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Beau is busy beating a faceless noble to a pulp when Caleb arrives.
She grunts a greeting, not bothering to look up from her work or its shifting robes, and plants her feet more solidly as she goes in for an offhand strike. It connects just in time for her to sneer her satisfaction, and she winds up quickly to land another hit, and then a resounding kick to the sternum. Hands wrapped, posture lithe, she looks unburdened to the untrained eye.
But Caleb knows her now. Despite all odds, they’ve become something like friends, and there’s a reason he walked to her, even if she does look a bit different here. It’s the outfit, Caleb thinks—where she usually wears a practical set of blue and brown robes, she’s now wearing more traditional garb, a demure dress fit for the daughter of a wealthy tradesman. It doesn’t suit her, but he won’t say that. He likes having all of his teeth.
He is content to just watch, awed that he even got this to work in the first place; Beauregard and her keen eyes, however, have other plans.
“Hey, creepy, the fuck are you doing over there?”
Caleb freezes.
He’s saved from answering by Beau’s slow smile, the meanness at its edges, how sometimes it seems like she talks just to hear herself laugh after. Caleb doesn’t know if this is a truer version of her than the one he interacts with in their waking moments, or simply a Beau he’s manipulated to be easier to recognize. “Gonna stand there all day?”
Around them, the scene begins to shift, Caleb willing forward a more utilitarian space. The designs on the pillars dissipate into the air. The pattern of the marble flooring settles into the earth, leaving only hard-packed dirt. This… this is how Caleb learned to fight. Not in a palace, but on the grounds of the Academy.
The temperature drops as Caleb remembers, clouds expanding to dim the meager sunlight coming in through the window of this room. Despite himself, Caleb shivers.
“Is this where you grew up?” he asks, because the environment may be simpler but it’s still unmistakably the inside of a grand house. “It’s…cold.”
“It’s the fucking Empire, of course it’s cold.”
“You know what I meant.”
Beau rolls her eyes. “I know, I know. ‘Poor little rich girl,’ right? Whatever. We all have fucked-up pasts.”
This is not going how Caleb planned, though admittedly he did very little planning beyond setting up the ritual spell in the dead of night and then going through with it. His mind is reeling at the possibilities, the implications. He’s here. He didn’t think he would make it quite so soon.
He lets the silence wear on for a moment, dissolving the previous conversation, and then starts a new one. “You train when you are awake, you train while sleeping—do you ever rest?” It was meant to be a jibe, started out light enough in tone to be one, but the delivery falters, leaves it sounding rather earnest instead.
Beau’s smile returns, quicker now. “I could take a break, sure. You wanna tag me out?”
“In fighting?”
“Sure!” Beau looks like she is having a fantastic time watching Caleb squirm.
“I don’t know if that is a good idea.”
“What, are you scared?” she goads. “They’re not real. Come on, show me what you’ve got.”
Another faceless noble appears, this time in front of Caleb, and Beau gestures for him to go ahead.
“You want me to hit it?” he asks, glancing at his hands, soft now from so much time keeping to books and classrooms.
Beau grins, rolling out her shoulders like they’re sore. “I know you’re not much of a hand-to-hand kind of guy, but I’m sure they taught you something at that fancy school. Just— okay, okay, hold on,” she says, interrupting herself as he starts squaring up. She begins adjusting his posture, kicking his feet further apart and looking at the set of his shoulders appraisingly before tweaking his stance, one side lower than the other. He forgets, sometimes, that even in her brash youth she shares his respect for precision, perhaps more than anyone else in the group. “Better. I mean, not great, but better.”
Caleb responds by pocketing the sand he’d been holding—the most essential component of the spell now tucked away for safekeeping—and taking a swing. He feels bone crunch, skin break, more a fact of his will than his brute strength. He hits again, and then again, his knuckles growing sore well before his mind tires of the action. There’s no visible indication that the creature in front of him is hurt, but he knows with a particular kind of dream-certainty that he is reducing it to a mess of blood and bone. If he willed it, the creature would break into pieces and sink into the floor, but he doesn’t want to stop. He wants to keep hitting, and he wants to find absolution, and he wants to bleed until he feels he has earned a moment of respite; he wants, and wants, and his chest hurts, and his hands hurt, and—
The figure dissolves like a mirage, and then Caleb is not hitting anything at all. He whirls around, fists still raised, to see Beau watching him with her arms folded. Her grin has faded into contemplation
“Time out.” She pauses and looks him over. “These could use some work,” she says, gesturing at his thin arms, “but overall you’re at a six out of ten. Seven, maybe. C’mere, let me see your hands.”
They’d been unmarked, but as soon as he holds them out, the bruising and split of his knuckles become apparent, vivid against his pale skin. Beau’s tanner, comparatively nimbler hands turn his over for examination.
“Nice,” she says, and then a bit of salve appears. She squints her eyes as she applies it to his wounds, unperturbed when he winces at the sting, and proceeds to wrap them in bandages she procures from thin air. “That wasn’t completely pathetic, Widogast.”
Caleb is too tired to sneer, so he sits down. Widogast is a good name, but it is not his; Caleb Widogast does not fight with his hands unless he is using them to cast a spell. “It has been a while,” he allows.
“Seems like.” She sits down next to him, and the wall moves forward to meet their backs. They lean against it, and then against each other, shoulders a solid point of contact. Caleb had not taken Beau for the cuddly type, but she appears unbothered by the closeness as she slings an arm companionably around his neck. “Hey,” she says, then pauses, waiting for a response.
He lets himself be pulled closer to her. “Yes?”
“Do me a favor and stop nearly dying every time we get into a fucking fight. Stay behind me or something, all right?”
Caleb shuts his eyes and decides, in a moment of weakness, to let her look after him, if only in this dream. At the very least, she will not him pity him for it, now or later. He trusts her enough to know that much. “Okay.”
She makes a small, approving sound, and they stay there for a while. The wall behind them never changes, but the space in front of them does. It turns into a breezy meadow, then a rowdy bar, then a peaceful mountaintop. For a heartbeat, Caleb thinks he sees his childhood bedroom, but it flickers too fast to be sure. The only constant is Beau’s shoulder, bony yet comfortable, beneath his resting temple. He can hear his own heartbeat, imagines he can feel her pulse, too.
Empire kids holding onto a dream: it’s the same song he’s known his whole life, just a different melody.
Caleb tips open the pocket of his ratty coat, lets the sand trickle out slowly. “It was good to talk to you,” he says, feeling almost helpless with how much he means it.
The dream fades just as Beau chuckles, low, and the sound stays with him as he wakes up in his room in the Leaky Tap, Nott still sleeping in the opposite bed. In the bleary morning light, Caleb feels exhausted but less heavy. Not by much, of course, but enough that it has him blinking at the ceiling, eyelids tired, one hand lax over the side of the bed with the sand that had anchored the spell poured out onto the floor beneath it.
“Okay,” he says, very, very quietly, and hates himself a little for how quickly he starts planning to try this again.
/
The inside of Jester’s head is a study in migraine-inducing technicolor. Caleb expected nothing less of her, and the fact that he’s sitting on a cloud watching her paint on the air with her fingertips is a reassuring kind of familiar.
“You have to draw fast,” she is telling him, nose scrunched up in concentration as she adds a pair of sunglasses to her dick-man, “or else you’ll overthink it and it looks like shit. You know?”
Caleb nods, though he’s not sure he does know. He has little personal experience when it comes to creating for pleasure, or even just for the sake of creating. Jester has been drawing for the better part of...an hour? Two? It’s hard to tell in the dreamscape, but it has been a long enough time that, were this reality, Caleb thinks his legs would have long since cramped up from the way he’s sitting. “Sure,” he says after a beat, choosing to humor her. She keeps trying to convince him to try his own hand at it, and he's found the easiest way to avoid that is to agree with whatever else she says.
She puts the finishing touches on the piece (it’s just glitter—lots and lots of glitter) and waves it off to go float near the others.
Caleb thinks she’ll start a new one, but she doesn’t. Instead, she takes her time glancing over the drawings she completed in his company, which range from caricatures of the Mighty Nein to a veritable small army of dick-men in different outfits to a squadron of unicorns for them to ride. It is, admittedly, an impressive show of imagination, and Caleb feels his posture soften.
