Chapter Text
The atmosphere after the meeting was warm, though it was a rainy evening outside.
Hermits stood in clusters with their plates in hand, and a low indistinct chatter filled the room over the background of the rain hitting the windows.
There were more desserts on the potluck table than there were mains, but no one seemed to mind much; it had the pleasant effect of making the room smell like a bakery, which was nothing to get upset over.
Etho had found himself, through the strange alchemy of floating from one conversation to another without much thought, talking to Ren in a corner. The topic had turned to soulmates, of all things, though he couldn’t have told you how it got there for the life of him.
Maybe it wasn’t too strange of a topic, the hermits were, as a rule, huge gossips.
“— nothing new, no one has heard anything about Xelqua still.” He said to Ren, before he caught the flash of something being thrown in his direction from the corner of his eye, and immediately ducked on instinct.
The glass sailed directly through where his head had been a split second ago, hitting the wall with so much force that it shattered on impact, denting the wood panelling of the wall and spreading sharp shards and juice alike onto the floor.
Silence descended on the party like an anvil, the background chatter ceasing abruptly as everyone turned to look at the source of the sound.
The apple juice dripped down the wall, extending the stain.
Etho stayed in his half crouch, frozen as he stared at Grian. The other man was breathing heavily in the quiet, as though he had just run a marathon, or gotten the fright of his life; his face looked somewhere halfway between scared and furious. It was an ugly expression, and it only caused Etho to tense up further to have it directed at him — Grian had never seemed hostile towards him before this. They had barely spoken one on one, but nothing the other hermits had ever said had prepared him for this behaviour.
Something was clearly very wrong, but he had no idea what it could possibly be.
Mumbo, who had been Grian’s conversation partner, looked equally as clueless and shocked by the sudden attack as anyone else, still holding his half-full plate in one hand (and seemingly Grian’s own plate in the other) and staring dumbly along with everyone else in the room.
“What did you say?” Grian’s voice cracked horribly, both a hiss and a demand and at the same time rising hysterically, “Where did you hear that name?!”
Etho raised his hands non-threateningly, palms out, in an attempt to deescalate from whatever had set Grian off so badly. It felt like he was trying to calm down some kind of wild animal.
A beat passed and nobody else spoke up to bail him out.
“I said that nobody has heard anything new about Xelqua,” Grian flinched violently as he said the name. It looked painful, and a suspicion started to form in Etho’s mind, “Do you… know Xelqua?”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” he countered flatly, “since I was asking you where you heard it.” He seemed to consider for a moment, “But you could say that. I know for a fact that you don’t know him.”
The way Grian was speaking sounded like it hurt. The sentences cut off and disjointed. Like he was biting the words off before they were really finished.
Xisuma seemed not to notice any of it as be bustled eagerly over and out from the spectating ring of hermits that had formed around the conversation.
The admin took Grian’s hand in his own armoured one excitedly, seemingly without a care for the tension still lining the other man’s frame or the severe tone of the conversation.
“Etho and I have been friends for a long time,” he explained gently, staring somehow beseechingly through his helmet visor, “of course he knows about Xelqua. Xelqua is the name of my soulmate.”
The tension dropped out of Grian’s body all at once. “Oh.” He said, “It’s all just a misunderstanding then,” he laughed shakily. “Maybe it’s spelled differently or something then. It must be a different Xelqua.”
Etho… didn’t believe that. The way Grian pronounced ‘Xelqua’ was exactly the same as the way that Xisuma did it. With the strange static-y quality on the X sound — like a signal breaking up — that only creatures from the void seem to have the vocal cord set-up to say in the proper dialect.
Come to think of it, Etho didn’t know that he had ever heard Grian actually try to say ‘Xisuma’ properly. It had always been ‘X’ or ‘X-eye-zoom-a’ from him, which would be nothing strange if he simply didn’t want to admit to being unable to say it properly, though most hermits at least gave it their best try once in a while. It was polite to try, and Xisuma was always understanding.
But clearly Grian could have said it properly if he wanted to. Etho really didn’t think they were talking about a different person.
Ren’s ears were still pinned flat against his skull is distress from the glass throw, “That was still totally not cool dude, you could have hurt someone.”
Grian turned away from Xisuma to look back at Etho and Ren, his face was still pale, but he seemed much calmer now, “I’m sorry for freaking out on you like that Etho — I shouldn’t have thrown something at you.”
