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They meet in a bookshop.
(Of course they do. Where else would be so suited?)
They meet amongst the soft sounds of pages turning and the smell of crisp paper on the air. He walks in to the bell jingling a cheerful tune over the door, and she turns her head at the sound.
It’s the red that catches his eye. The girl in the corner is dressed in red as vibrant as poppy flowers in a field. They are so very different, in that way; he is dressed in somber grays and browns, as to avoid attention, but her bold colors demand the gaze of passersby almost magnetically.
Ask him later how it happened and he will not have an answer, but he is drawn into her corner. He sits at the table a few seats down, a pile of books before him, and watches from the corner of his eye as she makes notes with one hand and turns pages with another. She does this with a practiced air, not even glancing down at her writing hand for a moment. It’s fascinating to watch.
He’s getting distracted. Then again, it’s terribly easily to get distracted when you’re as tired as he is. When’s the last time he slept a full night? Even he isn’t sure.
She’s watching him. Her eyes are round and lavender behind the silver frames of her glasses. “What are you reading?” she asks.
He startles. Checks the spine of his book. “It’s, ah. A book on arcane magics.”
She nods. Smiles. “Do you like magic books?”
“Ja. And you?”
She lifts her own book so that he can see the cover. “Local histories of the area. I like histories. They’re full of people’s stories. Are you from around here?”
He weighs the benefits of lying versus telling the truth, but she’s clearly not from around here either so it can’t matter too much. “No,” he says.
“Me neither.” She extends a hand for him to shake, and he takes it after a moment. Her palm is warm and smooth, and he almost feels ashamed for how grimy his own hand must feel against her skin. She doesn’t mention it, though, merely smiling and offering her name. “Lucretia.”
He could lie, or just keep silent. But something in the tilt of her head, in the slant of her smile, in the red of her robe says that she is trustworthy. “Caleb.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Caleb.”
And they go back to their books.
Inexplicably, they meet again, on the roof of a building, underneath the stars.
She’s not alone this time.
“So if it fell east of that sort of weird mountain range it might have landed….here-ish?” says the elven woman who stands beside her, pointing at a spot on the large piece of paper that Lucretia is holding. Lucretia opens her mouth to respond, but the woman’s ear flicks and she turns her head towards where Caleb is standing silent in the shadows of the chimney.
“Ah, hello,” he says, and it’s awkward, and why did he come up here again? (Nightmares, it’s always nightmares, he just needed the fresh air and the darkness, away from the visions of flames consuming everything he touches.)
Lucretia’s eyes meet his and she laughs. “Oh, you’re the man from the bookshop,” she says. “What are the chances?”
“The one with the magic books?” says the woman. “And the cute accent?”
Caleb feels a blush spread all the way down his neck. Lucretia lets out a sound of protest and lightly smacks the woman. “I never said that!”
“But you were thinking it.”
“I’m a lesbian!”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Lup, you have a boyfriend .”
Caleb clears his throat because—quite frankly—this situation is spiralling out of control much too quickly for his liking. The elven woman smiles at him, one corner of her mouth lifted just slightly above the other, and her eyes dance with mirth.
“Ah, I see I am intruding. I apologize. Goodnight,” says Caleb, and the woman scoffs as Lucretia shakes her head.
“No, you’re fine,” says the woman. “I’m Lup, by the way. Caleb, was it?”
He nods.
“Nice to meet you. We’re just doing math, don’t let us bother your stargazing or whatever.”
Interest piqued, Caleb takes a step forward. “Math?” he asks, lifting his chin to peer over her shoulder at the scroll of paper Lucretia is holding. He can see now that it’s a map of some kind, roughly sketched in a practiced hand and covered in mathematical scribbles and red markers. It’s the kind of map that someone makes when they’re searching for something.
Caleb leaves them to it and walks to the edge of the roof. He leans on the wall, feeling the cold of the stone leach through the thin fabric of his coat. The air is chill around him but he does not dare make a fire to warm himself. Not after the nightmares. Not after….
Lup, it seems, has no similar inhibitions. “Fuck, it’s freezing,” she says, and the sound carries across the roof. Caleb turns his head just as her hand erupts into flame, and he is frozen as she and Lucretia huddle close to it. The light and shadow dance across their faces and the fire is an alive thing, orange flame and dancing embers that swirl upwards and disappear like fireflies dying in the night sky.
Lucretia looks up and meets his gaze. Her smile is warm like the fire she huddles close to as she calls to him. “Are you cold? You can come join us if you like.”
“Hell yeah, I can even make a proper bonfire if you want,” agrees Lup, and the flames are reflected in the glint of her eyes and the flash of her grin. “Roof party!”
