like Verin insisted. He was just a man who had his priorities sorted well before anyone else. It wasn’t his fault that he had a purpose and others did not. Or that his purpose was objectively more … more.
He was eighteen when he figured out how to float.
“How exalted of you,” said Verin as he watched Essek’s feet rise up off the ground for the first time. “Does it last very long?”
Essek gave a presentational spin, sliding on his familiar mask of a smile. I will need to become accustomed to this, he’d thought then — to the routine of the somatics, to gliding across the world and never truly touching it, all for the sake of appearances. “It lasts for as long as I require it to.”
Deirta, to the other side, gave the smallest laugh through her nose; a dreadfully insincere sound to anyone aside from her children, who learned quickly the tells of a genuine one: her lips crinkled at the corners, not too pursed, gone in a flash; quick, discreet dives of joy.
“Do you realize what you have done, child?”
He stopped, looked at her. Her eyes shone like coins.
He would remember for the rest of his life the weight of her words — the frantic, screaming thrill of victory it seared into his heart — the urge to chase that same feeling again, pin it down, scrabble at it with bloody claws.
“Essek, my love," she'd said with pride, a crystalline tone like a ringing champagne flute. "You have created something entirely new.”
The praise didn’t immediately translate to progress. It took him what felt like a century to summon the world’s first echo.
He was ahead of his peers on all fronts. He was already, for the purposes of a student, socially untouchable. But there needed to be more. There was always something just out of his reach; the first formation of a thought, a theory, rendered out of equations and algorithms and mental scaffolding but not yet made real — and that could be real, had he just the skill to draw it into reality.
He busied himself with attempting to draw other things into reality, in the hopes that the idea would come with it. Any dunamancer with a head on their shoulders knew the ever-present timelines of possibility around them were but a spell away, and yet no dunamancer with or without a head had been able to access them. Two failed experiments were evidence of this. But they were hasty, and poorly-thought out, and not the least bit as patient as a thing like this required.
They were thinking of it the wrong way, then: they were attempting to transport themselves into other timelines, as opposed to the relatively simpler (and relativity-based) task of drawing other timelines into theirs.
Such was the basis of the Resonant Echo spell. Such was the discovery that earned him his first clamoring crowd, his first grant reward, his first champagne pop — the cork of which was stuck to the roof of his bedroom with a scrawled label by Verin that read, in Undercommon, the equivalent to Suckers!
He wouldn’t have stopped at the discovery itself, of course. It was an imperfect thing still; highly volatile and deserving of caution.
He needed to practice. He hated practicing.
The somatics busted. Again. He slurred a verbal. Again. He pulled and pulled until reality gave around him, a black hand reaching out of a void, begging to come through, but it was always his hand, and he’d startled each time with a horrible gasp, dropping every kind of concentration until he was on the floor, nursing a bruised temple, shivering like he’d been dunked in ice water.
It. It reminded him—
He shook his head. Foolish. He was not a child anymore.
And still, the echo was a perfect, clear image of the monster from his boyhood.
In his mother’s home, before his first decade and when he still only came up to her waist, he’d always felt a gravity to her office in the farthest corner of the estate. It wasn’t anywhere near his room, so it was out of the way — but on days where he and Verin chewed through the treat jar and buzzed too hard to stand still, they would romp around the house and terrorize the servants, running under legs, giggling, shrieking — and they would near-always end up in her office, trying on her stately jewelry, puffing out their chests to pin umavi scarves and badges over their ruffled shirts.
Look, look, I’m mamabug! Verin would giggle as he shuffled through her stacks of bureaucratic parchment, bowing sagely to Essek with all the sovereign authority of the true Deirta, or the Bright Queen above even her.
Always, Verin would bore eventually, but Essek would stay. He enjoyed the feeling of sitting in her high-backed chair, chin up, staring out into the expanse of the room over imaginary groveling guests. All his life he’d been talked down-to for the simple crime of being a child, but one day he would be the one in the chair, and he would be the one with all the universe’s knowledge. Until then, it would be an uphill climb of bracing condescension and ignorance. And he would bear it. He would be great.
But, as Essek realized one day, perhaps there was a reason she kept her office locked from her children.
In the corner of the room, a floor-to-ceiling curtain draped indigo and gray patterns, obscuring the dark shape behind it:
A boy. His height, his shape. Skin black as the night’s sky, eyes white like stars. A shadow of a person. When Essek raised his hand, it would raise its own. When he shifted, so would the thing behind the curtain.
Essek never approached. He’d stood and stared, eyes stretched wide with horror, breath coming short — until he’d heard Verin from another room and took the opportunity to flee.
Verin, ever the pragmatist, never believed his claims but wasn’t keen on meeting this monster either, and so they never again revisited Deirta’s office. Of course she knew they were in there regardless. When confronted with the needling question of What has you so rattled, Essek?, he’d merely shaken his head and pouted.
