Chapter Text
As strong as the fire had been the night before, it was bound to gutter out eventually.
Qifrey awoke in much the same position he fell asleep, if not curled more tightly into himself. If he had been warm at all during the night, he couldn’t remember it and the chill was seeping back into his bones. He shivered violently, and his joints ached something fierce. His eye was struggling to focus as well–his glasses must have been lost somewhere in the night.
The fire was still burning, although considerably weaker. It probably needed more wood to feed it, and there wasn’t likely anything else in the millhouse he could scavenge. He’d look, but that required his glasses to see and his joints to cooperate.
He shifted closer to the lamp, discovering that any subtle shift of his neck caused pain to knife through his skull. He grimaced, reaching out blindly to see if he could locate where his glasses had clattered off to.
Instead of hitting his glasses, his hand thumped against the lamp, causing it to wobble on its side for a moment. Thankfully, it didn’t fall over, but it did jostle Olruggio. The flame bounced around the glass bonelessly for a moment before catching himself with a grunt. “What in the hell,” he murmured sleepily.
“Sorry, sorry.” Qifrey said quickly, putting his hand on the very top of the lamp to ensure the wobbling stopped. “I was looking for my glasses.”
Olruggio simply groaned as he stood within his glass container, rubbing at his neck and stretching his back. He began looking around the room from the very small vantage point he had. The room was fairly dark, the snowstorm blustering outside and blocking out the sunlight. The fire was too weak to do much of anything except cast long, eerie shadows against the wall.
“Well, they didn’t get up and walk away. With all that tossing and turning you did throughout the night, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in another room.” Olruggio teased, then turned to really look at Qifrey. “You look terrible, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Qifrey deadpanned back at him, forcing himself upright despite the vertigo it caused. “Looks are fairly low on my priority list right now.”
Olruggio nodded. “Right. Food should be fairly high up there. When did you last eat?”
Qifrey realized he had no idea how to answer. He hadn’t eaten at all in his memory, which meant it might have been a matter of just yesterday, or multiple days. It may be contributing to the weakness he felt throughout his whole body.
Olruggio sat in the quiet with him for a moment, before sighing, “I mean, someone lived here at one point, yeah?” He waved an arm about to gesture to the abandoned furniture and cushions. “Maybe there’s something preserved. Like a wine cellar or larder. Did you see anything in the cabinets you destroyed yesterday?”
Qifrey shook his head, “I can’t recall that I did, but I wasn’t thinking of food. More so warmth.”
“Well, go check now! And try not to trip again. You’re so skinny; your body can’t possibly take much more abuse before a bone shatters.” Olruggio snickered.
“Thank you for your concern, dear friend,” the endearment slipped out sarcastically. Qifrey grunted as he stood, wincing as his back and twisted ankle protested the movement. “I assure you that I'm not made of glass.”
“I was thinking more like porcelain.” Olruggio returned. He was leaning against his glass, a mien of indifference, “Your skin looks as though you’ve never seen sunlight before. You’re bone pale.”
Qifrey smirked at him, “Did you spend a lot of time looking at me last night, Olruggio?”
Finally, Qifrey seemed to catch the flame of guard. It sputtered as Olruggio stuttered, “o-of course I didn’t! You’d have to be blind not to notice. Why, I barely saw you coming towards me yesterday, since you’re the same color as the damned snow. And! If I was staring at you, it was because I had to make sure you were still alive.” The fire in the lantern was nearly licking the metal top, and Qifrey reminded himself to wait a bit before touching it.
“Of course.” Qifrey responded, quietly smug. The fire dimmed some, but in a way that almost seemed like an embarrassed pout. “Do you happen to see my glasses? I fear I’m essentially useless without them.”
Olruggio grunted, “Yeah, I see them.” He replied smoothly.
“Wonderful.” Qifrey responded, “Care to share where they are?”
Olruggio made a show of thinking, hemming and hawing. Qifrey felt the thread of his patience fraying. Olruggio’s dark ocean blue eyes landed on his face, flickering with mirth, and he paused another moment. “If you take another step to your left, towards the fireplace, you’ll crush them.”
Qifrey jerked his head to the left and looked down. He could see the faint dark smudge that he may have originally mistaken as the wood grain. He bent down, running his fingers along the floor until they bumped into the glasses. Picking them up, he felt along the inside of the metal bridge. The adhesive was considerably less tacky than it was earlier. He pressed it hard against the bridge of his nose.
