Chapter Text
“Caleb?!” Essek called back into the kitchen, poking the roll of meat and vegetables suspiciously with his fork. “Is this animal… something where you eat the contents of its stomach?” He scrutinized the slab of brown, meat-textured substance on his plate. He did not remember such a creature being mentioned when he had spoken to Yasha about Empire cuisine.
“Was?” Caleb appeared in the doorframe, blinking in bewilderment, “no, we remove the organs in most preparations.” Caleb leaned down over his shoulder to scrutinize the offending piece of meat.
“Ah, Schatz, it is rouladen!” he chuckled at Essek’s bewilderment.
“Oh, of course. That helps so much,” Essek said. Regardless of the source, he couldn’t help being pleased to see Caleb laugh. Ikithon’s trial frequently led to anxious mornings and exhausted, quiet evenings. Without knowledge of what they would end up covering that day in the inquiry, every night was a test of reading Caleb’s emotional state. Was the twist of his lips anger? The redness in his eyes: sadness or melancholy? Was today a day of grieving the person he once was or eviscerating them for their foolishness? Essek did not begrudge Caleb his fragility—he had certainly earned it. Besides, Essek’s company was offered freely—he certainly had nowhere better to be at this point.
“It is not what the creature ate! The meat is rolled around the filling and then put with the sauce and pasta,” Caleb explained, miming how one might assemble such a thing. Essek began to pick the roll apart with a fork.
“Your food is so… compact,” he mused. “In the dynasty, this might be ten different small dishes.”
Caleb pulled out his own chair, grabbing a slice of the still-warm loaf of bread. He smeared butter on it with the relish of someone who never took hot food for granted.
“Well, I can’t say I minded. As a child, it meant many less dishes to clean and less water to haul,” Caleb said.
Essek diced his own beef rolls into neat portions. He cautiously bit into a piece and immediately felt as though his body was trying to escape the food as he ate it. The flavor wasn’t awful, but the texture mix was so deeply revolting he almost felt more accomplished managing to swallow than he had when he finished his first original spell.
“I can see how that would be a good characteristic in that situation,” he said. He glanced over to Caleb’s plate, which seemed to be already half empty. Caleb tore off a piece of bread to mop up some of the residual sauce.
“Well, Yasha said she was trying to cook some Zemnian dishes and apparently this was the first in the book.”
Essek began the delicate process of surgically separating out the contents of one of the beef rolls. Perhaps if he separated the different textures, they would be less offensive? He removed the pickle with all the precision he normally reserved for alchemical reagents. He placed it on a single side of his plate while he shuttled the beef to another, and the remaining vegetable mixture to a third zone. He glanced back to Caleb, who was already partially done with his second beef roll. It would never fail to surprise him how fast the Nein could demolish a meal, especially coming from a family of hours-long formal dinners. He carefully speared the pickle, lifting it to his mouth and nibbling the first bit. It was indeed less offensive disassembled, and this at least was a texture he was used to. Pickling was a necessary preservation method in a land with little arable land and even less natural sunlight, after all.
He shaved off a thin slice of the beef and realized his confidence had been misplaced—some of the textures were still strange even when separated, and the pickle taste had completely permeated the beef. He forced himself to finish the piece, pondering what type of beast might be cooked in this manner. Certainly none that he was familiar with.
“What creature becomes this?” He asked, gesturing to the remaining roll on his plate. Caleb’s face lit up like it did whenever he explained something innocuous about his homeland. He chucked and left the table to remove a book from the bookshelf—one of the children’s books they kept available for when they were entertaining Veth, Luc, and Yeza outside the Tower.
Caleb flipped quickly through the pages before turning the book around, pointing to a brown quadrupedal animal with horns. He looked up at Essek and said, eyebrows raised and manner completely serious, “Cow goes MOO!”
Essek barely restrained a snort of laughter, and with his most haughty Shadowhand affect replied, “Indeed.”
They stared at each other for a moment in a parody of their first meeting before bursting into laughter.