In his own dreams, his back is usually ramrod straight the way it was in his youth. In his waking hours, his beggar’s hunch is practiced, intentional. Whatever he’s doing now, all neutral spine and open hands, is something different altogether.
“Jester,” he hears himself say.
She blinks at him, guileless. “Yes, Caleb?”
His mind jumps back to the bar after their return to Zadash, battered and bruised from the final fight with the Iron Shepherds. How Jester was dancing to silence with her eyes closed, face tipped up toward the ceiling like she was trying to catch the light, like it would change anything if she could.
And then a different night in a different town, where Jester led him in a waltz and then tucked him into bed after he spilled his trauma onto her neat dress. How she tugged him upstairs and pushed his hair back from his forehead tenderly, like he was worth caring for, like she didn’t mind watching over him even when he called her by the wrong name. He’d woken up the next morning with a pounding headache and a lingering sense of shame, the usual but amplified into something with sharp edges.
She told him not to worry about it when he apologized. Of course she did. She is better than the lot of them combined. She could be doing anything else, with much kinder people, and yet she chooses to stay with the Nein.
Caleb swallows, throat tight, and tries to understand. “Why do you travel with us?”
“I like you guys,” says Jester quickly, but there’s a clip to her voice.
She’s hiding something, Caleb thinks again, just as decisively as he did the first time. “You can be our friend without risking your life.”
When Jester speaks again, it’s far quieter. “But I can’t keep you safe if I’m not there. Even though I’m technically the best healer in the world, probably, I have to go with you to heal you.”
Her usual cadence is flatter, sadder, and Caleb can’t even feel vindicated that he was right about her sorrow. “We are responsible for ourselves,” he tells her.
“I guess.” The clouds they’re on begin to move, descending downward through the gauzy air. “Still, though. When someone dies, people usually wonder where the cleric was. Usually.” Her hair flops over when she turns to look at her feet, obscuring her eyes from his view.
“We knew where you were,” says Caleb, trying to gentle it. “You did the best you could. We were just happy to find you three alive.”
Jester sniffles. “Thanks, dream Caleb,” she says, voice wet and a bit miserable. “I just don’t like to talk about this stuff, because it makes other people sad, and I don’t want anyone else to be sad.” Here, in her dream, she likely doesn’t feel the same pressure to keep up appearances, and her broken honesty makes Caleb feel a pang of guilt at intruding.
“Of course.”
“I really do like you guys,” Jester offers. “Aside from you all, the only person I have is my mom. And she’s great! She’s the best. But I had to leave, and I miss her a lot, so it’s nice to have another family around. I want to protect you guys. That’s all.”
“I understand,” Caleb says around the hot lump in his throat. “We don't have to talk about it anymore.”
Jester nods tearfully, wiping at her face. “Okay. Do you want to talk about anything? I know you get sad a lot. Like, your face does this thing—” she pauses to exaggerate a mopey frown that Caleb is fairly certain has never been on his face before— “and I can tell you’re thinking about something sad.”
“It’s nothing,” says Caleb, but Jester keeps looking at him balefully, and she won’t know that any of this actually happened when she wakes up. It’s not fair, and it’s not a particularly nice thing to do, but Caleb has not, historically, been either of those things to anyone. He clears his throat and—
—thinks of weak morning sunlight bathing the tall grass of his hometown, the sound of his own heartbeat loud in his ears, how Rexxentrum began to feel like home not because of its sweetness nor its understanding, but because it was there that Caleb first learned to bend things to his will. He never wants to do that again, except for how it’s the only thing he wants in the entire world.
“I hurt people,” he says, and it makes him feel small to say it. “A lot of people. And I didn’t care about most of them. I only panicked at the very end, when it was personal.”
“Oh,” says Jester quietly, face strangely inscrutable. “We guessed that you hurt people already, I think.” She looks at him closely, leaning forward as she does, and Caleb resists the urge to shy away.
Let her see him. Let her finally label him a monster the way she should have long ago.
But her expression does not harden. She comes closer, closer still, and he does not fight it when she laces her fingers with his.
“You seem very guilty for someone who doesn’t care,” she says.
“I have a lot of atoning to do.”
“Do you ever think about other stuff?”
Caleb blinks. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” says Jester, drawing out the word, “I think about my mom a lot, but I also like to draw, and talk to the Traveler, and go shopping, and lots of stuff. But when you look sad, it’s always the same kind of sad.”
It would be so easy to leave. The sand he brought for the spell is rough against the palm of his hand, this time gathered from a riverbed that was only “nearby” by the loosest definition of the word. The trip took hours, and he did not tell anyone where he was going. The sun was hot, the mud near the water thick. He’ll need new boots soon.
Caleb stays, sighs. “What I did cannot be forgiven so easily.”
“I mean, it sounds like you are the only one—”
“Jester,” he interrupts desperately, “would you teach me how to draw?” and instead he means, I cannot think about forgiveness without first making reparations, it makes the bottom of my stomach drop out. There is only so much falling I can do before I hit the ground.
Jester, predictably, lights up like a solstice festival. The topic of guilt is forgotten.
An array of luxurious paints appears before the two of them. Jester releases his hand and, with both of her own, effusively demonstrates the proper way to tell a story.
This time, the dream ends on its own. After what feels like hours, Jester wakes up, and the air around them both goes shimmery like harp-song before Caleb is thrust back into his own mind.
The Leaky Tap is still a bit shabby, and looks even duller than usual compared to the cotton candy sunset of Jester’s dreamscape. He misses it immediately, and looks down at his hands, disappointed when they’re clean, empty. He’s not sure what he was looking for. A splatter of paint? A wisp of a cloud?
None of it is real. Not a single bit.
He swallows his sadness and goes down to an early breakfast with a light scowl on his face. When Jester tries to meet his eyes, Caleb looks away, tries not to feel guilty at the hurt in her expression and fails at that like he does everything else.
/
“Oh, you’re here. That’s great, that’s really neat. I haven’t had a friend visit me here in a very long time. Would you mind helping me with this?”
Caduceus is holding out a spade caked with dirt. His eyes are half-shut but still expectant, mouth curled into what Caleb has quickly come to think of as his trademark lazy smirk. They are in a garden. Caleb is wearing denim, a fabric he’s only ever read about before, and a wide-brimmed hat to match Caduceus’.
He takes the spade, heart lurching. “Um, okay. I have not done this before.”
“What, gardened? Everyone’s gardened.”
“I haven’t.”
“Sure you have,” says Caduceus, with all the confidence in the world. “It’s just about making things grow.”
The earth around them is damp, rich. The sunlight is an oppressive brand on the back of Caleb’s neck. The space is too open, too flat. Caleb does not enjoy being seen, but the only person within view is Caduceus, and the firbolg has leaned down to begin digging unselfconsciously into the soft dirt beneath their feet, not even glancing in Caleb’s direction.
Caleb laughs. It’s a small, bitter thing. “I’m not very good at that.”
Caduceus just hums like he’s not convinced and continues to poke at the earth. Caleb kneels beside him with no small amount of hesitance; he hadn’t been lying about not having done this before. The closest he’d come was when he used to tend the horses as a very young boy, before Soltryce and the promise that he’d “make something” of himself. He tries to mirror Caduceus as best he can, but the other man moves with an unnatural kind of grace, like he’s gliding through air. Caleb can’t remember if that’s true of reality, too, or if it’s just the dream distorting things.
He doesn’t know why he came here tonight.
Where Jester’s earnest questions nearly tugged Caleb out of himself, maybe he’d thought Caduceus’ easy disposition would avert the attention from Caleb and onto something else. He wasn’t wrong about that, but he was wrong about it being easier to bear.
Now, with a spade in his hands and the knees of his trousers dirtied with soil, Caleb cannot stop looking at himself. At his soft hands, his skinny thighs, his freckled forearms. The dream had not been kind enough to change anything about him. It is, he supposes, the nature of the spell to present him exactly as he is.
A nature that Caduceus, with his strange way of seeing things, seems to catch onto rather quickly. “You look a little too right, Mr. Caleb.”
And there he goes again with the name-calling, a ghost of Molly in all the wrong, impossible ways.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Caduceus just frowns, waving a hand around vaguely in Caleb’s direction. “You make too much sense. It’s not the way it should be.”
At this point, though still half-perplexed, Caleb begins to sweat. “I thought you were going to teach me how to garden,” he deflects.