That was… oddly formal for Grian. But it did look like he was coming out of some kind of shock. And he really didn’t want to dig more into it and risk making this any worse.
“These things happen,” he ventured cautiously, “anyone can act strangely when they are startled. But are you sure you’re okay?”
“You’re right, I was just startled. That’s all.” He tacked on an obviously fake laugh, “Bad memories you know?” He said it as though he was trying to dismiss it from reality entirely. It really wasn’t as reassuring as Grian was clearly aiming for.
Xisuma squeezed Grian’s hand that he still had a hold of in a bid to regain his attention. Pain flashed across his expression for a moment, but it was gone in an instant and he didn’t try to pull his hand back from the admin’s grip.
“Are you sure it isn’t the same person? It’s spelled ̇/ ᒷ ꖎ ᑑ ⚍ ᔑ.” He pronounced each letter individually, and they fizzled together in Etho’s ears incomprehensibly. He couldn’t have repeated them back. “Please, if you know anything at all, tell me. I’ve been looking for a long time and haven’t found anything.”
Xisuma really had been looking everywhere, Etho had sat with him some nights as he used his Admin permissions to search through every public server he could access for even a trace of his soulmate.
But Grian was already clamming up again, that strange expression back on his face. He tore his hand out of Xisuma’s with no small amount of force and shoved the admin back, only succeeding in making the much larger man take a single step to steady himself, and even that only because he wasn’t expecting it.
“I need to go right now.”
Grian ducked through the crowd of shocked hermits at a startled rabbit speed, fleeing right out the door without another word.
Xisuma stood, stunned, in the middle of the room; his hand still raised.
Mumbo was still holding his own plate in one hand and Grian’s in the other.
Etho’s communicator buzzed in his pocket, going off in sync with every other hermits.
Etho turned and made eye contact with Ren.
Everyone started talking over each other all at once.
—
Grian crashed through the door of the (modest, by the standards of hermitcraft) home that he maintained on his own private server with all of the grace of a bird hitting a window.
Leaving the corner of the entry way rug that he had tripped on in his haste still turned up and the door half open he ran to the upstairs bathroom; the one with the largest mirror in the house.
No one else was in this world anyway, and it was broad daylight out since he had last left it in the middle of a morning, and time had obligingly waited to pass with no one online to watch it tick on.
In front of the mirror he hurried to strip out of his sweater and then the rest of his clothing. Twisting frantically back and forth in search of a soul mark that he was unsure if he even expected to find.
If he could have held onto his composure for a little longer he might have been able to ask Xisuma about the location of the supposed mark. That would have helped with locating its supposed match.
There was nothing at all. His skin was as bare as it had always been since the day he was born.
Carefully, he checked his few scars — the watchers had been inclined more toward the psychological than physical — for the broken lines that indicated a soul mark scarred through.
Still nothing; and he had no tattoos or burns that might have been large enough to conceal a name. There was no mark that had been miraculously missed for all these years.
But why would Xisuma lie about something like that? And why would Etho back it up? And even if the admin was lying, that wouldn’t explain where had he had learned that name in the first place. The watchers would never have told, and Grian certainly hadn’t ever said a word to anyone. Not even to Mumbo or Pearl when he had reappeared in their lives so abruptly after his long absence. Even when they had tried to gently hint at the topic he had always just deflected and smiled. They had understood, even if they were curious they were waiting still until he was ready.
Some wounds were too painful to yet consider reopening, even for the sake of people he loved.
He was putting it off. There was one more place that needed checking if he wanted to be sure. But then what? Go back and accuse Xisuma of lying? It wouldn’t even prove anything. He wasn’t going to get any answers. Better to keep his mouth shut either way.
He told himself that it was enough stalling.
Grian squeezed his eyes shut; he didn’t want to watch, though in a moment he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. The problem didn’t really lie in the eyes on his face.
He reached into himself, where he had tied up the flow of his magic into a knot to stop it from circulating or escaping, so that he could assume the shape of a normal human once again. The shape he had before. Imagining the knot being tugged free was repellent, but he did it anyway, as he always did when it got too much to contain. He focused until the magic unwound and flowed freely again, gently ballooning out, filling his entire body, like water flowing gently over the rocks of a stream, rather than the barren riverbed that damming it up made him feel like.