Essek picked at the remainder of the vegetable filling he had exiled to one quadrant of his plate, managing a few bites. A relatively inoffensive texture, albeit odd bereft of rice. He glanced over to where Caleb was replacing the book on the shelf and surreptitiously palmed the remainder of the disassembled meat into his wrist pocket. He could only imagine how gross it would be to dispose of it later, but the alternatives of eating it or telling Caleb he disliked it felt equally abhorrent in the moment. Caleb sat down and Essek picked at the remainder of the beef roll, carefully sequencing bites of vegetable filling with pickle pieces.
“You know, your Empire food is vastly more filling than ours. Would you like the rest of my plate?” he offered, gesturing to the remaining beef roll. He felt a bit guilty for fibbing, but surely this was a special case. He did not want to insult Caleb’s native food, not when it still felt like a privilege to even have the sort of relationship where he might be here.
Caleb, always too perceptive for his own good, cocked his head.
“Is the food of the noble dens so different from what we experienced?”
“Of course! Much more availability of vegetables, though not so much the very leafy ones or grains.“ Essek tried to keep within the bounds of the almost-truth while he carefully transferred the roll to Caleb’s plate.
“I suppose I am most familiar with tavern fare, and that is, in some ways, universal.”
“Of course. I believe elves may also have slower metabolisms,” Essek said.
“Really? I thought it was the reverse?” Caleb responded in confusion. Essek scolded himself. He should have known better than to try and elaborate on a shaky truth. Was it not one of the first rules of deception to not give more detail than was strictly warranted? He had been playing this game since he was a child. He should be better at it by now.
“I’m not terribly sure. It does not particularly factor into dunamancy, at least not in a way accounted for in most current explanations. Perhaps Jester or Caduceus would know?” Essek rose from the table, carrying his plate and cup to the kitchen. “I’m just going to clean these, would you like to put up the Tower?”
“Ach, yes. I am craving a warm bath tonight,” Caleb said. He joined Essek in the kitchen, planting a small kiss under his ear as he placed his own plate and cup on the counter. “I’ll put it up in the bedroom—join me in a moment?”
Essek smiled, casting prestidigitation on one of the plates with a sharp motion.
“Of course—I’ll be there in a moment. Just going to grab some permanent parchment, lest we get any good ideas that I can expand on while you’re out tomorrow.”
Essek heard Caleb’s footsteps recede down the hall. He cast prestidigitation on the other plate while he waited for the quiet impact of Caleb’s feet on the wooden steps. Once the footsteps receded up the stairs, he flicked the offending beef slice out of his wrist pocket onto the counter, as if by ejecting it with great vigor he might banish it from existence entirely. He stood, hands on his hips, staring at it on the counter for a moment. Finally, when no suitable alternative came to him, he teleported it to Nicodranas. He imagined the small piece of beef falling from the sky, confusing passersby, and smirked faintly. While it felt a bit overly aggressive, teleporting such a tiny object, it didn’t require him to risk leaving the house, which would surely confuse Caleb and elicit questions. Besides, what was a 7th level spell when so much of his arcane reserves remained after a leisurely day of reading and annotating his spell book.
He absent-mindedly tidied the kitchen: placing the plates back in the cupboard and prestidigitating the cups. If only his mother could see him now—doing servants’ work, he thought. She would be horrified at his calloused hands and the brevity of their meal. Only one course? What would the other dens think? Her imagined indignation would have to satisfy him, as he would never get to experience her real indignation, at least not about this. His stomach twisted and gurgled. He would have to find a way to get some food later, before it grew too vocal—preferably something mild to offset the Empire food. He could ask the cats for something, but it would be too suspicious for him to ask for a full meal before trancing when he had just eaten. He would have to wait until Caleb fell asleep. Gathering a few pieces of parchment from Caleb’s discarded satchel, he climbed the stairs to find Caleb and the entrance to their real home.
If there was anything that could distract him from the rumbling of his stomach, it was working with Caleb on spell design. Essek may have had decades more experience, but Caleb’s mixture of formal training, creativity, and necessity frequently turned his understanding of theory on its head. Some of their spells would have to remain secret, or else risk exposing Caleb’s suspiciously expansive knowledge of Dunamancy and, by extension, Essek’s continued existence. Even if they could not be published, there was still a delight in pursuing strains of thought that would have been considered deeply heretical in the Dynasty. Combining Transmutation, Evocation, Dunamancy—they could tweak spells for years and not even exhaust the fourth level.