Caleb swallows thickly and does not look at the flames, can’t look away, it’s just like his nightmares but the woman is unafraid of her fire, why isn’t she afraid, she should be afraid—
“Thank you,” he says. “I am alright. Good evening.”
And he flees.
And again, in a bar.
There’s three of them this time. Lucretia is there, quiet and unassuming, dressed in a cloak of dark blue instead of the vibrant robes of their previous meetings. She is not alone; her companions are...colorful, to say the least.
The human fighter is gigantic, all muscles and loudness and swagger. But he is friendly, and energetic, like some giant golden retriever. Caleb thinks he is someone that people would find likeable, but he is too much of everything, all at once, and Caleb has always been more of a cat person. It is this fact, perhaps, that draws his eyes to the second companion: a slender elven man, brown-skinned and freckled and the spitting image of Lup. There’s less fire in his eyes, though, more cunning.
He’s playing cards. No, he’s swindling people at cards. Caleb can spot a con when he sees one, though the man does it so seamlessly that it’s likely no one else notices. No one else, that is, save for Nott, who even now is slinking across the room to slip onto the seat opposite him.
She glances over her shoulder at him as she does, and her ears do a funny little twitch from within the shadows of her hood. Caleb sighs and follows her, and Lucretia looks up as he passes.
The elven man deals as Nott watches the shine of his many bracelets, and Lucretia slips quietly into the seat beside Caleb, just a table over from the card game.
“Funny, we keep running into each other,” says Lucretia. Neither of them are looking at each other, instead watching the dance of the cards as the elven man and Nott cheat each other and work around each other’s cheats. It’s a mesmerizing sort of duel, and the smiles pulling at the corners of both of their faces show that they are enjoying it. “You’re not following me, are you, Caleb?”
“I would ask the same of you,” says Caleb. Lucretia huffs out a laugh and scribbles something into her notebook, and when he glances over he sees that she is sketching the game with a practiced hand.
“Did you find what you were looking for on the rooftop?” asks Caleb, after a pause. Lucretia’s hand pauses, and she sits up straighter with a sigh.
“Not yet.”
Silence between them. The ruckus of the bar. Nott wins a hand and the elven man frowns, brushing his hair back from his face in a jingle of bracelets and earrings. Lucretia’s quill moves across the page again.
“ Lucy!” comes a voice, all of a sudden, loud and booming right in his ear. Caleb almost falls off of his seat, turning wildly towards where Lucretia’s gigantic companion is suddenly very close. He’s throwing his arms over her shoulders and grinning widely, and Caleb is prepared to defend her until he notices that she is smiling as well.
“Hello, Magnus.”
“Come dance with me!” The man is large, and tipsy, and beaming ear to ear, and he drags Lucretia off of her feet as she laughs and lets him. The elven man glances over at the pair, one eyebrow raised, and Nott switches out one of her cards with his while he isn’t looking.
“Farewell again, Caleb,” says Lucretia.
“Auf wiedersehen,” says Caleb.
The elven man looks back at his cards, curses, and drops another bracelet onto the slowly growing pot. Lucretia and Magnus dance in the background and Nott grins at Caleb over her hand of cards. The bar is loud, and warm, and Caleb is thinking of red robes in libraries and dancing fire on rooftops.
It’s a funny little group, the people who follow Lucretia.
He thinks, absurdly, that he rather likes them.
Nott is hurt.
She’s hurt she’s hurt she’s hurt she’shurtshe’shurtshe’s—
“I’m okay,” she says, and presses a calloused palm to his cheek, her other hand holding her side as the white bandages turn crimson.
Crimson.
Caleb grabs her. He hoists her up into his arms and clenches his teeth and runs. He’s not sure what he’s looking for—logic has abandoned him—but his eyes roam the crowds for help, help, help—
Lucretia steps out of a bakery, arms full of pastry, and Caleb runs into her full force. She gasps, and drops the pastries, and then she sees Nott in his arms and does not say a word.
She takes him to an empty clearing that isn’t actually empty and leads him into a structure the likes of which he’s never seen. Part of him wants to explore his surroundings, to figure out where he is, what this is, what’s happening—but his thoughts are consumed by a constant stream of Nott, Nott, Nott, Nott.
There is an old dwarven man with flowers in his beard. He holds a book in one hand and places the other delicately over Nott’s wound, and there is a flash of light, and she is sitting up and she is looking at him and she is alright she’s not dead she’s alright he was fast enough she’s—
She’s hugging him. Arms around his neck, forehead to his. “Caleb,” she’s saying, and her yellow eyes are staring straight into his, and he remembers to breathe, finally. She’s alright.
The old man clears his throat. Caleb looks up and realizes he’s in a strange place surrounded by strange people he doesn’t really know, but Nott’s alright and that’s what matters. “Thank you,” he says.