A few years on, he’d been invited — invited! — to her office for the very first time, to sign some ridiculous ceremonial document he wouldn’t recall years later. She’d stepped out to procure another quill, and it was only within the first five minutes of being left alone in there, beside that dreadful shadow, that he snapped: in one sharp move and with a great roar of courage, he drew aside the curtain once and for all — and it was his own face staring back at him.
For all the terror he’d faced alone, the creature of his nightmares was nothing more than an ancient mirror, long forgotten in his mother’s lifetimes, stowed away and hidden from guests for its unsightlyness. An Essek indistinguishable from the real one had spent all these years shadowed into blackness by a curtain, swimming behind a layer of dust. He almost pitied his own reflection.
“Of course it just wasn’t my reflection. I’m smarter than that,” he’d sighed, pressed by Verin’s needling at the dinner table. Then, smaller. “It wasn’t the mirror. I swear to you, it was a monster.”
“Monsters don’t look like people, smart one,” said Verin, shoveling vegetables into his mouth.
Essek kept his lips pressed shut and gripped his fork, stifling the truth about to escape. He’d been certain — if it were a monster, it was one that could look like him, and that terrified him more than anything else.
It swam in his dreams. It crept in his mind. In the middle of the night, when he wasn't yet old enough to trance, he'd imagine the creature reaching out from behind the curtain, thrusting out its jet-black hand to him, grasping to exist. For years even after the discovery of that mirror he would avoid his reflection altogether; a little itch in his mind told him that it was still something more, something unstoppable and ancient, starving and ready to lap his blood — or perhaps something entirely new, borne from catastrophe in the furthest planes and grappling with reality behind a glass portal, fissure of tension, sparking with instability — I’m here —
It’s just you, darling. Deirta tap-tapping his shoulder when he’d shuffled past glass-paned storefronts with his eyes averted, ducked his head at being handed a hand-mirror. Corner of his eye, black static; peripheral moving darkness, roving hunters, nightmare in every shiny metal cuff, window, puddle. It was never just his own image, Essek knew. It was always, too, the potential for evil.
One day, he’d been able to stare it down. Rather, stare himself down, thinking the creature had gone, finally — but no. It was never too far from his mind. After-image, two presences at all times in every reflective surface. Asynchronous blink. Breathing just a split-second too late.
No one gave him the time of day for it. Resentment at their ignorance boiled over in his heart, knowing that had he been an adult, or even an adolescent, his concerns would be taken seriously and with respect.
“And you wouldn’t make a very scary monster,” Verin continued, drawing him out of his thoughts.
Essek ruffled, slamming his fork down. “You want to see?”
“Quiet, children,” said Deirta at the head of the table, looking for all her authority like a curious teacher.
Years. Years and years and years go by. A lifetime of memories settle in his mind, many that he refuses to pull forth.
With enough persistence, Deirta did act, though never to the degree Essek felt his plight necessitated: extra lights in his room, all the mirrors blessed by priests, the barest consolations. Though, in practice, it worked. Essek as an adult — drifting, cool-gazed, pleasantly above it all — never again saw that monster, (or ghost, what have you) in his mirrors.
In addition to righting his fears, he had many things about his success to thank her for—
Excluding the self-sabotage, the annihilation of his livelihood and safety, the rapid-state combustion of everything he’d ever built and cared for.
Bad deal. One long whiffing backswing — strike, miss. A chess piece tumbling off the side of the table and into oblivion. A treason larger than any recorded in Kryn history.
Unthinkable. (And surprisingly easy.)
For a time he was bitter and blamed her, words stuck in his throat — Why didn’t you stop me? Didn’t you see what I was becoming? — but today, he supposes there was no way she, looking down at her watery-eyed son, (juice cup, twine moorbounder toy in his pudgy grip), could have predicted the next hundred and twelve years of his life, or half the destruction he would have stumbled into.
Nothing could have prepared her for the hunger stirring fast in his belly, quick in his blood, that so motivated his brilliant mind's quest for discovery. She'd collected eons of allies like dew on a spiderweb, sure, but never knew so impudent and feral a scholar as he. Never one so unafraid of shadows, knowing — now, at least — that he would only find himself in them.
Ending up this way was inevitable.
He only regrets he’d gotten them wrapped up in it, too.
On the ship, with Caleb’s lips on his brow, Essek closes his eyes.
Forgiveness. Olive branch. Regret-regret-regret spinning fast and wild like a cart clattering free of its horses.
He wonders if he has a life beyond today. He wonders if he has time to erase the chalk plans in his home before abandoning it forever.
He wonders if he was the one who looked into the mirror, or the one who stepped out of it.