Night found him pulling a half-asleep Caleb into their bed, both of them covered in chalk dust and a wreckage of tea mugs left on the workshop tables. Essek’s stomach groaned again and he glared down as if that would help silence it.
“Bedtime for humans,” Essek said, quickly hoisting Caleb into the bed before his density adjusting spell ran out.
“You too?” Caleb asked. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, but patted his hand in the open space next to him.
“In a few moments—I just want to copy down our work.”
Caleb mumbled his assent.
Essek walked back into their laboratory and began to sketch out the equations and sigils they had brainstormed. He paused, setting down his ink and quill—he had intended to eat now, hadn’t he? Now that the time had come, he couldn’t conceptualize a food that sounded appetizing. His favorite stew seemed too heavy for a meal directly before trancing, and Caleb had never had the roasted tuber and cicada bowls that he used to pick up on the way home from work, so the Tower would not be able to reproduce them. He tried to imagine the taste of various dishes, but everything either seemed too heavy, too foreign, or was unknown to the magic here. Finally, he settled on a simple broth—it was one he had cooked himself for Caleb many times. His nanny used to make it for him when he was coming off a fast and it still always tasted like relief, guilt, and fermented soy.
He sipped a cup of the broth, offered to him by a phantasmal cat, turning back to their work. The slight edge of hunger was reassuring—it was, after all, how he spent much of his youth. He summarized the rest of their thoughts from the evening with a precise hand, noting which sigils he hoped to work on the following day. He straightened the workshop, collecting their permanent paper into a neat stack which he tucked into his spell book. When he returned to the bedroom, Caleb was sprawled across the bed, copper hair tinted slightly purple from the faint light emanating from the Kryn-style windows. He changed into his lounge clothes and tucked himself cross-legged next to Caleb’s sprawled form. Gravitating towards the warmth like plant roots towards water, Caleb shifted to curl around him. Essek placed a hand on Caleb’s shoulder and sunk into his trance.
Essek was eight when he first began skipping meals. At first, it was not his choice. It was his first year attending the dinner the Umavi hosted in honor of the ascent from the Underdark, and he was in charge of keeping an eye on Verin at the table. His mother had taken him aside that morning amidst barking orders to the servants as they bustled about the house to ensure everything was spotless before the guests arrived. She had crouched down to his level and he found himself startled by seeing her face so close. He was so much more familiar with the silky fabric of her sleeve when she would pat his head that seeing her eyes stare into his own so close was almost frightening.
“Essek. You are my eldest—my clever, clever boy. I need you to watch your brother tonight, yes? He is still young and prone to mess. Nanny Idna will be nearby if necessary, but I hope it will not be needed,” she said as he nodded fervently. “I know I can trust you with this important task. You are always so good at following my instructions,” she finished, straightening. He vowed to do his absolute best job as there was nothing he liked more than making his mother smile proudly down at him, just like when nanny told his mother he learned his letters faster than any other child she’d ever met.
When he marched down to dinner that evening, he felt as though he was walking into a great test, one which he would be sure to pass. He carefully cut Verin’s food for him into appropriately sized pieces for each course, beaming with pride when one of their guests commented on how good an older brother he was. When Verin’s eating grew messy, he splattered globules of food onto himself and the floor. Essek quietly cast prestidigitation to clean the mess, flicking through the somatics under the table and whispering softly. He tried to engage one of the researchers from the Tomes in discussion, working the more advanced topics he had recently covered in his studies into the conversation while trying to provide sufficient acknowledgement of Verin’s babbling on his other side. He knew there was only so much he could ignore his little brother before he threw a tantrum. As he quietly fired off another iteration of prestidigitation, his limbs felt like utter lead. He had never cast quite so much for quite so long. Finally, he saw his mother give the signal to bring the last course.