It’s lucky that he ran into Lucretia when he did. Lucky that they’d met before. Lucky that she’d known what to do, that she’d had a healer on hand. Lucky that they had not had to travel so far.
Fate works in strange and circuitous ways. She weaves her tapestry and smiles as the colors blend.
“We are refugees from a planar system beyond your own,” says the captain. His name is Davenport, and he is a gnome. He stands at the ready, both hands at his sides, jacket crisp and pressed and hair combed neatly. Caleb looks at him and feels ashamed for the dirt on his face and the wear to his clothes. He feels lesser, looking into the stern face of someone who his mind registers as a Superior. He wants to curl up and hide. He wants to clean himself off. He wants—
Nott’s hand squeezes around his, and then lets go. There’s a kind twinkle to Davenport’s eyes. Caleb lets his shoulders relax, just slightly.
“We’re looking for something called the Light of Creation,” says Lucretia. “That’s what I was doing on the rooftop, that night. We need it to save your world.”
“You haven’t found it yet?” asks Nott, voice pitched high with worry. Davenport frowns deeper beneath the gray-orange of his mustache.
“Not yet.”
“But we will,” offers Lucretia. “We’ll find it.”
Hope is a funny thing.
The fifth time they meet is in a temple of the Raven Queen.
It is an accident. Caleb had come to pray forgiveness to the spirits of his parents, to bury his head in his hands and breathe his guilt onto the cold stones of the temple. But the temple was far from empty, and the necromancers had not been pleased to be interrupted.
The door bursts open. Lucretia enters, flanked by a human man with glasses perched on his nose and salt-and-pepper hair in disarray atop his head. They are wearing robes of crimson, and they bring the necromancers to their knees in moments.
“This is getting ridiculous,” says Lucretia as she unties Caleb’s hands from behind his back. They’d been planning to add him to their sacrifice, apparently, because the addition of one filthy wizard couldn’t hurt, or so they’d claimed.
“Ja.”
“Huh,” says the man with the glasses, and pokes at the ritual circle with his foot, wiping some of the chalk away to obscure a rune. “This. Wouldn’t even have worked? I mean I’ve seen some pretty spectacular fuck-ups in my years but this is a level of amateur that just—”
“Barry.”
He looks up, and spots Caleb, and closes his mouth. “Uh,” he says. “Right. Sorry. I’m Barry Bluejeans. You must be Caleb?”
Caleb shakes his hand. Barry’s grip is firm, but not overly so—he drops the hold no sooner or later than is appropriate. He is unassuming and kind-looking, but Caleb had seen the skill with which he’d dismantled the necromancers.
“What are you doing in the middle of this ritual?” asks Barry. His fingers fidget with the sleeve of his robe.
“It was not on purpose.”
“Yeah, Barry, not everyone’s obsessed with necromancy like some people,” calls Lucretia from the other side of the temple, where she is levitating unconcious necromancers into a pile. Barry laughs sheepishly and scratches at the side of his head.
“I mean, he could be. Listen, the theory of it is really—”
“You’re a necromancer?”
Barry stops. “Yes?”
Caleb thinks about all the wrongs he’s done that he wishes he could right. He thinks about the cinders of a home and two graves that he has never once been brave enough to visit. “Could you, ah. Would you happen to know of any spells to raise the long-dead, the unjustly murdered?”
Barry regards him with an unreadable expression. His hands still their fidgeting and for a long, long moment he just watches Caleb, blue eyes meeting blue, holding him frozen. Then he hums, soft and low and shakes his head with a sad smile. “Necromancy is nothing to be meddled with lightly,” he says. “It is fascinating in theory, but there are natural laws that must be obeyed, and there are some ghosts that must stay at rest.”
“But—”
“I know it’s hard, but sometimes what’s best is to just let go.” Barry places a hand on his shoulder, and squeezes, and then he turns to leave. Caleb watches, speechless.
“I’d listen to Barry,” says Lucretia quietly, from right beside him. “He’s right, you know. Letting go sucks but if you don’t do it you’ll never heal. We all learned that the hard way. And…” A sigh. “I’m sorry.”
She brushes a ghost-light hand across his forearm and then she’s gone, leaving only the afterimage of red fabric in his vision.
The year ends and the sky turns black and rainbow as the colors of the world fade to nothing. Caleb clutches Nott in the harsh-blowing wind and watches a silver ship fly up and up and up and then it is gone.
“Caleb,” says Nott. She’s holding his face, trying to drag him back from the distant skyline of swirling darkness. “Caleb,” she says again, and her cheeks are wet, and her fingers comb through his hair.
They’re going to die here. Everything he has run from and they are going to die like this, in an empty field beneath a raging sky.
“Caleb!” calls a voice that is not Nott’s, and Caleb finally tears his eyes downwards in time to catch Lucretia running through the grass, white hair flying loose about her face, red robe swishing dramatically about in the wind.