The flag of what was once a city snaps and pops in the astral breeze of Cognouza.
It’s a blasted place, rotten; a world so twisted and sown with horror that focusing on the one thing without an eye or a mouth is all Essek can do to keep himself grounded. (Or at the very least, unnauseated.)
The Nein behind him discuss amongst themselves, blood caked deep into their clothes and hair blustered by the winds. Together they blanket the nude reborn tiefling like an orphan rescued from a fire. Jester coos to him, picking through the clumps of gore in his hair, baby-talking to a fully grown and dewy-wet man — man? — oh, Mollymauk will correct him once they relearn language. And even though he cried for the premature death of this ally, for the failure of their ritual and the flash of confusion and anguish it caused him on the Nein’s behalf, and even though he is beyond glad — really, truly glad for them — Essek cannot bring himself to join the celebration in earnest. Today has been contender for the longest twenty four hours of his life, and still, it isn’t near over. He has no more tears left in him. He only wants to leave here and find solid ground.
“What’s going on, Caduceus?”
Beauregard is holding onto her shoulder to keep it in place. Caduceus, per her concern, is beginning to look back and forth between them with steady, well-neutralized nerves.
“I’m sorry, everyone, but Plane Shift isn’t working,” he says, indicating the sparking magic at the end of his beetled staff. “I think we’re going to have to leave here the old-fashioned way.”
“How the fuck do we do that?” Veth gestures to the desolation around them, to the sky that wasn’t a sky at all but an emptiness profound and unkind. “What, are we gonna float to the goddamn door?”
At Caduceus’s silent shrug, Beau swears. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“Why Plane Shift?” adds Caleb, working it out beneath their conversation. “Our other magics worked.”
“Well, teleportation was weird here, wasn’t it?”
“No. It was weird in Aeor.” Caleb turns to face Essek squarely. His hair sticks up to the side, flat to his scalp where he impacted and slid down the stones of a tower. Essek misses what he says, as he’s looking. “ — conjuration spell, yes?”
He stammers, nods, disguising the way his mind slides in and out of the conversation. “Yes, of course. That could be an explanation.”
Caleb takes his affirmation as a truth and turns back to his book, busy. They can’t stay long. Even as they speak, the materiality of Cognouza rises up and disintegrates to ash, eradicating any evidence it existed to begin with.
(Essek finds that he cannot help but mourn the city. The willowy, pitching voices of the souls around them have reason to rise up into their afterlives with full-chested freedom, so it shouldn’t disturb him as it does. And yet.)
In time, they find the exit. Spinning, orbiting around one another, they navigate the empty everything, holding hands to keep from falling or separating — and it is still ultimately Caduceus’s Find the Path that leads them to the door. Unlike everything else in the Astral Sea, it hadn’t swum away from its designated point. He supposed it would explain why Cognouza was still within its view after all this time; an interesting note worth exploring, but not one he feels inclined to prioritize over leaving this forsaken place.
On the other side of the portal, the Nein dunk their heavy feet into the waters of the aquifer and cheer — “Is that it? Did we just fucking win?” — and their loud caterwauls echo through the cavern until someone reminds Jester to cheer quietly, and so they do, all joining in on this strange muted ceremony of relief and victory.
A daunting feeling strikes Essek, even as he claps his hands.
He hasn’t yet been discovered by Leylas Kryn or her intelligence officers. (Though he supposes it only helps that he is, by title, the intelligence officer.) He hasn’t even been confronted by Ikithon, even after the Nein waved dunamis in his face. There are many reasons, in addition to the battle in the Astral Sea, why Essek should be dead by now, but he is not. He is alive and well.
He feels more and more that perhaps, to even out the impossible triumph, he is going to need to begin to lose.
“Why do I get the feeling that these tunnels got longer after we went through them the first time?” says Fjord, the words coming out in a strained domino cascade as he forces his body above a tall grouping of boulders. Veth easily picks her way up the side, punctuating her success with a wink to Fjord that Essek is sure no one else catches.
“Because this city hates us,” says Beauregard, as if she knows it to be fact.
It is she and Yasha next who muscle their way up the side of the corridor’s crumbled remains. The climate and humidity of this place form an icebox, trapping and preserving all possible debris, organic or otherwise. Altogether, it smells of metal and acid — of something sulfurous, like a pocket of heavy, crushing air. Around them, every creak and groan sets off their instincts, bringing them to a beat of silence to listen and wait before advancing again.
The space reminds him of his old laboratory, the one he'd kept in the Marble Tomes Conservatory before being given the deed to his tower by dignitary favor. It had a basement much like this, with a dreadful reek of leaking chemicals and detergents that dried as a pasty white foam. The kind of place where someone long ago may have committed heinous acts and abandoned it to be used by someone much less — or in Essek’s case — much more dangerous.