Even as he knew his physical eyes were shut, he could once again see himself, unable to stop watching. He was his own voyeur, unable to shut the eyes outside himself — for these eyes had no eyelids, and did not blink — as his wings reappeared, unfolding from the cut in space where they hid themselves when he put them away. Like the wings of a beetle emerging from their neat place tucked, undetectable, inside a seamless shell before it unexpectedly flew and caused everyone in the room to scream.
A watcher really was like a flying roach now that he thought about it, unexpected and unwelcome. A disgusting pest that refused to die when it should. Secret wings. He giggled a little hysterically through the line of thought. The other watchers would have hated that.
He could see himself from all angles as his skin bloomed with the purple shimmering of the watcher patterns, it was like looking at a shattered mirror or the compound eye of some bug, every version of himself from every angle fluttering his wings at once. The walls all around glittered with eyes, and all of them were his; dark hard beetle-like eyes, like jewels. He was distracted by it briefly, his eyes meeting his own eyes, caught up watching himself watching himself — and then he saw it.
There it was, between his wings, written sideways down his spine; ‘ ̇/╎ᓭ⚍ ᒲᔑ’, ‘Xisuma’.
His face-eyes snapped open, and his vision concentrated and congealed all at once within their view, he was in front of the mirror, looking into his own eyes still; entirely black-liquid and fathomless as the void itself under the end islands. No longer the brown of his human self. Watching the tears welling up in the corners of his eyes come out just as black was too much, and he turned away from the sight of it.
The corners of the bathroom where his spectral eyes remained bunched up in hideous clumps also wept black liquid and he tried to turn away from that as well, but there was no escaping it. It was every direction that he turned, and he could not look at nothing like this. That darkness escaped him.
Looking at his own body was out of the question, but all around the eyes that phased in and out of existence stained everything, crawling across the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Something dripped into his hair from above, and he didn’t dare look up. Hastily, he pulled at least his pants back on, though his shirt wasn’t designed to accommodate his wings so there was no need to bother with that until he could tuck them away again.
He needed to calm down, but he could feel a scream building up in his chest. The sound of his tears dripping from the ceiling and hitting the tile around him was maddening, he wiped his hands over his face. Even though he refused to let his body cry he was betrayed by the black rain around him. It was starting to form puddles, and perhaps in another circumstance the rain-like sound would have been soothing. If he could ignore what it was.
He swallowed the scream down and what emerged instead was a strangled sob, and once that was out more followed.
The bathroom tile was cool and damp against his cheek. When had he laid down?
He shut his primary eyes again as he sobbed into the tile, and immediately reconnected with his other eyes; once again seeing himself as though he were a dozen spiders clinging to walls and corners. His own little pity party panopticon, he thought wryly, through the hiccuping force of his pathetic wailing. If he couldn’t even be allowed to pretend at being human, couldn’t he at least have some of the watcher’s cold disaffected bearing instead? Something that wasn’t this crushing feeling.
The name between his wings was still there; staring, accusing, mocking.
It was hard to believe that he would ever calm down, that he could stop feeling this miserable.
What was he supposed to do about this? Go back onto hermitcraft, where his family was, and announce that he didn’t know anything at all about their admin’s soulmate after that public crash out at the potluck? No one was going to believe him.
Xisuma was a lovely man he was sure; Grian wasn’t particularly close with him among the hermits, but he was always working hard to take care of the hermits and their home. He was compassionate and warm and hard working. He was never controlling with the power he wielded, hearing everyone out at meetings and taking their feelings into account. At least Grian had though so. Had heard so from the others. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Why would his name not have appeared before he became Xelqua? What about Grian, as he had been before he was ruined, had not been good enough for Xisuma? Why was he only perfectly matched to him after he had been hurt? What that said about Xisuma and the kind of things, or people, he liked Grian didn’t know; but it scared him.
It didn’t matter. Xelqua wasn’t a real person who existed. Grian wouldn’t pretend to be him just to be loved. If it was only Xelqua who was capable of receiving love then Grian didn’t need or want it. He would take care of himself, just as always.
As he pushed himself up, still shuddering a little, he resolved that he wouldn’t be saying anything. No one could prove it if he just stonewalled hard enough. His wrist collapsed back onto the tile with an unexpectedly sharp pain as he put his weight on it and he let out a yelp as the tears welled up again. A bruise had ripened into an ugly shade of purple to match his magic when he wasn’t looking. He could see the long stripes where Xisuma’s fingers had wrapped around his wrist in the imprint. He shook his head and got up more carefully.