“They left you,” says Caleb.
She nods. “I wanted to stay.”
Nott slips free of Caleb’s grasp but grips his hand so firmly that her claws dig just slightly into his palm. “Are we going to die?” she says, and her voice trembles but she stands firm.
Lucretia sighs, and very carefully meets each of their gazes. “Yes,” she says. “I won’t lie to you. The Hunger will come and it will devour your world.”
“And then what happens?” asks Caleb from across a distance. “After we are consumed, where do we go?”
“Into the Hunger, we think. We hope that someday we can bring you back. We hope we can stop the Hunger and free the worlds it has consumed. But we’re not sure. We don’t know how, yet.”
Caleb looks to the greying grass and the black-blue-red-green-yellow-orange-purple sky. He looks into tired lavender eyes and feels small fingers squeezing his. He snaps, and Frumpkin curls around his neck, purring and warm and comfortingly familiar.
“Alright,” he says.
“Caleb,” says Nott. “I want you to know—”
“I know.”
She nods, and places a kiss on his knuckles. “Then we fight till the end. We take as many of those bastards with us as we can.”
And she raises her crossbow, and Lucretia raises her wand, and Caleb reaches for his flames.
And they fight, and they are victorious, and they are consumed.
It is very loud and very crowded and very empty and very nothing. It is many colors and none. It is blinding light and utter blackness. It is a cacophony of silence.
Then there is a story, and then there is a song.
And then he is whole again.
He is whole in a field of grass near-unchanged from when he had last been himself. He hears a cry in a voice so familiar that it buckles his legs and forces him kneeling, and then Nott’s tiny body is pressed into his and her shrill voice is in his ear and she’s here and he’s here and they are alive—
And the sky is blue. And the world is whole.
“They did it,” says Caleb.
“Yes,” says Nott, and she smiles her wide goblin grin. “They did.”
The last time is in a bookshop in a city called Zadash, two years after the story and the song and the becoming whole.
“Hello,” says Lucretia.
“Hallo,” says Caleb.
She’s older now. Much older than she should be, probably, with wrinkles on her forehead and deep bags beneath her eyes. Her hair is shorter, her manner is more dignified, but she is undoubtedly the strange girl he had met all those years ago.
“I thought that you were gone,” he says. “I thought that you had saved reality and found a home.”
She nods. “I did. But there are loose ends to tie up and so I am tying them.”
“I am a loose end?”
She smiles. “Perhaps.”
Her hand reaches deep into the pocket of her sky-blue robe and she withdraws a fine book bound in cobalt and gold. He takes it and admires the crispness of the paper and the smell of new leather. The words swirling across the cover are written in common and they spell out the title: The Mechanics of Reality. And the subtitle, in smaller letters: in the Poetry of a Woman Who Has Crossed It.
There is no author listed. Caleb flips to the first page and finds that it is credited to the Journalkeeper.
“This is yours?” he asks.
“Yes. I thought perhaps it might suit your interests.”
Caleb thinks about the power to bend reality to his will. He thinks about time and space moving like clay beneath his fingers. He thinks about how easy it would be to change past mistakes. He thinks about the things he’s wanted for so long.
Then he thinks about bonds, and family, and what really matters. He thinks about a goblin girl and a foul-mouthed monk and a vibrant tiefling and bubbly cleric and a gentle giant and a patient leader and a tea-loving keeper of graves.
“I think,” he says slowly. “That since last I saw you, I have become a different person.”
And Lucretia smiles.
“Good,” she says, and pats the cover of the book. “But keep it anyway. I’m told it’s a good read.”
“Danke.”
“It’s no trouble—”
He catches her hand. Holds it firm. “Nein,” he says. “Thank you. For—” and he waves his hand about vaguely, attempting to encompass everything from the gift of the book to the saving of his world. “Thank you.”
Lucretia smiles again, and nods her head. “You’re welcome,” she says.
The door opens suddenly, announced by the jingling of the bells and the commotion of the city street outside flooding into the quiet interior of the shop. “Caaaaleb!” calls a voice in Jester’s familiar lilting accent, and Caleb smiles fondly.
“I suppose that’s my cue,” says Lucretia, and takes a step back. “Have care and live happy, Caleb of the books.”
“And you as well,” says Caleb. “Mach’s gut, Lucretia of the stars.”
Her hands twists something at her belt and then she is gone, leaving behind her only the impression of a smile and the crisp blue book in Caleb’s hands.
“Caleb!” yells Jester. “We’re going to dinner, come on!”
Caleb tucks the book carefully into his satchel. He will not need it any time soon, he thinks.
He silently bids farewell to the family from beyond the stars, and then he goes to join the ragtag family of his own.
It's a funny thing, fate.