He isn’t nearly as dextrous as Veth, so he privately thanks his ability to float above the worst of the cluster, but it’s a thanks too soon. Even with his vision, the darkness obscures depth, and his boot sticks between two boulders.
Shit. His stomach swoops, the spell stuttering as his concentration breaks and the full weight of his other foot falls down onto the boulder, slipping backwards, falling—
He thuds onto something much higher up than the ground. Even through his cloak, he feels the ethereal static, the potentiality. It resembles a Feather Fall, but Caleb and Veth are out of those for today, and the clerics are too far ahead to have noticed his tumble.
“Whoa, there!” Caleb shouts up, and Essek peers down at him through the translucent Cat’s Ire.
Of course it’s the paw. Essek gives a breathless sigh of relief, rolling his eyes as it descends with him on it like a drink on a platter. He gives the pink nubby underside a pat in thanks before standing, appreciating the absurdity of the image.
“You did not need to use such a powerful spell,” he says as he disembarks.
Caleb shakes his head genially. “It was worth it.”
“Ah,” says Essek, and leaves it at that.
For the next minute, he walks with the Nein, waiting for the paw to become of use, but it eventually dissipates as a pointless expense. He tucks away the twinge of guilt into its designated corner in his mind, which is an experienced reflex — it feels as though he is tossing a bottle into a refuse bin the size of Wildemount.
The Nein have expressed to him before that his guilt is useful because it motivates change. Essek cannot find much use for it when it paralyzes him so quickly. Perhaps there will come a day where their advice is satisfied, but for now, he has allocated enough space for that guilt for some time.
Hours pass. The walk to the Genesis Ward is longer than anyone remembered, most of all Fjord, who grouses at the mouth of each corridor as if it committed a personal offense by continuing to exist.
“Okay, that’s at least three more corners than it was last time.”
“You were counting?” Beau says. She taps Caleb’s shoulder. “He’s wrong, right?”
“Ja,” says Caleb, more interested in the quick revision he is making to his spellbook. “It was always seven turns.”
“Then three of those turns got stupid-long between then and now.”
“I think you’re just going crazy,” offers Beau.
“Shut up.”
“Quiet, Fjord.”
“I have a right to complain, Deuce, we saved the—!”
“Quiet, Fjord,” rumbles Caduceus, who presses a finger to his lips. The party catches his tone, going hush. He listens for a moment, his ears almost imperceptibly twitching, before turning back to them.
The silence is choking.
“... I think there’s a—”
Essek gasps, shoving Beauregard out of the way.
A yowl pierces out of the darkness. Swift, primal, a blue blur pounces onto Yasha, mauling her with rabid fervor. Essek backpedals out of its path, catching it fully in his sight only when his back hits the wall. The Aeorian panther-creature — the one that absorbs spells — whips its eye-tail around her body to stare wholly at Caduceus, who barely puts a shield up in time to deflect the bolt of erratic energy streaking through the tunnel at him.
“Jester, look out!”
Essek catches the moment where Caleb reaches to cast Cat’s Ire, realizes he is out of that caliber of spell, and quickly re-aligns to cast an alternative — but the single beat of hesitation is enough for the beast to land a horrible blow on Jester — the impact first, and then the crack of her ribs — and, shit. Shit. Essek’s hands are unsteady for another few impossibly long moments as Jester is ribboned with those claws, until he breaks through the cloud in his mind and flings a barrage of magical missiles.
Overhead, dodge. He tumbles under a gusting swing, sidles up to the wall again to avoid another hit, pow— Beauregard, coming in hot, windmill-kicking the beast to the side like a battering ram. Mollymauk in the center like a lost child, blinking wildly; Yasha shoving him behind her. Spells spark and sail from all corners, strikes land — Shit! — Essek barely sucks in his stomach in time to avoid a graze of claws.
The ordeal takes much longer than anyone would’ve liked.
It is Fjord who decapitates the thing, meaty head severed cleanly from dense neck tissue. Like a child's toy, it thuds and rolls across the stone floor to stare up slack-tongued at Essek, perfectly plopped at his feet.
“In another life, you were a very good butcher,” he says appreciatively.
“Is that one of the possibilities you’ve seen?” Fjord grins back.
Essek, truly, can never quite tell whether some of them are taking his words at face-value. “No."
“Oh,” says Fjord, as if he’d forgotten who he’d been speaking to.
“You’d make a great butcher, Fjord, don’t worry. You’re so strong. And your calves are so toned, they would look good with those sexy heels,” says Jester, slinking to Essek and rolling up her sleeves. Faster than he can close his eyes, she’s elbow-deep in the absorber’s mouth, scavenging what she finds of its teeth.
“Butchers wear sexy heels?”
“So they don’t step in the blood, duh.”