It works, maybe. Caduceus, at least, stops looking at him with that squinty, suspicious expression. Beneath the wide brim of his hat, his face is hard to read now. “I certainly could. Are you amenable to learning?”
“Yes,” says Caleb, because the alternative would be to loose the sand onto the ground and wake up back in the Leaky Tap again, and he doesn’t think he’d be able to get back to sleep if he did that. Last time, he nearly woke Nott with all of his tossing and turning at the break of day, and that is a conversation he wants to postpone for as long as possible. He loves Nott, or at least he’s fairly sure he does, and that is terrifying in and of itself. Nothing good ever happens to the people he loves.
“Well, all right,” answers Caduceus. He is a patient man, slow in speech and sharp in understanding. “What you need to know is that there’s no formula. No studying. It’s something you feel.”
“Something you feel,” echoes Caleb, not quite with him.
Caduceus nods, smiles a little. “Yeah. You seem—I hope I’m not offending you—mostly book smart. This is something else. It comes from inside you.”
Caleb nods like he has any idea what Caduceus is talking about.
“Right,” Caduceus continues, “so each plant is different. We’re planting winterflowers today. They bloom when it’s cold enough for frost to gather on flat surfaces, because nothing else can grow then, which gives them space to crawl up through the cold. But not every winterflower blooms at the same time, and not every winterflower needs the same amount of water or sunlight. You have to watch them and get a knack for it.”
“A knack.”
“Yeah. I like the way you say that, it’s nicer in your accent.”
“Thank you?”
Caduceus inclines his head genially. “You’re welcome. Now, we’ll start by preparing the earth. I prefer to do this near a body—cycle of life, you understand—but this’ll do.” He looks around again, still kneeling, and filters some dirt through his thick fingers before smiling again. “Yes, this’ll do just fine.”
Caleb stays kneeling as well, and braces himself on one hand. It sinks down a few inches, soil crawling up his wrist, and he lets it. Doesn’t move or course correct.
“When you’re preparing the earth, you’ll want to thank the Wild Mother for the gift of growth, and acknowledge that whatever you plant will someday die. It’s a big responsibility.” Caduceus shuts his eyes and tips his face down, toward the earth, lips moving silently as he speaks a prayer.
Clumsily, Caleb tries to follow, though he keeps his own eyes open. Something could approach, could attack them—never mind that he’s largely in control of what happens here. Caduceus may be setting the scene, but Caleb will not yield the reins here. He has no use for faith, blind or otherwise.
He does, however, feel a certain kinship with the firbolg kneeling across from him. It is a big responsibility, he agrees, to create something you know will die. It is also a necessary evil to cultivate something that, despite being good in the moment, will only end in sorrow. It is sacrifice and suffering, martyrdom and murder. These are things Caleb knows.
“And then,” says Caduceus, moving the spade in zig-zagging motions, “you follow your instincts, and do what you need to prepare for the seeds to go in.” He continues with the spade for only a moment more before tossing it to the side in favor of the packet of seeds in his shirt pocket. This must be a ritual he’s completed dozens of times, considering how easily the motions come.
A toss, and seeds spray across the ground.
A quiet moment, and Caduceus buries each of them with his fingertips, careful and gentle the way Caleb fears he has forgotten how to be.
He clears his throat awkwardly. “How can you be sure they are the right depth?”
Caduceus chuckles, still burying seeds. “You have to trust it. And if you get it wrong, that’s all right. The rain will either bring them to the surface or wash them away.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“To you, maybe.”
Caleb huffs, a little juvenile, and presses the seeds into the earth with the pads of his fingers, hyper-conscious of his movements. The sun is still far too hot, but Caduceus, even with his fur, barely seems to notice.
Caleb knows patience, knows picking something apart until you finally, finally understand how it works, but he does not understand this.
Like he senses it, Caduceus leans over to where Caleb is working and catches his hand, stilling it where he’s been pressing down into the ground with a too-intense fervor. “You’re upset.”
“That is not the word I would use.”
“You’re rushing it, then. Slow down. It’s okay.”
Caleb shuts his eyes against both the sun and the way Caduceus’ voice has gentled, like he can read the self-loathing directly from the lines of Caleb’s face, his hands, how he holds his body like a ticking bomb that he’s terrified will go off again. “There’s no time,” he murmurs, so low he’s not sure Caduceus can hear.
Again, however, the firbolg proves to be more perceptive than most. “It’s a dream, Caleb. It’s all right.”
It’s like there was a wire holding Caleb’s chest together, and it has snapped—a sharp pain, and then a gaping sense of loss. “It’s not.”
Caduceus releases Caleb’s hands, guides him back to planting seeds. “Sure it is.”
Caleb’s movements are slow, unsure. He does not make things grow. He does not create for the sake of creating. He is not like these people with which he has surrounded himself, and each time he realizes it is another bitter reminder that he deserves none of the things he has, least of all another family after what he did to the first one.
His parents were good people, and he cannot undo what he has done. All of this dreamwalking has been playing pretend, wishing for something he cannot allow himself to have.
“I am sorry,” he says, and he means for taking up Caduceus’ time, for infringing upon this peaceful scene with his ugly trauma.
“It’s all right,” answers Caduceus, and Caleb doesn’t know what he means by that at all.
He is still holding the sand in his free fist. He could let go, move on.
He doesn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he doesn’t know what he wants, but he wants something, and he’s beginning to fear he’ll never get it. The nape of his neck is sweaty, and would likely be starting to burn if this were real, which it’s not.
Caduceus fixes him with a look that makes Caleb feel like he’s made of cheap glass, fragile and transparent and warped in places. “You didn’t have to come all the way here to apologize, you know.”
“Of course,” says Caleb. He feels cold, stomach dropping. A kid caught stealing from a cookie jar, a kid caught shirking his reading. He knows what comes next.
But Caduceus does not puff up with rage. He does not snap at Caleb, words acerbic and biting, nor does he lock Caleb in a closet and leave him there, feigning apology when Caleb finally crawls his way out two days later.
Instead, he smiles again, that molasses smile where he looks amused more than anything else. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
“You shouldn’t be so nice to me,” warns Caleb.
“You shouldn’t be so obviously hurting, then.” Caduceus says it like he’s commenting on the weather, an undeniable fact of the matter that leaves Caleb reeling.
Of course he is hurting. He has been for half his life, maybe more, and to say otherwise would be foolish. But to have that turned on him as a reason for kindness has him standing up, using his open hand to brush the dirt from his strange attire. “I have to go,” he says, and his voice cracks on the last word.
Caduceus nods. “Go on, then. It was lovely gardening with you.”
“That was not gardening, and you have only known me for a few weeks,” protests Caleb, like a strange, desperate plea.
“Sure, sure,” says Caduceus, but he doesn’t say anything else.
Caleb looks down one more time at the messy rows where he’d tried to plant winterflowers. This is a dream, but he still knows with a terrible certainty that nothing he planted will bloom. Caduceus, with his abundant lichens and divine connection, can trust that sometimes imperfect things turn out okay in the end, even beautiful.
Caleb cannot.
He lets the sand trickle from his hand, slowly this time. “I will see you soon, then, friend.”
“Oh, are we friends? That’s great. I love that.”
“Um,” says Caleb, trying to find a way to say that the word just slipped from his mouth, that he was thinking of Molly and his endearments and his bullheaded certainty that everything would be worth it if he could just love being alive enough, and then—
He wakes up in his bed again. He shivers, though it’s not that cold, and pulls his coat tighter around him.
It’s strange to be back to wearing his regular trousers, and to be hatless, but he settles back into reality quickly enough. The clock in the hall seems louder tonight, or maybe that’s just Caleb’s sadness. In the milky twilight, it’s hard to tell.
/
The next attempt is an exercise in shame.
Caleb knew from the start it would be folly, but it didn’t stop him from walking back to the riverbed and scooping sand into his soft palms. It was cool by the water, and devoid of other people despite the lovely, balmy weather. Caleb had shut his eyes as he gathered the necessary materials, as if in prayer. But he didn’t say anything to anyone. He just took the sand and walked back to Zadash.
“You’ve been gone for a long time,” says Nott when he returns, big yellow eyes pinning him to the spot.
Caleb shrugs his shoulders uncomfortably. “I am just trying to further my studies.”