He had always heard that this feast had a particularly good finishing course, and he had hoped for weeks it might be fruit. His father had brought back Nicodranian oranges on his last trip home, and Essek still frequently thought of the sweet taste and the odd, visceral joy of picking off the skin with his fingers. The servers set down the platters with a flourish. The feeling of disappointment, followed by revulsion, was immediate. Holodets was the last course.
Essek had heard of this dish in his studies of the appropriate festival foods for each holiday. Holodets was a meat jelly dish formed from boiling a meat-bearing creature with vegetables and letting the collagen from the creature’s bones solidify the gelatin-like mixture. To make holodets for this number of people his mother must have commissioned a mammoth or two to be hunted fresh and cooked for the event. Verin immediately dug into his portion, shoving the jellied meat into his mouth and exclaiming in delight. Essek pursed his lips together, casting his eyes from his own portion as he waited for Verin to finish so he could cast prestidigitation yet again. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him. He had done so well tonight—must the last course be the most repulsive food he could imagine? Essek suppressed a shiver as he cleaved off a piece with his spoon. He closed his eyes, hoping if he didn’t have to see it, perhaps it would be less upsetting.
It was not. His spoon clanked down too loud on the dish as he set it down heavily. He could feel his mother’s eyes weighing on him as everyone else around the table finished their portion, conveying their complements. His stomach churned. He had to eat it somehow, but there was no way he could eat this goo in its current form and keep down the rest of his dinner. Perhaps he could mend it back into normal meat? He thought back to his recent lesson with his tutor, and twisted his fingers in the somatics. His vision fuzzed at the edges, and all he saw before the darkness took his vision entirely was a chunk of meat and a massive bone stitched together on his plate, which shattered in a dramatic crack of antique porcelain.
He woke up in his own bed, his mother and one of the cleric guests staring down at him.
“—should be fine, just a bit over extended,” he heard the cleric say.
“One would expect so. I suppose we can only be thankful the mammoth did not try to mend from within our stomachs,” she said. The cleric nodded. She cast her eyes down towards his own, as he began to look about.
“Thank our guest for their help, Essek,” she said.
“Thank you,” Essek croaked. His nerves felt as though they had been cooked, and pain sparked from beneath his ribs. His mother inclined her head and escorted the guest towards the door.
When she returned, he had propped himself up to sit cross-legged on the bed. His mother glided over to the bed, still resplendent in her formalwear.
“Mother, I—”
“Enough,” she said, reaching forward to touch his cheek. His sinuses burned as he tried to keep from crying.
“A religious dinner with guests is not the time to be experimenting with magic you don’t understand—”
“But I—”
“No. When a meal is given in honor of the Light, to refuse it is to refuse the gifts of the Light itself. Do you understand?”
Essek nodded, tears starting to spill down his cheeks.
“Now, you are old enough for penance. Someone from the kitchen will bring you your food for the next three days and you should attend the morning and evening meditations at the temple. You need not come to dinner.”
Essek quickly nodded his affirmation. He didn’t know if he could ever please the Luxon, but perhaps next time he might please his mother.
Essek came out of his trance with a deep sigh. It had been a long time since he had revisited that particular set of memories. Caleb made a faint sound of protest at being jostled, but with a bit of wiggling and potentially a strained hamstring, Essek managed to extricate himself. He checked the clock—only an hour or two until Caleb would wake. His stomach whined at him like it too had been cast back into the memories where a grumble would have been too forward. The aching hollowness felt somehow reassuring, even though it was unpleasant. It was a little bit of home—and what has home been for him in recent years but a dull ache?
He moved to request breakfast from the Tower cats then stopped, hand raised. He paused in indecision, frozen in the door of their laboratory. He should eat. He knew this factually. But turning away, grabbing a book, and settling down to read instead felt like a choice. It was perhaps the only choice he would make today that required neither discussion nor input from others. It might be good, he thought, to be accustomed to the sensation of hunger again if Caleb was to go somewhere for an extended time and it was not safe for him to leave to get food. He would have to stretch their stores if that happened, he rationalized, curling up in the armchair. He paged through the book, trying to focus on the author’s rather ludicrous assertions regarding the applicability of combined abjuration and evocation magics irrespective of the warded materials. These ridiculous people were going to blow themselves up. It was as though they’d never warded anything themselves before.