“Anyone hurt?” interrupts Caduceus, wearily uprighting himself with his staff. His wrinkled, thick-skinned eyes roll up to the ceiling for an infinitesimal second, assessing whatever’s left of his magical stores. “... Well. Hurt bad? I got a heal or two left.”
Essek takes quick account of himself. A bit of red darkens the front of his coat, but the cold of it is no greater than the cold he was already feeling. Minor. A half-missed slash is a decent compromise, given the alternative.
“You got a cure for stuck-in-a-fucking-cave syndrome?”
“If I did, you’d probably kill me for not using it until now.”
“So smart,” Veth mumbles from the ground. Her voice creaks up and up in exhaustion, reaching a higher plane. Essek sympathizes. “Yep. I absolutely would do that.”
A round of sound-offs and affirmations groan through the party. Even at the end of a grueling day of travel, the Nein find themselves surprisingly intact. It speaks to their tenacity, and the skill that Essek regrets ever underestimating. Even Jester healed as soon as she was able, resuming her charismatic bounce as if she hadn’t been nearly ripped apart moments ago.
“What about you, Essek?” says Beauregard. Before he can reply she cuts herself off, voice going quiet. “Oh, shit.”
Caleb is the quickest to look. All eyes flick to him, scanning.
Essek goes cold. Perhaps he wasn’t as alright as he’d thought. He has an appeasement on his tongue, but Caleb is already rushing forward to catch him as one knee collapses and, lurching, he splats on the ground with wet fabric. The room slants around him, melting into a fluid, and Essek cannot feel anything but the uncontrollable shivers wracking up his body.
“You should have spoken up, friend.” That same concern tumbles out of Caleb in great breaths as they struggle together to get Essek standing, which is an impossible task. If he’d felt the severity of the injury, he might have known to mention it, but it blanks his mind unpleasantly. Not a twinge of pain, and yet he feels consciousness slipping treacherously from him.
Shock. He realizes he’s in shock.
“I will be fine,” he says. His voice sounds gurgled. He moves to stand again and instead staggers back into the flat of Caleb’s chest, which warms the side of his freezing face. “I am— fine.”
Caleb’s breath is hot on his ear where his head rests on his shoulder. He is not speaking to Essek when he calls over his head, “Maybe we should summon the tower?” and Essek cannot find the strength to protest.
Thankfully, Caduceus is a miracle worker.
The injury is a swift repair, leaving only a line of scabbing. Patiently he sits as the giantkin radiates divine, fresh-smelling magic down onto him. Not the strangest thing, and definitely not the strangest he's seen with the Nein — but he does feel a bit as if he is photosynthesizing.
In the safety of the tower, Essek indulges in the luxury of clean, room-temperature bandages — unlike what they’ve been using in the field, which eventually freeze stiff with blood — and a hot, well-deserved (or at least much-needed) bath. Exhaustion sloughs away from his skin with the sweat and filth of the cavern, leaving him loose-limbed, with legs that feel like gelatin.
After staring down at them quizzically, he eventually toes into the fuzzy, cat-shaped slippers beside his tub. They must be complementary to his stay.
He will never get quite used to the tower. The ornamental, palatial design is one thing — and if he knows its creator, it’s a miracle they aren’t standing within a dramatically more complex structure — but the ever-ambling cats are another. A legion of small, furry servants juxtapose the wise, proud interior, like a whimsical fairyland. He pictures Veth at the entrance, charging admission.
There is something so very Caleb about it all, though he supposes it’s only appropriate. It would be worrisome if there was something so very not-Caleb about it.
Caduceus had brought Essek to his room, where he’d helped himself to the bath immediately. Caleb, on the other hand, had been tugged down by Fjord to construct something better than a thrown-together plan for their manual departure from Aeor. They'd been putting it off for long enough, after hinging on Plane Shift.
Essek did not mind Caleb attending to more pressing concerns. He is not sure why he felt he would have minded. It is an afterthought that swims when poked.
He wraps the provided robe about himself and appreciates the way it hugs him, luxuriously soft against his slighter frame. The material is a rich spider’s silk dyed violet, cool to the touch; it folds over itself once on his chest and reaches the lower end of his calves, disguising his silhouette. He wonders if the tower knows to magically size its clothing for its inhabitants, or if Caleb commits them to his eidetic memory in advance— which. Hmm.
Dynasty robes have a certain cut about the waist to accommodate a sash, and this robe features it as plainly as if plucked from a Xhorhasian clothing catalogue. Without paying considerable attention, such a thing would be unusual for an Empire foreigner to notice.
Yet another thought that swims. He will need an aquarium for them soon.
He steps out of the bathroom through a curtain and startles at a noise by the door. It unlocks and swings a hair open, from which a voice calls.
"Essek?"