She keeps looking at him, and he feels more than sees her cataloguing his dirty boots, wind-mussed hair, sweaty hairline. He must be visibly tired from the trek, which had taken the better part of the day. There is no good way to explain it, and so he doesn’t try.
Caleb has, recently, made it a point to only overshare when he was certain the incentive was worth the price. Nott, who has already seen so many of his ugly secrets, does not need him to further tarnish his image to her.
“Are you coming to dinner?” is all she asks in the end.
“I don’t think so,” responds Caleb. He feels tired, sallow, like the disgraced orphan he knows himself to be, and he doesn't feel up to facing that this evening. These friends of his are nosey, especially when they haven’t seen him much over the span of a few days, and he does not want to spend too much energy trying to defend himself against something that is true.
Nott pauses a moment longer before nodding and ducking past where he stands in the doorway, darting downstairs like a whisper. He feels a prick of guilt at likening her to a shadow when he already has so many ghosts hanging over his shoulders.
Never mind, though. Never mind. The sand in his pocket feels heavy, and he doesn’t want to wait to try this. With the others, he’d needed a reasonable amount of certainty that they were sleeping for it to work, but for this attempt, he has no way of knowing what time will be right, or if there is a right time at all.
He sis down on his bed and murmurs a few words, the sand cupped between his two upturned palms. Like always, the tug of magic is a heady, terrifying thing.
Asleep, he thinks, with near-feverish intensity, let him be asleep.
The sand begins to twist into a vortex-like spiral, dancing over itself the way it does every time he conducts the spell, but this time he does not shut his eyes. His body does not go lax, and his hands are still hands and not the miracle-makers he had wished for them to be.
Instead of being transported, Caleb feels a splitting pain in his head. The sand scatters to the floor, useless now, and Caleb clutches at his hair, trying to pull the offending sensation right from his system. But he can’t, because he is the cause of this, and it only hurts more as he yanks.
“Caleb? Caleb!”
He turns away from the door, still curled into a ball and waiting for the pain and nausea to pass. “Go,” he manages.
Nott listens to him a lot of the time, but not always. “You need help,” she says shrilly, a grating sound that makes his eyes squeeze shut even tighter. “Jester! Jester, come quickly!”
“No,” mumbles Caleb, but he is still locked up, tense.
A series of footsteps comes thundering up the stairs, and Caleb is still curled on the floor of his room in the Leaky Tap, surrounded by sand and trying not to lean into the touch of a very concerned goblin.
An exercise in shame, he’d thought, and he thinks it again. What did he expect was going to happen? That he’d really find Molly? That he’d get to play hero?
You’re not stupid, Caleb, he hears in a slow, disappointed voice in his head. I don’t know why you like to act like it. Perhaps we should discuss it further downstairs, hm?
“Nein,” mumbles Caleb desperately, muzzily, and he barely hears himself over the whining sound that rings in his ears—except he realizes that that’s him, too. That he’s too overwhelmed by the pain and the memories to get a grip.
“It’s okay, Caleb,” Jester says, drawing him into a seated position. She’s stronger than he is by more than a bit, and anyway he lets himself be pulled. He opens his eyes to the two of them looking alarmed.
Jester examines him for a moment, then turns to Nott. “What happened?”
“I don’t know!” exclaims Nott. “He was fine, and then I came back and it looked like he was dying.”
By this point, the wave of pain has crested and moved on, leaving Caleb sore and achy but no longer incapacitated. “Sorry,” he says, a bit hoarse. “I’m fine.”
He’s met with twin looks of disbelief.
“I mean it,” he insists. “I was trying to do a spell, but it went wrong, and I paid for that. I am fine now. I won’t do it again.” It’s a lie, he thinks as soon as he says it. He may very well try again, if only because it seems fitting that he was struck down the way he was. Before, he was guilty about what he was trying to do. Now, embarrassed and dazed, he knows he got what was coming to him for believing he could use such a rudimentary spell for such an ambitious mission. He wasn’t paying close enough attention to what he was doing, so of course it was a disaster.
If nothing else, Caleb knows the unflinching hammer swing of consequence. Almost, almost finds comfort in its inevitability.
From downstairs, lute music like windsong creeps its way into the room, filling the empty corners with a rhythm that would likely make Jester dance under any other circumstances. As it is, it clashes with the mood in the room, which is raincloud-heavy, cotton-thick.
Jester sighs, blowing some hair from her face. She’s a bit of a mess, likely dragged from a crowd in the tavern by Nott’s insistence. “That was pretty scary, Caleb.”
“It was terrifying!” agrees Nott.
“I’m sorry,” says Caleb again. He does not stand up. Jester helps prop him against the legs of the bed, and when he shifts they all notice the sand scattered on the floor and piled near his right leg.
Nott squints. “Why is there sand everywhere? Is there an ocean nearby?”
Jester shakes her head decisively. “No, but I wish. I miss the sea—it’s very beautiful.”
“Then why—”
“I was experimenting with magic,” says Caleb, and he clips his words, trying to end the conversation right then and there.
Jester is a hard person to deter, however, and she picks up some of the grains curiously, filtering them between her fingers. “How did this get here? Did you make it?”
“No, I didn’t—” Caleb sighs— “I have spell components that I carry with me that are from different places. Like the silver thread, ja?” He waits for her to nod before continuing. “Jester, listen, it was a mistake.” Would you leave? he thinks but doesn’t say, because it’s hard for him to bring himself to ask anyone to leave these days. He’s stuck with them long enough. Surely they’d see right through him.
“Okay,” answers Jester dubiously.
Nott looks less convinced, but more likely to keep quiet about it. “Caleb looks exhausted. He needs to rest.” She barely looks at him as she tugs at Jester’s sleeve, pulling her toward the door.
“Are you sure?” Jester asks over her shoulder.
Caleb nods. “Go ahead. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night then!” Jester lets herself be tugged, and then Caleb is alone in the room again.
He still has the remnants of a migraine sitting heavy behind his eyes, and the back of his skull feels tender when he lifts his fingers to prod at it. He shouldn’t have done this, shouldn’t have tried. Everyone seems to have been moving on, and Caleb went and satisfied some terrible curiosity for what? To frighten Nott and Jester? To prove something? He shouldn’t have bothered. He knew it wasn’t going to work.
Then again, Caleb has never known how to let dead things rest.
/
It takes nearly a month for Caleb to cast the Dream spell again. There are many reasons, most of them tied up with his exhaustion and guilt, and they have visited and left the Menagerie Coast by the time he pulls out the sand he’d stashed in his bag, fresh from the beach, and sits down in the dead of night to perform the incantation.
He keeps it quiet, more cautious now than he had been before, because the target of the spell is lying down not five feet from him, curled up into a tiny ball of sleeping goblin.
When he blinks his eyes open, he finds he’s underground. The smell of damp earth permeates the air, and he shivers in his coat.
Across from him stands a halfling girl with deeply familiar yellow eyes.
“Caleb,” she says, “what are we looking for?”
Caleb takes a moment to examine at the space around them. Down either end of the tunnel, things start to go fuzzy, but where they’re standing now is a hollowed out cavern, clean despite its dirt floor and ceiling, with a mounted torch and a neat desk pressed up against the wall opposite them. “You’re doing detective work? Don’t you usually do that with Jester?”
The girl—Nott, Caleb reminds himself, even though she looks different—nods distractedly, pushing hair out of her face. “Yes, but I can’t just wait around for her. There’s too much to do. And you have such a sharp mind, you’re brilliant! I’m sure we can figure it out.”
He walks over to the desk and looks at the scrolls lined up in a neat row at the back.
The first is about the ocean, shipwrecks, sailing. It lists different kinds of knots in two columns, each with illustrations. For Fjord, Caleb thinks. He doesn’t know what exactly she’s trying to learn, dreaming up things like this, but it’s sweet all the same. The second is on the Cobalt Reserve, though it’s mostly blank, and the bottom of that one has some scribbles about wine that Caleb doesn’t bother looking at too closely. It goes on like that, scrolls on the circus and prostitution, fungus and slavers, until he comes across one that stops him in his tracks.
He feels numb as he reads the name scrawled along the top. Astrid. The scroll itself is sparse, but it contains nearly every detail Caleb has ever dropped about her, intentionally or otherwise. He hadn’t thought Nott was paying such close attention. Foolish of him.
He just stares at it for a moment, tracing the shape of the letters of the name with his eyes, and then he puts it down and looks at her.