“Once you get some food in you, we should make our way to the next village.” Olruggio said. “We can ask questions about any strange activity in the area. For you, perhaps robbers that go around knocking people’s skulls together. For me, any witches that might be bitter enough to turn a bloke into fire for any slights.”
Qifrey walked over to the dimming hearth, grabbing his outer layers. Thankfully, the stone had been warm enough to dry the clothes. It helped, since his current inner layers were still slightly damp and cold. He pulled on his skirts, and then fastened the long cloak over top, feeling significantly warmer than he had in recent memory. He picked up the rusted fire poker and shifted the wood around, hoping to coax the hearth back to life.
“I fear we won’t make it very far today. I don’t know how easily you can hear within your lamp, but it looks and sounds quite bad out. We may be trapped here for another day or two.” Qifrey lamented, gently touching the lamp’s top to ensure it wasn’t hot enough to burn. Thankfully, it was only pleasantly warm against his numb fingers.
He lifted up Olruggio’s lamp high enough to where he could look out the cracked window nearby. With glasses on, he could see, not just hear, that the storm was in full force, the snow piling on the window frames outside. The few visible trees were bent from the force of the wind and Olruggio sighed in tandem with them.
“Well, let’s hope they have food in here then.” Olruggio sighed.
Qifrey lowered the lamp and went into the kitchen. The watery light from the large window over the sink illuminated the room, casting it in sad shades of blue. It made the room feel colder than it was the night before. The only point of warmth was Olruggio’s orange glow around Qifrey.
He made his way around the kitchen, holding up Olruggio to get a better vantage point of the counters and shelves. If there had been any food here, it had all been cleaned out by the previous tenants or scavengers. He sighed, feeling his stomach give a disappointed cramp of hunger.
“I suppose we’ll have to find a way into the basement. There may be something down there.” Olruggio stated, and Qifrey nodded in dismayed agreement. He began to make his way through the house carefully, as several boards were rotted out and the last thing Qifrey needed was an infected cut on top of everything else.
The floor groaned beneath each step as he journeyed through hallways and opened doors, none leading to a staircase. Qifrey had a horrible premonition that he would have to go outside to reach any kind of basement, and he was not keen on that. Qifrey tried to keep the niggling anxiety to himself while Olruggio seemed a bit more outwardly frustrated, huffing each time a door opened to a dusty bedroom or linen closet.
They finished searching the millhouse in full, and Qifrey sighed. “I’ll have to go outside to see if there’s a cellar door.”
“The hell you are!” Olruggio scolded, “Your clothes just finally dried. You’ll get hypothermia.”
Qifrey sighed roughly, “I don’t have any other ideas, other than waiting until we can leave to go into town. Even then, I’m not sure how long it’ll be before we can get out, and if we’ll have a way to buy food once we’re there.”
“Just punch through the floor.”
Qifrey startled, “I beg your pardon?”
“Yeah. Just break some of the rotted planks. You could slip through a hole in the floor easily enough to see if there’s anything.” Olruggio nodded sagely, and though Qifrey had not known him long, he was sure this was one of the man's dumber ideas.
Qifrey frowned, holding the lamp up to his face so Olruggio could clearly see his expression, “And how do you propose I get back up? It’s likely damp and colder down there.”
“Hang me down first so you can see how deep it goes. It might be a more shallow crawlspace. If that’s the case, you can lift yourself back up.” Olruggio explained, brows pinching together, “It’s either that, or starve until we can leave. I don’t see any other options.”
The flame had a point, unfortunately. Qifrey gave a theatrical sigh, holding out the lamp again to see where the wood might be most rotted. He saw a dark patch of wood at the end of the hallway closest to the main living space, edges of the wood fraying and lifting from the rest of the planks around it. If he was going to break through anywhere, that would likely be a good starting point.
He made his way over and set Olruggio down in a safe spot. He toed at the weak spot gently to gauge how much give there was. The wood was disconcertingly soft and spongy under his foot, rotted through.
He placed a bit more weight on it, and heard a chilling crack. The wood where his foot had been pressing all but disintegrated with the extra pressure, and Qifrey stepped back to avoid falling down into the darkness with it.
Unfortunately, as his foot stepped back hard, more of the rotted wood decided to give way under him. He could barely get a gasp out before he was tumbling down into the darkness himself. His back hit hard against a wooden support beam, wrenching the breath from his body even before he made contact heavily with the ground.
“Qifrey!” He heard Olruggio shout, voice breaking with fear, and it was an oddly, uncomfortably familiar sound.