Caleb's voice, soft as night. A tension leaves Essek's shoulders but returns trifold when he remembers his clothing. Or lack thereof. He tightens the knot on his robe, coughing politely. "Yes, ah. Come in."
Caleb steps inside and toes the door behind him shut, giving Essek a hospitable berth. His heavy adventuring layers are gone, replaced by a soft and loose cotton shirt and leisurely trousers in patchy tan. He searches the room for a moment until his eyes settle on Essek, and like a flame jumping, his whole expression changes: at once bright, then carefully neutral. He holds in his hands a tray of metal clattering things, including what Essek recognizes to be a series of bandages and a steaming stone mug of Caduceus's tea.
"My apologies, I did not know you were indisposed,” he says tightly, making a move to leave the room. Essek feels a jab in his lungs.
"No, no. It is alright. You are welcome to stay," he says too quickly, too strongly, privately balking at the sound of his own voice.
Caleb makes an odd sniff sound. Slowly, he turns. "If you say so," he says, but there is a strange weight to it. He glances about the room, gesturing with the tray. “I intended to show you in better circumstances. I hope you find it to your tastes, despite the duress.”
Essek, indeed, had not yet a moment to absorb his surroundings. The last time he’d spent a night in the tower, he’d tranced in the lower rooms instead, prepared for the Tomb Takers’ inevitable fall down that trapped chasm.
He glances about the space, the ancient cynic in him expecting something generic. An average inn room, or a thrown-together guest suite. Quickly, he remembers this is Caleb's design.
Straight Rosohnan carpets lead the eye to the center of the room, where a glass coffee table over ivory carvings holds up tomes with dark spines and gilded lettering. The chaises are simple, familiar shapes: abstract burnished quadrilaterals with hard framing and just enough stuffing to feel comfortable for sitting on, but not for resting on. Above the elegant black fireplace, stained glass glimmers back at him, both visually and conceptually reflective of his studies and his short journey with the Nein. The centerpiece features eight pairs of hands outstretched to an angular glass relief of himself, a crystalline star embedded and radiant in his chest.
(No paintings, to his disappointment — but then, he did not have paintings in his home. Only in his office, which the Nein have never seen.)
"Oh," he whispers.
It is a bedroom, yes, but somehow more. A peaceful, lived-in part of a world, carved out carefully just for him from nothing but the ether in which they swim.
The geometry and sterility of his own tower in Rosohna kept him safe and kept his mind cautious and neutral, reminding him at all times of the levels of appearance he must maintain. He’d entertained perhaps a handful of guests over the past ten years, each of them sorrowfully bland or outright venomous. He'd himself commissioned nearly half the structure to be burrowed through with escape routes and passages, which was typical for an arcane practitioner of his status, even if it felt a bit trite.
Here, in this enchanting space, the only routes to keep in the back of his mind were the primary door and perhaps the dumbwaiter, on a silly day. If anyone sought to threaten him, they would first need to fight through the unyielding apocalyptic cold of Eiselcross, and then the eight adventurers scattered around him, who have thus far declared his allegiance to them before bothering with the other way around first, what with the backwards way they do things.
It is fitting that Essek's mind first goes to the escape routes. Yes, that, he has practice in. But it is a novel thing to recognize the people now in his life who might protect him. Not a soul has ever afforded that for him save for his family — perhaps not even the crown he swore allegiance to.
Clearly Caleb had put forth a concerted effort to keep him comfortable; not too far from Essek's own cultural and personal staples, but not too close to feel cloying, trapping. This is a gift, after all. He does not realize how long he spends observing, with Caleb observing him in kind. Something comes to his eyes, stinging and cool, but doesn’t fall. He chuckles, because the laugh is easier to disguise than open crying.
"Perhaps... softer couches next time?" Essek says, unable to keep at bay the lopsided smile splitting his face. He wipes away the moisture with the front of his robe. The gesture is so vulnerable, it sends the slightest of shudders through him; he hopes it goes unnoticed, but for all that Caleb stares, it likely does not.
Caleb reads the shift in Essek’s disposition and takes a deep breath as though drinking it in, slow, satisfied with his handiwork. A smile, too, breaks the tension in his face; tired to the point of pallor, but radiant nonetheless.
His teeth flash in the smile, cheeks dimpled. Essek nearly does a double take. He looks like a different person with it.
"Ah. I did not know. Bean bag chairs, then?"
"Sure." Essek shakes his head with a chuckle to mean Whatever.
“Done. It will be different the next time you are here," he continues, and Essek feels delirious. Caleb sets down the tray on the nightstand, brushing his hands, turning to approach him. Perhaps it is the blood he's lost, but he feels remarkably warm and does not move or swat or shy away when Caleb's fingers close on his elbows, rubbing into them with his calloused thumbs.
They are very close. Essek, not floating, takes a half-step back to make room for his boots.