In this form, her hair is chestnut-brown, straight down to her collarbone. She has a sweet face, tanner than his but not as tan as Beau, a straight nose, and a small mouth now pursed in concern.
He takes a breath. There are a lot of things he could do now. He could drop the sand and leave, or he could shout at Nott for putting them all in danger. If it came down to a fight, Astrid would not leave any of them alive. She was never soft like Caleb was. Is.
“You are the best friend I have ever had,” he says instead, and means it.
Nott’s brows raise in surprise. “Oh! Well same to you, of course. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without you.”
“You would,” he says, because he knows it’s true. “Anyway, that is beside the point. I just wanted you to know. You’re good with...vocalizing these things. I am not.”
“Right.” Nott nods to herself once, decisively. “So where do we start? What are we looking for?”
Caleb conjures chairs for them to sit in, watches as Nott watches him. She does not seem surprised or perturbed by this display of power. He assumes that, in her head, he does far grander things on a regular basis. “How about you?”
“Me?”
“Ja.”
“What do you mean, me?”
Caleb looks at the scrolls, all of them dedicated to other people, and twists a hand to create a new one, blank. “I know a lot about you,” he says, “but not everything. I’d like to know more.”
Nott looks down, her straight hair forming a curtain over her face, and she seems to transform before his eyes. Her posture goes hunched, hands curling. As he watches, she sprouts claws, then forces them back down until her nails are blunt again. “I don’t like talking about me.”
“Okay,” says Caleb. He understands.
She seems to hear it in his voice, because parts of her begin to slowly relax.
A while ago, she had asked if he loved their friends, and he had not been able to answer her then. He is not sure he can answer her now, either, since there is perpetually something in his throat blocking the way. There are so many things he would say if he were less burdened, but there’s no room for that. Not here, not anywhere.
“I used to run away a lot as a child,” says Nott after a pause, proving once again that she is far braver than he is. “I thought it was proof that I wasn’t— that I’m not—”
Caleb blinks and then he is looking at Nott as he knows her, green-skinned, sharp-toothed. Her eyes are exactly the same.
She swallows before continuing. “I didn’t want to be what I am, so I would make up stories about how I’d been kidnapped, and I had to get back to my real family so they could break the curse. I thought it made me some kind of hero. And then I began aiding torturers, and I gave up on that pretty quickly.”
“Nott,” says Caleb, because he can’t say nothing, but she presses on.
“I can’t lose our friends, Caleb. What we’ve built here is better than anything I have ever had. I’ll protect that with my life if I have to.” Above all odds, Nott has loyalty written in the very marrow of her bones. It straightens the length of her spine. Her defiance against any and all perceived threats is a miracle considering the upbringing she had, but she wears it so proudly. “We need each other. And I need you to believe that, because I’ll choose you if I have to, but I don’t want to lose them.”
It’s tearing her apart, he realizes with a terrible jolt. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see it sooner, too selfishly wrapped up in his own plans. Gods, but he is a terrible person.
He comes closer, kneels down so he can press their foreheads together. “I won’t leave you,” he promises, though it’s not a promise he’s sure he can keep. “And if you don’t leave them, then neither will I.”
If she doesn’t trust him, she doesn’t let on. Instead, she sighs in relief and curls a hand into the fabric of his coat like she’s using him as an anchor. “Thank you, Caleb.”
He doesn’t say anything. There’s a bitterness at the back of his tongue, and the landscape begins to warp, cracks in the ceiling letting in sunlight. They must not have been very far underground, and Nott doesn’t react at all, leaving Caleb to squint up and try to figure this out. The new cavern is narrower and bumpier than the first, less like an invention of an active imagination and more like a real place. Have they been here before? He doesn’t immediately recognize it, but he doesn’t understand why it pings something in his head until—
“This is where I decided that, you know.”
He tilts his head. “Decided what?”
Nott lets go, leans back. “That I wanted to stay with everyone. When Molly chastised you for stealing gold, and he told you to be smart about it...I decided then that this group wasn’t as selfish as I thought. He was looking out for you, in his own way, and I know what that’s like.”
“What that’s like? You mean being smart about stealing?”
Nott laughs, and it’s a rare enough sight that Caleb pauses and just watches her, watches the way her eyes squint, relaxing from their usual bug-eyed position, and how her rail-thin shoulders shake with it. “That too. I meant looking out for you. Wanting to look out for you.”
“Oh,” says Caleb.
“Yeah. Though I’m not that good at it yet, I don’t think.”
“You’re very good at it,” retorts Caleb. “I’m safer in this group, and I’m here because of you, mostly. I wouldn’t have stayed past the second night if you weren’t here.”
“I’ve seen you get knocked unconscious so many times, though…”
Admittedly, Caleb is not fond of being knocked out, but it’s an occupational hazard. “It’s all right, and it’s not your fault.”
Nott’s eyes abruptly shine with tears, and Caleb freezes. No sudden moves, he thinks nonsensically, frightened to set her off. She seems to run on such an even keel, if a very anxious one, and seeing her like this is not something he’s used to. The last time he saw this expression on her face was when she learned about what Caleb did to his family, and even then there had been a protective cant to her countenance, like she was ready to fight the entire Empire for him. Like he was the victim in the story, and she would do anything to save him.
Now, she looks fragile. “We’re both getting stronger,” she says, voice wavering. “It won’t be like this forever.”
It might, thinks Caleb privately, but there’s no use upsetting her more. He shifts the dreamscape again, bringing the two of them above ground to a meadow he is surely misremembering from his childhood, flowers swaying gently in the breeze around them. It’s not dissimilar to the spot where Caduceus taught him to garden, though this area is a bit yellower, drier. “We are stronger,” he agrees. “But even if it is still hard, it’s all right. I trust you.”
This time, tears do spill from Nott’s eyes, but her face doesn’t crumple. She just swipes impatiently at her cheeks and sits cross-legged on the ground. “Good.”
“Good,” he agrees, though he cannot match the vehemence of her tone.
Nott begins picking flowers absentmindedly. She still looks like herself, like a goblin with a lighthouse gaze, but she is calmer here.
He is grateful to be able to give her that.
He stays for maybe an hour more of dream-time as she teaches him to braid flower crowns, something she’d apparently picked up from Jester and Yasha on a late-night watch a while back, and the two of them are clumsy but end up with presentable tiaras of multi-colored wildflowers. Nott’s is crooked on her head, and Caleb doesn’t fix it because he finds it endearing.
He wakes up without broken glass in his chest for the first time in a very long time. In the other bed, Nott is asleep, a gentle curve to her lips that almost looks like a smile.
He thinks, briefly, to join her, to curl behind her like a comma, but he decides against it. Stays in his own bed and drifts back to sleep into dreams of his own.
/
It starts because he wants to check if she is all right. Just a moment, in and out with no harm done. It’s been weeks now since they all saw Yasha, and he can’t help but be curious—and, admittedly, a little worried at her constant disappearances, how she ducks in and out of their lives seemingly at will. Maybe, if he talks to her without the pressure of adventuring together, he’ll be able to understand her a bit better.
So far, everyone’s subconscious has given him a better idea of what they value, or what they would like to. He predicts that Yasha will be picking flowers, maybe, or tearing Lorenzo to pieces in a simulation of the revenge she never got.
He wasn’t expecting to be back at the circus.
“Oh,” she says when she sees him walk up, “hi. The show doesn’t start for another hour or so.”
Caleb looks around, and recognizes some of the performers from the first time he stumbled upon this carnival. Bo is there, as are the twins that performed, and a few other crew wandering around making adjustments inside the tent in the peeks he get as the flaps open and close in the breeze. “Sorry,” he says, for lack of anything better.
Yasha smiles, a small thing that Caleb wouldn’t even have noticed if he wasn’t watching her so carefully. “It’s okay. Between you and me, the show probably won’t happen tonight anyway. We had some last minute complications, so. You know.”
She looks well. Her hair is neater, her body cleaner than it was last Caleb saw her, and he can’t be sure if it’s the reality of her new situation or if this is just how she sees herself in dreams. Everyone here is clean, happy. The place is bustling.
The only exception is the small fortune-telling stand a handful of yards from the tent, by what Caleb is fairly sure is the the Southern entrance.