By the time Caleb emerged from the bedroom, there was a mess of parchment scattered across the floor, and he had scribbled increasingly disgruntled notes in the margins of the book.
“This book,” Essek declared, standing up and sending several sheets of parchment drifting to the floor, “is absolute rubbish. How did you even make it through this?”
Caleb took a cup of tea proffered by a cat and rubbed his beard. “Is that the Adamczyk warding book? It is rather bad.”
Caleb sat down at one of the tables that was not scattered with parchment. At some point the cats had clearly brought in food irrespective of Essek’s lack of ordering. Noticing the quill in Essek’s hand, he asked, “Have you been annotating?”
Essek’s cheeks colored. He had scolded Caleb for writing in a book just the other day.
“I have. But I might note, this book is not real,” he said archly.
Caleb reached out a hand for the book, and Essek handed it to him, pulling up his own seat at the table and serving himself a bowl of rice and vegetables.
“Ach, but your annotations can become a permanent addition. If only it was real, this would be a collector’s edition, schatz.” He held the book open with one hand while piling cheese and meat on a roll with the other.
Essek huffed. “Yes, of course. The irate ramblings of a disgraced Dynasty mage. Worth every platinum as a scrying focus,” Essek muttered.
Caleb frowned minutely. “You still have the amulet, yes?”
“Of course,” Essek said. He sighed. He didn’t actually believe he was at risk from scrying, but it was like a frayed cuticle or a hangnail—he couldn’t stop worrying it. He needed to distract himself. “Would you like your hair braided?”
Caleb nodded and Essek moved to stand behind him, studying Caleb’s coppery hair before beginning to twist it into three simple, interwoven braids. He always had to be careful, if he didn’t focus, his fingers would knit together a variation of the Den Thelyss braids automatically, and wouldn’t that be a way to reveal himself?
“I used to do this for Verin every morning,” Essek mused, taking the offered hair tie from Caleb and tying off the end of the braid.
“Did Verin do your hair as well?”
“No, no, he never memorized the pattern. Our nanny would do my braid, or I would let Verin try and mother would fix it.” Essek recalled with a wince the way his mother’s hands would tug at his hair and scalp as she would rapidly redo his hair after Verin had tangled it.
“Once he actually got jam in my braids, and our nanny had to have me prestidigitate the jam and then redo the braid,” Essek mused.
Caleb chuckled.
“Braiding is just like somatics, in a way,” Essek said. He sat back down into the chair and set to finishing the small portion of rice that remained.
The first time he had done Verin’s braids successfully, his mother was so pleased. She had told him how clever he was, how important their braids and hair were for showing respect for their rank and station in the Dynasty. He nodded along, rapt with the thrill of his mother’s attention and pride. After that, he made sure to learn all the different patterns for the different holidays, braiding Verin’s locks into increasingly complicated patterns. His mother had smiled down on him, and he felt like he was finally making her proud.
A cat meowed next to him, startling him out of his reverie. He nodded to it, having long forgotten his meal. Caleb was shoving a stack of notes on the previous day’s testimonies in his bag.
“Best of luck today, as always.” Essek wrapped Caleb in a hug, inhaling for a moment. He couldn’t change either of their pasts, nor could he affect the trial, but he could have this moment of contentment before they crashed against the walls of reality once more.
While Caleb was away at the trial, he messaged Yasha. It’s Essek. Caleb loved the food. Can you pick up a copy of the cookbook for me when convenient? He peered out the window at the green beans. Are your beans late too?
Yasha’s voice echoed in his head moments later: Glad he liked it. Very different vegetables here. Will bring a copy next time we’re over. Not enough sun for beans yet.
He nodded approvingly to himself, sketching potential ward designs on parchment at their kitchen table. He would get this cookbook and see if there were recipes that looked less offensive to him, but still might bring that delighted spark to Caleb’s eyes. And if all the recipes had that odd… beef texture, well, he would figure out a substitute. Once he had learned to cook. How different from alchemy could it be?