"Forgive me, but I come with instructions from Caduceus."
Of course he justifies this with an order. Essek smirks, summoning an easy, faux venom. "He could not be bothered to come upstairs for himself, I see."
"Well, he is a very busy fellow," says Caleb. Boyish smile, little tick of the brow. "He has given me the task of ensuring your injuries do not reopen."
He puts the mug of tea in his hand, their fingertips barely brushing. It is bigger in Essek’s, and his colder skin finds the warmth uncomfortable, but the steam helps to clear what feels like gum arabic in his sinuses. As he breathes it in, Caleb begins guiding Essek by the shoulders to one of those light-forsaken chaises and Essek makes a noise, shaking his head.
"No. Those feel like rocks. I have had enough rocks for today. For all of time, thank you."
Caleb blinks. "You are aware that they come from your own foyer, yes? That was the reference."
"I hate them," says Essek. If there were ever a time for honesty, he started months ago when the Nein shook him down.
At least Caleb seems to find humor in it. Stifling a laugh, he guides Essek instead by the elbow and the small of his back — a delightfully tender touch that he allows himself to relish — to his bed. It’s new as well, and doubly as warm as the one he keeps for himself in Rosohna. The back of it slopes upwards with more silk pillowing, embroidered with little shapes, likely to accommodate his sitting trances.
If Essek squints and leans forward, he can pick out a shape that is— … what?
"Did Jester help you design this?" he guffaws, the laugh bubbling out of his chest against his will.
Caleb's eyes go wide at the sound, his crooked smile reaching a place of incredulity. “You are very tired.”
It is a baffled observation. Essek, under no circumstances, has laughed so openly around anyone in the past seventy years — longer, sober. But Caleb does not know that. He finds he wouldn’t mind if Caleb could look in his brain to infer it.
“Yes, well. That is… very, very true.” At least he can blame the exhaustion; his head feels faint enough to topple off, and it prevents him from caring too much about the Rosohnan social niceties he has no reason to keep any longer. With a sweep of his long violet sleeve, he deposits the tea on the nightstand and sits back onto the bed, allowing its rich comforter to swallow him partially. “How long until you have completed Caduceus’ instructions?”
“Ah… Well, he never gave instructions, per se. It is more of a favor to you, in friendship.” Caleb dusts the back of his already-clean trousers to sit down gingerly beside him. His weight pulls Essek to him just a bit on the mattress, a small gravity. “I do not mean to impose on your rest. Caduceus was concerned, and for good reason, I think. You look poorly still, even after healing.” He scrubs at his stubble, considering something unseen. “It is … not uncommon, with us. But it won’t hurt for me to join you for a bit.”
“No, no, of course. Do what you must.”
“It’s not that I must, Essek.”
Essek blinks. “As opposed to what?"
His eyes narrow, concerned. “... That I would like to?”
Right, yes. Essek nods minutely, embarrassed. “Ah.”
At the hidden admission, Caleb smiles victoriously. Essek has lost track of the game they are playing.
Eventually Essek’s head demands that he recline his body, so with a fleeting courage, he does. Caleb stays sitting and together they rest for a time, throwing algorithms and axioms between each other like a quiet game of catch. It is… easy, being like this with Caleb. He should feel afraid. Instead, he’s afraid that he isn’t. The Shadowhand in him tells him to defend his modesty, to get away, but his sore body weighs too much to lift, and he doesn’t think he could leave if he tried — he is out of escape spells for today.
Trust, says the memory of Caleb in his mind. Essek notices that his fingers are trembling when he reaches to fidget with his robe, keeping it from riding up.
Trusting, being trusted. The show of it they put on for each other is designed, meticulous, exhilarating. Of course. This is the game.
Eventually Caleb looks up. Essek absently follows his eyes to find them glued to the ceiling, watching the chandelier — there is a chandelier — creak slowly in its contained orbit. A big white crystal gleams, followed fast by a smaller red gem. Catha. Ruidus. Their presence is tucked away as just another piece of decor, despite being rendered in such deliberate detail. The thing doesn’t even have any lights, likely to compensate for his sensitive drow eyes. Instead, it glimmers with the glow of the fireplace, casting refracting shapes and fragments over the room, the floor, over their bodies so close to each other.
A question comes to him. Essek searches for his voice.
“Caleb, have you ever … been fond of anyone?" he asks to the air between them. He feels Caleb measure his breath carefully beside him, so as to not make a noise with the sharp intake of it.
He has thought about it. The Nein are not quiet with their desires, and it doesn't take a mind like his to put the pairings together once they've been sardined for days in Aeor. In Rosohna, maybe, he hadn't enough data to draw conclusions, but now…
Caleb is always alone. Not truly alone — but. Not wrapped arm over chest like Beauregard and Yasha. Not quick to touch, lean, caress like Jester and Fjord. He is surrounded, yes, but alone in rest and alone in thought on so many nights. Veth seemed almost a contender — for what, Essek can't name — until he’d recalled the husband they’d come to rescue in the first place.