He wouldn’t let his newfound family flinch away from him or cast him out; no one had discovered the ugly truth of what he had become against his will for all of season six, and no would be finding out this season either. Better to be though of as rude or strange or closed off than to admit to anything that might get him caught.
Taking some toilet paper in hand he wiped the blackened tear tracks off of his face, preparing to flush the evidence and not use this particular bathroom again until he felt up to deep cleaning it.
On the counter his communicator rattled — and he vaguely remembered it going off before, while he had been having his little melt down.
And then, “Grian?”
That was Mumbo’s voice, calling from downstairs. Mumbo was whitelisted here.
“Grian!? Are you there?” Closer. More frantic.
There were footsteps on the stairs.
Grian dived for his communicator, opening the text box as fast as he could with fumbling fingers.
The footsteps were nearly at the top of the stairs now.
/ban MumboJumbo
—
Among the shouting and the talking over the top of each other that was going on in the meeting room after Grian’s dramatic flight, Mumbo was not having an easy time making himself heard.
Not that he really wanted to, but everyone else apparently felt the need to throw their opinion on the strange scene out there, and they were not taking turns.
He had swiftly retreated into a corner to put the plates he was holding down before someone knocked him over in their efforts to get closer to Xisuma, who everyone now stood clumped up around in a knot, theorising at and sympathising with him in turns.
Waiting for a small lull in the clamour, he announced to anyone who was paying attention, “I’m going to go try to log into Grian’s private server and see if he is there.”
Ren’s ears swivelled towards him first, and then he turned and caught Mumbo’s eye. That was good, he knew at least one person had heard him and would tell the others where he went. That was all the permission he needed. He was worried about his friend, and he was going to check on him. There were enough people here fussing over Xisuma, he didn’t need Mumbo now, not like Grian might.
Pulling out his communicator, he logged out decisively, not giving any time to talk himself out of it, and then he was logging back into Grian’s server.
Following the short path from spawn to approach the house at a hurried pace, something was clearly not right.
The front door was left wide open, and the rug was rucked up. The entry table was slightly crooked from its normal place flush with the wall, like someone had caught themselves against it and then kept going. There were boot prints on the floor; Grian hadn’t even stopped to take his shoes off as he went inside.
He caught the tail end of what might have been a wail from upstairs, and froze.
The muffled sobbing — he assumed it was sobbing? It was the sort of hysterical sound that made it hard to differentiate between crying or laughter, but he didn’t imagine anything was that funny right now — that followed wasn’t any more reassuring, and he stood awkwardly in the doorway, wondering if he really ought to leave and come back later maybe. Whatever was going on was clearly deeply personal to Grian, but it whatever it was it wasn’t something that he had ever spoken to Mumbo about.
As far as Mumbo knew, Grian was just like the majority of people, and had no soulmate of his own. Slightly less like the majority of people, Grian had no strong opinion on the bonds that Mumbo had ever heard him express; most people were prone to fantasies of being one of the lucky few — at least once or twice — that they might just be a late bloomer, that the universe cared enough for them specifically to have someone perfect picked out for them. Not so Grian. He had never entertained the thought of changing his name, just to see if he had become the sort of person who had a match.
Then again, anything at all might have changed in the mysterious time that Grian had been away. In the year and a half that his friend never spoke of to anyone, any number of things might have changed without Mumbo’s knowing. It was disconcerting to consider that he might no longer know his own best friend as well or as completely as he once had.
Xisuma had been thrilled with his own mark when it had come in during that year that Grian had been missing from Mumbo’s life; everyone on the server had heard about it then, and helped him, even in small ways, to look for his partner. It had been a welcome distraction for Mumbo during that worrying time, even if it had turned up nothing.
Everyone had agreed that there couldn’t have been anyone more deserving of a destined love than their kind and compassionate admin; Mumbo had remembered the thought floating through his mind when Xisuma had agreed — hearing out Mumbo’s overly emotional plea — to offer Grian a home with the hermits after his reappearance. The hermits would offer that home just as readily to Xelqua, for Xisuma’s sake.