His stomach churned. He had breakfast with Caleb, but all that remained in their kitchen was the fluffy Empire bread. He looked at it—imagining its texture and taste—and broke off a small piece. It was not a lunch, per-se, but he supposed it would do. He occupied himself with the ward designs, noting where he wished Caleb’s feedback, and measured the dimensions of their front door and lab door. He pondered the combination of enchantment and dunamancy sigils that might reinforce their Hold Person ward and thought of how heretical such a combination might be perceived in the Dynasty.
He had been thirteen when he started asking such questions. His dunamancy and arcane theory tutor began to look increasingly distressed when he raised his hand during their sessions. He didn’t understand why some questions were allowed and some weren’t. Didn’t the Luxon want them to understand it? Could the beacons offer more than reincarnation? Why was asking what they could do so bad? He went to every religious ceremony he could for an entire month, hoping that at some point they might address his questions in one of the sermons. They did not. He spoke to the clerics, but each one fiddled with their vestments, said something about his mother, of course, being a much better authority to consult, and then excused themselves.
His mother had hoped his arcane efforts were a sign of his upcoming anamnesis. She hoped, when his memories began to return, his inappropriate questions might fade and he would follow his prescribed trajectory into the elite of the Dynasty’s theocracy. As both his tutors and the clerics had directed him back to his mother, he began peppering her with questions about the Luxon, how they found the beacons, what they even were and how she knew. The boundaries between inquiry and sacrilege remained inscrutable to him.
Retrospectively, their schism was inevitable, but it didn’t seem so to him then. He didn’t even remember what he had asked, only the flush of rage across her face as he finally cracked her composure.
“You are the reason we killed our extra sons under the Spider Queen,” she spat, striding away.
Essek knew well enough not to show up to dinner that night. He was absent from their shared table for a week—long enough that Verin tried to sneak him bits of dinner from his pockets.
Essek gently took the vegetables, covered in pocket lint as they were, and thanked him. He tucked them into his wrist pocket to dispose of later when Verin was not watching and reminded him that their mother would not want him to take on the burdens of Essek’s soul. Verin nodded as solemnly as a young child could. Essek cradled Verin’s small cheek in his palm and pushed back a stray strand of hair. He could not stand to see their mother punish Verin, even as she loved and doted on him—her uncomplicated child. She still had hope that Verin may be a returning soul. Regardless, Verin was hard not to love. He was a child with straightforward needs, he mostly did as he was told, and he already showed the physical coordination that would carry him into the highest ranks of the Aurora Watch.
By the end of the week, Deirta’s face lightened when she looked at her eldest son, and Essek even caught a glimmer of approval in her eyes at his strict observation of his penance. He ate only enough to live, and Deirta respected his dedication. If he could not gain her approval through his actions, he supposed at least his apologies were satisfactory.
Caleb was preceded home by the wafting scent of rice, vegetables, and chicken skewers. As he opened the door, a heavy bag of food balanced on each arm, Essek nearly tore the bags apart to get to the neatly packaged containers of rice and skewers.
“Ach, liebling, I’m not sure if you’re happier to see me or the food. Sorry, I realized when I left that we hadn’t gone to the market yet this week,” Caleb said. He set down the heavy bags on their table as Essek pulled silverware from the kitchen drawers.
“You, of course. Although,” Essek began serving himself a large helping of the rice, “the food certainly helps.”
Caleb chuckled.
Essek pulled a char-edged vegetable skewer from the container, moaning at the familiar taste of marinated sweet peppers and onions. He had nearly forgotten how heady and rapturous food was after skipping meals. He pulled a chicken skewer onto his plate. The frantic hunger in his stomach faded, taking with it the dull, throbbing headache that had emerged over the course of the day. How quickly he had fallen into old habits, he thought, ashamed, as his head cleared. When he was hungry, the thought of such fullness was nauseating. But now, with a full stomach, his thoughts while hungry seemed cloaked in a gauzy curtain. How quickly the false sharpness seduced him. He watched as Caleb dug into his own meal with aplomb. How do you tell someone who grew up in a world where meals were never guaranteed that the demon of hunger that stalked their steps was the same demon that flirted with you? Essek grabbed another vegetable skewer. He would figure this out. Caleb had enough to worry about.