And yet, with Essek, Caleb couldn't seem to ever be close enough. Months ago, when they were still on collaborative terms, they would converse long and fervently into the dawn. Where Essek could chip away at a problem until a solution revealed itself, Caleb had a knack for finding loopholes and leaping over the issue altogether. A fast, dirty way of going about it, compared to Essek’s polished-marble strategies. Transmogrification, for instance, could not have come about without Essek's tenacity and Caleb's imagination, even with Halas’s contributions.
Together, theories and chalk diagrams fell out of thin air, spiraling and painting their fingers with powder until they were giddy from the dust. And every night, he'd close with a respectable goodbye, and they would nod their heads to each other in understanding, linked by this golden gossamer strand of sight, knowledge, of genius that left him breathless as soon as the door shut behind him, left him wired and awake for hours after Caleb's departure — and in his tower he would putter alone, wanting, searching, aching for something no one has ever seen or known or thought to think of, wondering if Caleb heard him when he Sent to him and spoke nothing into the dark, just to feel the connection cool on the back of his mind like a breath.
For a time, he did not think of it at all. He was never supposed to see Caleb again. Until the Nein caught him in Eiselcross and Essek had to suppress those thoughts, else he cut this fragile thread with an act of impulse and ruin the only thing to touch him sincerely in ages.
"Yes,” Caleb says with that voice, rumbling with honesty. “Yes I have.”
He swallows, courage doubling. He cannot take a chance on this. He does not know what ‘this’ is.
“You are aware of the type of fondness I mean, right?”
“I think I am.”
He thinks of the way he’s seen Yasha look at Beauregard, Fjord look at Jester. Rosohnan couples lolloping about beneath bridges, in courtyards, the textbook image of romance. He wonders if he’s seen Caleb look at anyone like that. He wonders if he would know.
“What happened?”
“Oh, well.” Caleb has that tone, like a ship about to wreck. Essek knows the next statement is going to shake him. “They did not like me very much, once I lost my mind.”
There it is.
The little that he knows of Caleb’s life, the paths of it he has seen, inferred, are dangerous shards in a larger, labyrinthian mosaic. He knows his origins in Rexxentrum. He knows of the Academy, his proximity to Volstrucker. He does not know what regimen folds them into being — only that the few ever caught in Leylas Kryn’s web did not scream when tortured.
“This was…?”
“Astrid,” Caleb nods. “And Eadwulf. Before we convened with you, we met with them over our goal to prevent the return of the Somnovem.” Essek nods too, following, recalling the Nein’s mention of those two names and the way they made the hairs on his neck prickle.
“There is… there is more to it than just this.” Caleb makes a gesture around his head, as if referencing the very mind he’d lost. “We disagreed fundamentally. We hold different types of ambition. It is a dangerous thing, the three of us in a room. And I am not … fond,” he says with a look to Essek, “of them the way I was in my schooling. But I have kindness in my heart reserved for my memories of them, if they ever choose to return it."
“If,” repeats Essek, reminding himself that the odds were low.
“Yes,” sighs Caleb. “If.” He quirks one eyebrow down at Essek. “Why do you ask?”
Essek stares back up at the ceiling, at the chandelier, imagining it hanging from the real sky. Nights in Aeor have so very few stars, blustered by fog and sleet as it is.
“I collect intelligence for a living,” he says, the words heavy in his mouth. He wonders when he will need to begin phrasing it in the past tense.
No matter; they change the subject. Caleb never demonstrated any sign that the question particularly affected him, but there is enough unsaid in the tension now. After bouncing a theorem back and forth for much too long, he eventually satisfies himself with Essek’s health and pats him on the knee, making as if to leave the room.
“Have a good night, Herr Thelyss,” he nods to Essek. A formality, to end their casual conversation. Essek notices for the first time that Caleb’s hair has fallen from its braid to hang loose. He doesn’t look for long; if he allows himself to consider that it looks good on him, he will fall mute for the rest of the evening.
Essek stands as well, the associated formality lost by the nature of wearing a sleep robe. “Have a good night,” he nods in turn. There is memory in the motion; those nights of research in Rosohna. Flicker of understanding. Words unspoken, humming in the air, in the energy between them. “I will… see you in the morning.”
“Yes.” Caleb smiles with teeth again. Only he can turn a shark’s grin into a thing of honeyed affection. “In the morning.”
The door creaks shut. Silence finds him once more.
He has lived his life surrounded by so much silence, Essek thinks, readying himself for rest. He does not know how it became so unpleasant.