Caleb nods. He wants to say something, but he can’t. There’s nothing he could say that won’t make this worse, and he thinks Yasha understands by the way she inclines her head. It could be gratitude, or merely an acknowledgement, but either way Caleb feels heard, a good sign since Caleb wasn’t actually sure she would be willing to speak with him or not.
For how close the rest of the group is, Caleb has always found Yasha to be one of the easier ones to talk to, perhaps because she is quiet the way he is, or because she, too, guards her past. There is a kinship there. He appreciates it.
“We miss you,” he tells her.
Her expression clouds over, and the sun is slowly obscured by clouds that roll in from what should be the north. “I miss you all, too,” she replies simply. Neither of her hands lists toward the greatsword strapped to her back, and Caleb takes that as permission to continue.
“We killed a couple of big guys, mean ones. Jester said they weren’t as scary as you could be, but she meant it with love, I think.”
That coaxes another small smile from Yasha, but the clouds don’t part. “I’d like to have seen that.”
“You could see the next thing.”
Yasha glances up. In the mottled light, she looks otherworldly. Aasimar, Caleb thinks, and knows her to be, but she doesn’t match the pictures in his history books, nor the descriptions in his studies of arcana. She is something darker, sadder, altogether more dangerous, and it is especially evident when she shuts her eyes. “I’m not sure,” she says, and there is something helpless in it.
“You are strong,” he tells her. “What is it that frightens you?”
Another smile. It’s still so reserved, like she is afraid to enjoy the moment, and that is an emotion that Caleb recognizes intimately. “Many things. There are so many things.”
If Beau were here, she’d make a joke about fear, Caleb thinks, but he can’t figure out what it would be, or how to formulate it himself. His brain does not operate like that. Some days he is grateful for his predilection toward reason above all else, but other days he wishes more than anything that he could let go of the coil of regret in his chest for long enough to laugh again.
He used to be able to do that, he thinks. He’s fairly sure.
It was a long, long time ago.
Behind her, the bustle of the circus continues to overwhelm the scene, and the empty space at the fortune-teller’s booth keeps catching Caleb’s eye. His chest aches.
“I tried to visit him. To see if he was okay.”
Yasha’s head tilts. “Who?”
Caleb adjusts his coat. “Molly.”
“Visit him?” her eyes widen just a bit, so subtly she probably doesn’t even know she’s doing it, and Caleb realizes he needs to quash her optimism. It was stupid of him to phrase it in a way that gave her hope.
“It was a spell. I thought there was a chance I could know if— if he lived again. But I don’t think he does. Not after the encounter with Lorenzo.”
“Oh,” says Yasha.
Caleb turns away from the empty booth, the empty stool behind the empty table. He pauses a moment, and when he turns back around, it’s gone, like it was never there at all. “I’m sorry.”
Yasha swallows hard before answering him. “No. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me.”
“I know,” she says, and her voice catches, “but he’s not here.”
Behind her, the circus begins to fall away. First, the booths on the outside disappear piece by piece, fabric and tables and chairs blinking out of existence or drifting airily into the ground. Next, the personnel fade, each going transparent and then ceasing to exist entirely. And finally, as if in slow motion, the main tent peels apart. The red and white stripes of the tarp open so widely it ends up folding, impossibly, into itself, and the entire area splits into an open road.
The carnival sinks into the ground and is replaced by hard dirt, a smudge of bruise-clouds in the distance. Yasha shifts toward the road and begins to walk.
“Where are you going?” asks Caleb. He can’t stop looking at the horizon.
Yasha keeps going, away from him, and doesn’t turn back. “I don’t know.”
There are many things he could say or do in response. He could follow her, try to see where the road leads. He could lace up his boots more tightly, or replace them in an instant by tugging on the strange thread of dream magic that permeates everything here. He could call back the carnival, or conjure a wall in front of her. He could try to make her talk by any means necessary. He was gifted in that once. He is terrified that he still might be.
Caleb drops the sand, lets the spell fade.
He’s tired of all of these convoluted conversations, the layers on layers that must be peeled back to get to the truth of the matter. It makes him think of his studies, and how much still has to change for him to get what he wants.
He remembers Yasha as she was in the dream, and then as she was in life. Clean against dirty, uncertain against reserved. Both versions just a little fumbling, trying to do the right thing and sometimes tripping over it.
Caleb understands some of it, cannot fathom the rest.
She is another question. Caleb, despite the way his gut tells him to cauterize the wound and move on, adds her to the list.
/
His last walk is not an impulsive choice, not like so many of the others had been.
The Mighty Nein are nearly two weeks into what is quickly becoming a war of attrition against another party of adventurers that was hired by the town they’re trying to enter to stop them in their tracks. They can see the rickety gates from their camp (Caduceus likely sees more, but he doesn’t share), and they still haven’t even figured out why the town doesn’t want them there. It’s a mystery, and a frustrating one at that.
Jester’s messages to the Gentleman haven’t gone through, and they have no other way of gathering information without simply giving up and leaving.
Caleb knows he is not in the company of people who particularly enjoy cutting their losses. It is a lesson he had hoped they wouldn’t have to learn twice, but Beauregard in particular has been stubborn about it, hardheaded as she is.
He labels his foray into Fjord’s dream a peacekeeping mission, nothing else.
He’ll speak with Fjord, convince him that they all need to back down, and ask him to speak with Beau. When Fjord wakes up, assuming all goes well, he’ll approach Beau out of his own volition, thinking it was merely his subconscious trying to give him a hint about the best course of action.
A flimsy excuse, admittedly, but a logical enough one that he doesn’t feel bad using it to duck his way into Fjord’s unconscious mind.
It probably won’t go wrong, Caleb thinks, which is a stupid thought to have, and so it really serves him right when he opens his eyes in the dream and finds that he can’t— breathe—
The blue of the water is so dark it could be mistaken for a void. Caleb, with the eyes he has, can’t see much of anything, and finds himself thrashing, coat weighing him down, shoes heavy and socks thick, nose burning as he sucks in a breath and inhales only saltwater.
When he feels a hand on his shoulder, he almost screams. The only reason he manages not to is because of how precious he knows the miniscule amount of air he has left is. He needs to swim to the surface, but he doesn’t know which way that is.
And then, he hears, garbled but still understandable, “Caleb?”
He twists around, getting tangled again in his coat before dream-wishing it away, and sees the faint outline of someone who might be Fjord. He sounds wrong, strange, but there is something familiar to him, enough so that Caleb reaches out instead of recoiling.
Fjord clasps his arm more tightly, and the moment he stops fighting the grip, Caleb feels a strange clarity. “Hi,” he says, and finds he can speak. He still cannot breathe, but he doesn’t think he needs to.
When he blinks, some of the water seems to drip from his eyes, rolling down his cheeks like fat tears, and the body in front of him sharpens into clarity. Fjord exhales, almost a laugh, as he looks Caleb up and down in disbelief.
“What are you doing here?” Again, he sounds like someone else.
“Fjord?”
A nod, hesitant. “Hello, Caleb.”
There is something else in the water with them. It’s too dark down here for Caleb to catch even a glimpse of it, but he feels its weighty presence all the same. He would panic, but he’s scared that if he breaks the point of contact between him and this strange unfamiliar Fjord, he’ll drown. So he stays calm. So he considers his options.
His peacekeeping plan goes more or less out the window, and he keeps his eyes forward and his voice steady when he asks, “Is this where you go?”
Fjord doesn’t play dumb. “Yes,” he says. He looks curious, concerned. Some of the bright intelligence Caleb has known was there shines through without pretension, and Caleb finds himself breathing more shallowly. “But you shouldn’t be here.”
Fjord pulls back, brows crumpled in something that might be worry--or, if Caleb lets his fear get the best of him, malice--as he watches Caleb, and the contact is broken.
He has enough time to think this man is not from Port Damali before water rushes up his nose and into his mouth. He swallows salt, squeezes his eyes shut, and kicks for the surface, but he has no clue which way is up. His clothes are too heavy, dragging him further into the murky depths. He thinks he sees a glint of light below him, like an eye or a treasure or a tooth, but he can’t quite make it out as his vision fades into spots.
And then it’s just darkness.
/
He gasps awake at their camp spitting up water at the same time that Fjord jolts upright, looking hunted.