By the time season six had begun and Mumbo was able to spend time with his old friend again, the frantic energy around the mark’s appearance had faded some, the hermits accepting that they would meet when they met. That Grian might have met their admin’s mysterious match in his time away wasn’t a thought that had every crossed Mumbo’s mind. Evidently, given Grian’s strong reaction to even the name, no one had found cause to bring it up in his presence before. It was lucky Etho had such quick reflexes.
Everyone would have undoubtedly heard about a freakout like the scene from the potluck as soon as it happened.
Maybe this was how the soulmates were destined to meet — because Xisuma had allowed Grian onto the server, he would hear about Xelqua from Grian. Maybe Grian would even introduce the two of them himself, after he sorted out whatever misunderstanding had caused the distress.
He nodded to himself as this train of thought wrapped up. Yes, needed to stay and make sure Grian was alright. Whatever was going on, the happiness of two of his dearest friends was on the line right now; Grian needed comfort and support, Xisuma needed to be able to find his soulmate. And Mumbo was here to help them.
Mumbo glanced wearily up the stairs, calling out as he stepped into the hall.
“Grian?”
Silence from the upper landing. That awful sound had stopped while Mumbo had been stuck in his head. He needed to get a move on.
He started climbing the stairs.
Was Grian even still there? Had he left while Mumbo wasn’t paying attention? He pulled up the server list on his communicator to check and almost jumped out of his skin: Grian, Xelqua, MumboJumbo.
Xelqua was on the server right now?? Since when?
“Grian!? Are you there?”
The bathroom door was, like the front door, open, though not all the way; he couldn’t yet see inside. Just the back wall, which looked to have … something dripping down it.
Then he couldn’t see anything at all. The stair beneath his foot disappeared mid-stride along with the walls of the house, and then the bare sky, and then everything else.
His foot went down onto the now flat floor of the hermit craft meeting room that he had left not even ten minutes ago, and he lost his balance and fell in an uncoordinated heap, attracting the attention of the few hermits still left in the room.
His head spun with vertigo as he sat back up, checking his communicator for an explanation.
He had been banned from Grian’s server, no reason given in the ban message.
At least he had managed to take the screenshot in time.
He looked back up from the screen at the other hermits — Xisuma, Etho, and Keralis at this point, sitting in a huddle — and set his shoulders as he decided what needed to be done. What the right thing to do was.
“So, Xisuma, there’s maybe something you should see…”
—
Xisuma was experiencing some of the wildest highs and lows of his life. Flipping between hope and elation to despair and worry every few waking hours. He struggled to get sleep, though the other hermits had been cycling through to check on him and try their best reassure him. He had made pots of tea one after another as his guests came and went, and participated in their distractions as best he could, trying his best not to let on how he was feeling, though everyone knew about as much as he did now, and had their own opinions on how Xisuma himself must have been taking it.
Finally, after years of waiting, he had his very first lead on his soulmate. And that lead was refusing to talk to him. Or anyone else.
He had a screenshot of a server list with Xelqua’s name on it. Grian (and Mumbo, however briefly, and Xisuma was grateful beyond measure for the screenshot; he already had it saved in three places) had been on the same server as them.
But something was very wrong. Nobody had been able to get ahold of Grian for the last three days. What if he never came back? What if Xisuma had missed his chance entirely because he hadn’t held onto him? He should have held on harder, with both hands. There must have been something he could have said that would have convinced him to say something. If he’d missed his only chance he had only himself to blame. He had to believe that wasn’t the case.
As much as he wanted to ride the high of his — possibly — imminent meeting with the destined love of his life, it was difficult to deny that the situation was alarming. He wanted to hope that it was all some kind of misunderstanding, but whenever he tried to imagine what about Xelqua could have possibly drawn that kind of reaction from Grian, normally playful, someone Xisuma had gotten to know a little in the season that he had been here, someone that other hermits who he was closer with spoke well of, he couldn’t come up with anything at all. It was a struggle to rationalise it.
Was his soulmate a bad person? Xisuma liked to think that he himself wasn’t so terrible as to be matched to someone like that. And if that were the case, why was Xelqua on Grian’s server? Surely he wouldn’t not only let in, but meet with someone who he actively disliked. Surely that couldn’t be the case.