The entirety of Caleb’s shirtfront is wet. He sputters, coughing, gasping for air. There is no way to explain this away, and he meets Fjord’s eyes only because he knows he has been caught out. It helps, at least, to know he’s not the only one hiding something here.
He nods his head toward the outside of the hut. He can cast the spell again later, but for now they need a moment of privacy. There are few things Caleb can think of that he’d like to do less than wake up the rest of the party trying to hash out what just happened.
Fjord agrees silently, and they walk a short distance away. The greenish dome of the hut fizzles and fades, leaving the others exposed. It makes Caleb feel jumpy, and he imagines it makes Fjord feel doubly so by the way the other man is looping and unlooping his hand around the rope at his side like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.
“Caleb,” says Fjord, back to his drawling cadence like he’d never departed from it, “are you all right?”
No, thinks Caleb drily. His throat and nose still burn with saltwater, though they’re currently nowhere near the sea. It’s been weeks of travel since their travels from the Menagerie Coast, and frankly Caleb does not envy Fjord if this is what happens every time the other man falls asleep. “I’m good,” he manages eventually, rasping and wet. “How about you?”
Fjord looks… fine, honestly. Confused and groggy, but not physically worse for the wear. Caleb wonders if he absorbed some of the negative effects of the dream in Fjord’s stead, or if this just happens sometimes, and the ones where Fjord coughs up water are somehow worse than what the two of them just experienced.
Fjord clears his throat. It seems like a formality. “I’m not sure. Do you— this might sound crazy, but do you remember that? The dream? I could’ve sworn you were there, and...” He trails off, gesturing to Caleb’s current state.
There’s no ducking around this. “I remember it.”
“Oh.” Fjord’s eyes dart around, almost imperceptibly. Caleb can see the wheels turning in his head. “Well, sorry about that. It got kind of, um, weird at points.”
Caleb doesn’t say anything, peeling off his coat so he can start dabbing at his thin undershirt, now transparent and clinging to his skin. He shivers. It’s not so cold here during the day, but at night the winds blow something wicked, and despite being accustomed to the biting winters of his childhood, Caleb’s thin coat is not suited to any kind of extreme weather.
Fjord is not looking at him. “I thought I explained everything to you all before, but I think maybe there’s some more I should say.” He sounds distinctly uncomfortable as he considers the idea, but determined to follow it through. Even as they sit there, some of the strangeness around him dissolves, and Caleb sees him for what he must be: a man with a burden he’d rather not share. Maybe it’s just that Caleb is tired, but he’s not scared of whatever Fjord is hiding.
“You are entitled to your secrets, friend.”
“You really think so?”
Caleb laughs humorlessly. In the stark moonlight, nothing about this is dreamlike. “I do.”
He is remembering the night he and Eodwulf snuck out into the Western Courtyard to practice slinging spells at each other, and how it felt to be bathed in starlight, to coax firelight into being out of practically nothing, how the energy wrapped itself so seductively around Caleb’s hands that he began to laugh, but quietly so he wouldn’t wake up any of the staff. Eodwulf cheered him on with each lick of flame that crawled its way up Caleb’s arms, and Caleb watched in awe as Eodwulf spun objects and even creatures into existence. It was the caw of a conjured crow that alerted the faculty to their presence, and more than anything Caleb remembers the way the wind felt in his hair as he made a hasty retreat to his dormitory.
When Miss Hannah had peeked in, Caleb pretended to be asleep, heart beating rabbit-fast in his chest, and she had simply sighed and walked off.
He still doesn’t know if she suspected he and Eodwulf were the miscreants of that night, and if she chalked up their excitement to childhood enthusiasm and decided to, for once, let the students off easy. He doesn’t know that it matters anymore.
But that is a happy memory, and he tries not to dwell on those so much these days. They nip at his heels, hold him back. He keeps them to himself and presses forward. Most of the time, he’s sure that’s the only way to move on.
“Huh,” says Fjord consideringly, and this time it is Caleb that looks away. “I guess you would.”
Caleb shrugs a shoulder. He can’t argue that.
For a wavering heartbeat, he wonders what Fjord would think of his story. If he, finally, would be the one to cast Caleb out. To call him the traitor that he is. To spit in his face like he deserves.
But Caleb’s limbs are tired from literally drowning just moments ago—that, at least, is the lie he tells himself when he keeps his mouth firmly shut.
Eventually, Fjord seems to grow weary of the quiet. “I’m fuckin’ tired. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m gonna go back to sleep. Big day tomorrow, what with the…” he trails off, gesturing toward the city gates that they haven’t been able to get through. “And,” he adds, lower, edge of vulnerability to his deep voice, “I’d feel better if that force field you’ve got went back up around the others.”
If this were a dream, Caleb might say something reckless like I would feel better too, or if I knew you better I think I could help you, or we’ve gone wrong so many times but I can fix it, I can do it if you give me time, I swear I can, we never have to regret anything again.
But it’s just the two of them and their sleeping friends and all of this cold wind, and Caleb’s courage long since burned up along with his family all those years ago. He’s a desperate man running on fumes and guilt. To pretend anything else would be disingenuous, and for all that Caleb is a very talented liar he tries not to do it so much anymore. There’s no time. He doesn’t know how to stop trying to make more.
For now, though, he pulls out Jester’s glass bead and begins to work on the incantation that will bring the hut back, protecting them from whatever out here in the wide, wide world threatens to harm what little family Caleb has left.
He feels more than sees Fjord’s shoulders untense when the energy field reappears around them.
“Do you dream like that a lot?” asks Caleb, too curious to stay quiet. It was a difficult, physically taxing experience to go through, and he finds himself impressed at Fjord’s general level-headedness upon waking.
Fjord settles back onto his bedroll, lying flat on his back and staring up at the sky through the magic dome. “Yeah,” he says quietly.
Caleb finds himself wanting to help, an impulse he doesn’t want to fight, but he’s at a loss. This is something bigger, darker, more abstract than what he’s used to managing. He has nothing, so he does nothing, and the conversation fizzles.
With nearly everyone asleep in the bubble, the only sign of movement is the smudgy fire of their opposition in the distance. By nature of the spell, Caleb can see them, but they can’t see him.
Usually, that knowledge feels good, but now it just makes him feel lonely.
Fjord is probably still awake, and he could reach out. He could keep talking, or just scoot close enough that he can feel, without having to look, the presence of a friend.
He could say a lot of things to Fjord before the two of them fall asleep, and maybe it might even change something, but— but there are a lot of buts, and all of them buffet at Caleb like ocean waves, some easy like breathing and others terrifying like walls of water: imposing, dark, and impossible to fight, even with fire.
/
On a cloudless night a few weeks later, Caleb dreams of burning.
The fire is cold, and he can barely see through its flicker. Within its cage, he looks at his hands, how the skin crackles black and appears to peel from the bone even though it doesn’t really. His hands stay cleaner than the rest of his body because the fire purifies them. Every spell brings him closer to his goal, and makes him feel less like himself. Neither of those is a bad thing, he’s fairly sure.
Around him, strangers converge in a dark circle. He can’t make out faces or physiques beneath the dark, undulating robes. They extend their hands to him, and Caleb burns colder, brighter. He can smell something smoking, and it might be him.
“Hallo,” he says, because he’s encased in a pillar of fire. He’s visible, but he feels safe enough where he is that he’s not afraid to speak. “Have you come to kill me?”
No answer.
They are not talkers, he thinks, and almost smiles. The urge feels like an echo, empty and loud in the night.
To his right, a wave of movement ripples through the robed figures. First one, then another, until the two of them closest to him are unceremoniously shoved apart and a new figure strides confidently between them to meet Caleb in the middle.
“Well, fancy meeting you here, isn’t it? You’re lucky I grabbed my coat, or I’d have been spitting mad, you know.”
All at once, as if by some outside force, the flames extinguish from everywhere except the palm of Caleb’s right hand, where he holds a small flicker, just enough to see by. In front of him, in all his technicolor glory, stands Mollymauk Tealeaf. It’s impossible, whispers one part of his brain, the part that wants to run. It’s a dream, whispers the other, more rational, more hopeful side, and so Caleb stays and looks the purple tiefling up and down.
It’s something, he thinks, which is so much more than the nothing he had before, and he stands there tongue-tied for a moment too long before he says, “You look well.”