He moved on to the next option. Did Grian think that Xisuma wasn’t good enough for Xelqua? If they were that close, close enough to talk about soulmates, since Xelqua had supposedly told Grian he didn’t have one, then maybe he was just being protective of a friend. Maybe Xisuma himself had done something that Grian took objection too. Maybe it was something he had said in passing and not noticed. Grian had never indicated he thought badly of Xisuma, or that he had a problem with him. Hopefully it was not that, although it was better than some other options he could think of; at least a misunderstanding like that could be cleared up easily. Other things he could think of wouldn’t be so easy to fix. Maybe he should hope that he had offended Grian in some way.
Was Grian jealous? Were he and Xelqua involved somehow? It would make sense; finding out your lover had been hiding a soulmate from you might invoke that kind of reaction. Maybe they were just friends but Grian still felt betrayed by the deception, but Xisuma shook his head to his own thoughts, that seemed an overblown reaction. If they were together what was Xisuma going to do? He didn’t relish the though of being a home wrecker, but he and Xelqua were meant to be, so surely Xisuma had the right of it in a situation like that.
Grian would hopefully calm down and talk soon, but it had already been a concerning amount of time that he had been ignoring even his best friends (Mumbo had even reached out to Grian’s friend Pearl to see if she had heard anything at all, she hadn’t, and everyone else he had reached out to had also been banned from Grian’s server without explanation, no could see what, or who, was going on inside it now).
Had Grian been holed up together with Xelqua the whole time? The thought brought a bitter taste to his mouth. He hoped, selfishly, that they were just friends, that it wasn’t like that.
Xisuma didn’t know if he could accept Grian into his relationship with his soulmate. He hadn’t ever wished for more than one partner. Since this was his soulmate, who was perfectly suited to him, surely Xelqua would want the same thing as him. Something like that would be a fundamental that they are on the same page about.
He had never thought on Grian as a romantic prospect before, since he had only met him after he had already got his soul mark; he hadn’t though on anyone that way since the mark’s appearance, since he didn’t wish to be disloyal or have to dump someone when his soulmate eventually walked into his life, didn’t want to already be in a relationship to pass the time and make Xelqua think he didn't want them, or to just throw someone aside when Xelqua finally made an appearance. It would be a cruel way to behave.
Could he learn to love Grian? Maybe they both would, together? But no, soulmates could come in groups of more than two, if that were necessary then he would be there also. They must just be friends. They had to be.
Grian was going to get over whatever this was and introduce the soulmates to each other, and surely remain a close friend of theirs when they were a couple. This would all be a funny story to tell at their wedding someday. Maybe Grian would be Xelqua’s best man (man of honour?). Etho and Keralis would surely duel each other for the right to be Xisuma’s.
Just trying to imagine it made him feel a bit calmer, even though he couldn’t yet picture the face of his partner, it was easy to picture all of his family having fun planning and attending the party, everyone being happy together and in one place. The hermits did love an Event. It was all going to turn out fine. No need to catastrophise before he even knew what was really going on.
Maybe Xelqua did have someone else right now, from before the mark even, and Grian knew about that but not about the mark and he was just sorting out a big mess; breaking the news to his friend and possibly Xelqua’s current partner. That would certainly be awkward enough to take some time, and quite dramatic besides.
Xisuma didn’t envy him the task if he really was having to break up someone else’s long term relationship right now. He’d probably also freak out like that if someone he was close with dumped a situation like that on him too, even if they didn’t mean to.
That was probably as sensible an explanation as he could come up with without speaking to Grian directly. There was no point torturing himself with speculation, even though it was difficult not to. He just needed to stop thinking about it until he had more information.
Easier said than done. But he would try to get back to his work; there was always something he had been avoiding somewhere to do, administration was like that. Things could always run smoother.
He sat down at his desk and pulled up the chat and the server monitoring tools on the side as he opened a fresh coding window and tried to decide what to work on first.
Not even five minutes later the world chat exploded into questions and exclamations, drawing his attention back away from the code again. It was moving so quickly it was hard to parse what had even happened, and he scrolled back to check the cause and paused to stare at the message he had been waiting for.
Should he … go talk to him?
Maybe not. Better to give him some time to settle, he’d surely come to Xisuma when he was ready.
It seemed Mumbo was already on his way over anyway. He could deal with it later. Give him few hours. Grian was surely going to be embarrassed about all the fuss he had caused. It was a little hard to suppress the voice in his head that told him that he was being a coward, but he managed, and turned back to his work. He’d wait just a little longer.
—