Molly does look well, is the thing. Too well. Surely Molly should be bloody and torn like he was when Lorenzo ripped his chest apart, or still and sallow like he was when they lowered him into his grave. Surely Caleb would not construct the tiefling so generously in his own mind. Some people romanticize the past, but Caleb could never be accused of that. He has a near-perfect memory; he remembers everything.
A seed of doubt creeps in then. If he can manipulate dreams, he must not be the only one able to do so.
Just as quickly as the thought comes to him, however, he dismisses it, irritated and ashamed at the stubborn hope that won’t leave him alone. Caleb knows loss. He should know how to deal with it by now without succumbing to all of this wishful thinking.
Molly just laughs. “You flatter me.”
If Caleb built this Molly, he built him generously. “I suppose I do.”
“So,” says Molly conversationally, ignoring all of the figures crowding them; he waves away Caleb’s confusion and concern with the flick of a nonchalant wrist. “You seem more chipper than usual.”
“Do I?”
Molly’s smirk is knife-sharp, incongruous with his bright tone—or, perhaps, perfectly fitting. The darkness makes it difficult to tell. Caleb runs through memories of him, one after another flashing through his mind, and as he does so, Molly speaks, laugh still ringing in his voice. “It’s not a particularly low bar, I’ll admit, but sure! Why not?”
“Ha,” says Caleb, though he doesn’t find anything about this situation particularly amusing. His mind is still boggling with the sight before him, and the knowledge that it may be something more, and the knowledge that it may not be something more at all.
Really it’s the not knowing which is true that is messing with his head.
Molly, unperturbed, begins to walk around Caleb, making him turn if he doesn’t want his back to the tiefling. “So, how are the others? Alive, I presume? Though I guess I shouldn’t, considering everything.”
Caleb has no idea what Molly wants from him. Never has, and apparently never will.
“They’re fine,” he says, thinking of Beau’s scarred knuckles, Jester’s near-frantic positivity, Caduceus’ silent consideration. Thinking of Nott’s copious notes, Yasha’s choked voice, Fjord and all of his secrets.
Thinking of Molly on the ground, perfectly still, blood everywhere and not in the way they had to learn to be okay with. It took Caleb time to get unused his numbness at the spatter of blood on skin, to think of it again as unequivocal danger. Back then, Caleb felt a sting of guilt at the unlearning. Now, he only feels defeat, exhaustion. How many more of them will fall before this is over? How many will Caleb be able to bring back at the end? Not enough, surely.
“Fine,” echoes Molly slowly.
Caleb, very suddenly, doesn’t want to be here anymore.
No sooner does the thought take shape in his mind than does the landscape begin shifting around them. The hooded figures blur, spinning around and around until their shapes become a single smear of darkness whirling by. Caleb feels dizzy just looking at it, and so he doesn’t; instead, he looks at Mollymauk, and tries desperately to commit him to memory. Normally, it’s easy, but this is not normal.
There’s a humming in the back of his head that is only getting louder.
“Caleb?”
Caleb falls to his knees. The flame in his hand flickers, then extinguishes, and then he only has the moonlight to see by. His eyes strain, though he assumes Mollymauk can see him perfectly fine. Caleb must cut a pathetic figure, nauseous as he is on the ground, palms flat against the hard-packed earth of a trail. It is taking everything in him not to claw at it with his fingernails.
And then, in the span of a blink, the place is bathed in sun.
Molly looks amused from where he’s leaning against a thin tree, one foot propped up against the bark. “You all right?”
“No,” answers Caleb honestly.
Molly’s hum is both kind and mocking. “I didn’t think so.” He pauses, contemplative, and kicks a rock at his feet so that it skitters away from them, Mollymauk’s posture easy, Caleb still winded from where he’d landed on his tailbone and not bothered to stand up. “You know, I didn’t think you’d all full-out martyr me. Threw me for a loop, that one.”
“It made Beauregard feel better.”
Molly purses his lips. “I’d believe that if you didn’t keep looking at me like I’m some higher power. It’s unsettling, and not particularly flattering.”
Caleb’s tone is bland when he responds. “You are dead.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t change the life I lived.”
“You don’t need your life anymore.” And so we turned it into what we needed it to be, Caleb doesn’t say, because the thought makes him feels a bit sick. It is easy to pretend not to care. It is much harder to confront a ghost head on. “Why are you here?”
Molly smiles indulgently. He is sharper in death. “Because you wanted me to be.”
Caleb does not have an answer to that.
The scene shifts again, back to darkness this time, and the figures come back and then disappear too quickly for Caleb to pick them out… until they slow. At first, he doesn’t quite recognize any of them, but as time passes it gets horrifyingly easy. Eodwulf’s mischievous smile peeks out from beneath a hood, followed by Astrid’s dark eyes. Master Ikithon blurs by for only a moment before others cycle through, copies of the students and supposed traitors Caleb slaughtered without a second thought in his youth. They don’t look scared. They don’t look angry, either. They don’t express any emotion, and their blank faces make Caleb shudder.
And then his mother and father appear, not ghostly where they stand but real, solid, and something in him snaps.
Caleb wakes up choking on a gasp, sweaty and shivery and far too disoriented for comfort considering the Nein’s precarious position. It’s still dark; Caleb can tell even from inside of their magic hut. It seems wrong, like it must be morning by now after such a long, drawn out dream.
Gods, but he has not felt so off balance in a very long time.
Next to him, Nott stirs. “Caleb?” she asks, voice rough with sleep.
Some part of him is still expecting to hear Molly’s voice, he realizes. It felt so real, so immediate. Nott blinks up at him with her huge flashlight eyes, and Caleb, tender despite the uneasiness rolling in his stomach, brushes some of her hair back from her face. “Go back to sleep,” he murmurs.
Sleep. The root of the struggle, or maybe just a symptom. Either way, it’s a call Caleb hasn’t figured out the right response for yet. He schools his features into neutrality as best he can, easy since he’s gotten so good at lying, and Nott examines for just a moment more before turning over and shutting her eyes again. Caleb stays awake, watching.
An ugly truth: Caleb doesn’t trust himself to dream anymore.
At the other side of the hut, just a few feet away, he finds Beauregard watching him. He’d forgotten she was awake, and is surprised that she hadn’t interjected when he first startled back to consciousness.
“I can take the rest of the watch,” he says when he’s certain Nott is asleep.
Beau snorts. “You look like shit.”
“And?”
“And I don’t think you’re gonna be able to watch our backs like...that,” she says, waving a hand at him to encompass his— well, his everything. Caleb feels a mess, and he’s certain he looks one, too.
He sighs. “I will watch with you, then.”
“Fine by me,” says Beau. There is something naturally defiant in the set of her jaw, like she plans on pulling danger from its hiding places in the darkness and destroying it before it can destroy her, and Caleb finds it strangely comforting. He crawls carefully over their sleeping friends to sit by her side.
The magic of the spell sheltering them prevents Caleb from feeling the breeze on his face, but he imagines it anyway. He tugs his coat around his body, trying to find warmth despite its threadbareness and all the holes.
“Bad dream?” asks Beau. As a monk, she rarely stumbles, but she has no idea how close she is wandering to this particular precipice.
Caleb shrugs a shoulder.
She hums in what she must think is an empathetic way. “About that shit when you were a teenager?”
“Something like that.”
“Sucks, man.”
“Yeah.”
Above them, the stars shimmer unnaturally through the hum of magic. The moon, nearly full, illuminates the tall grass in which they’re currently hiding from the would-be dangers of the night.
They are, by Caleb’s calculations, a mere two hours from sunrise.
Winter is fast approaching, and the leaves on the trees have been shedding liberally for the past two months. An empire kid, Caleb is used to staving off the bitter cold with sheer, stubborn determination, first to live and then to undo what the living had cost him.
Everyone knows that nothing grows in the winter, that it is something that must be endured for the sake of the spring, and the barren landscape of dry grass around them will soon be blanketed by a thin layer of snow. But Caleb thinks back to Caduceus’ dream, how he taught Caleb to plant flowers that bloomed only when the weather was so harsh that nothing else could, and Caleb looks at his hands and wonders if they could ever create something so strong that not even the coldest winter could stop it from growing.
Maybe it’s just the way the night crests into morning that has him feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. Having the monk at his side, quiet but not silent, gruff but not uncaring, certainly helps.
He and Beau take the rest of the watch in silence as their friends dream, and Caleb surveys the land and thinks mostly about winterflowers.