Work Text:
There is a spellbook in Caleb’s bag.
It is old, and worn. The cover is brown and battered, and there are faint dried bloodstains like fingerprints on the first pages that were clearly washed out as delicately as possible. The title is first in Zemnian, and second in Common. Nott wonders absently how young Caleb was when he started it — before the Academy, or after? Before Ikithon, or after? Before his parents, or after?
The first pages are painstaking, and give her a headache. Fjord keeps looking at her pityingly, which pisses her off a little. Beau doesn’t look at her much at all, which Nott thinks should probably piss her off, but doesn’t.
She gets it. She wishes everyone would stop looking at her, too.
There’s a dictionary in Caleb’s bag as well. Much less bloodstained, but no less old. Some of the pages are yellowed and worn and hard to read, but it’s usable, so slowly, Nott translates the first part of Caleb’s spellbook. It’s an introduction chapter, but riddled with the fragmented sort of notes of someone who has learned the basics long before and is only now refreshing their memory.
He has other books, too, that she salvaged from his bag. Tucked away in there was a tome on the basics of transmutation, which she uses to supplement the more rudimentary bits, the ones he hadn’t bothered summarizing. There’s also a handful of rather raunchy romance books that Jester clearly recommended him; one on tarot cards; and one on maritime culture. All of them are annotated.
He didn’t keep his most prized book in his bag, though. That one she finds in one of his holsters — the left-hand one, for easiest access — and it is a series of theses on higher-level transmutation spells. They are dense and academic and loaded with pretentious language and when Nott recognizes the unifying thread of each paper — the principles and workarounds of the spell called True Polymorph — she has to set the book down and leave camp.
Only for a few minutes, she tells herself. Except then those few minutes become half an hour, and then a full one, and then half a night. She finds herself a little clearing amongst the dark forest, makes herself a seat among the fallen leaves, and looks up to the stars. She names every constellation she knows. Some of them she knew before she became a goblin. Some of them are clearly Zemni in origin. She and Caleb made up their own stories about every single one.
But the stars don’t care that it’s just her, sitting beneath them. They keep spinning, and spinning, and spinning, always around the bright star that points north.
Eventually, it’s Beau that comes and finds her. Beau, who claps a hand on her shoulder, sits beside her, and tips her head back. Beau, who sits with her until the sun starts to rise again.
Absently, Nott wonders if there is a planet in this sky, too, or if the planets have all gone out.
They’re heading back east, for Zadash. Caduceus drives the cart. Fjord and Jester sit with him. Nott sits in the back of the cart and ignores them. Most of the time, Beau joins her, wordless. Nott’s glad for the patient silence.
Eventually she gives up trying to maintain Caleb’s journals as she received them, and scrawls her own notes in the margins. Her handwriting is painfully cramped and messy beneath his stick-thin, neat lettering, and it hurts her eyes to look at. Sets them to stinging.
It takes her a week to wind through the first half of the book. She’s learned...an incredible amount, really. She hasn’t tried any spells yet. She doesn’t want to.
It’s halfway through the book — the dawn of the eighth day into their limp back — that Nott finds a note different from the rest. Different, because the handwriting is shakier, and because it begins with her name.
Nott —
If you have found this tome then you are sneaking through my things, little one, and I am proud of you. I am very protective of this book, and I hope it was not easy, it says; and then continues, wry. But then again I think by now that if you really want to take it from me then you would manage with ease.
Nott’s eyes ache. Even through the impersonal black ink on yellowed paper, she can hear the pride in his voice. Oh, he’d been so happy for her, every time she’d learned something new. Even now, he’s still proud of her.
Even now.
And if you have gotten this far then I suppose there is no point in hiding it from you — surprise! These are, ah, notes of a sort. It will be pretty messy from this point forward — and it is, there are pages torn from other books and pasted into his journal, pages crinkled and worn with frequent reference, page numbers smudged and rewritten three, four times — and you know how I hate ripping out pages, but this knowledge is very valuable to me, and to you too, my little friend.
Anyway — to the point. Beyond this page are a series of revisions, and the evidence I have found to support them. The True Polymorph spell, prefaced in the text, it is a powerful spell, but simple; there are the components, yes, and the words, and the gestures (though I suppose I cannot truly call it simple because it requires intimate knowledge of the things of this world and the interactions between them), but those, that can be learned in books. And we are already on our way to learning a great deal.
But it is not exactly what you want, my little friend. The spell is good for so long as you are not harmed, and you and I, we are looking for something more permanent. So behind this page there is, it is...it is a dangerous magic that I am experimenting with here. It is the spell called Wish, but I hope that at the point when you are reading this that I have made the combination safe. Because I wish, with all that I am, little one, that you will have your form back, and that you will have it back for good.
So with this book, it is my goal to combine the two. The two spells outlined here, the True Polymorph spell and the Wish spell, so that we can put you back as you should be, Nott, and that we can put you back for good.
Perhaps I am showing you this only to explain this spell before it is cast. Perhaps you have stolen it from me, my cheeky halfling friend. Perhaps — and this I hope most of all — it is after the spell entirely, and we are reminiscing, you and I, in Felderwin.
I would like that, I think. Yeza tells me there are windchimes on your porch. Ones that you made of bottlecaps and glass, and that they sing beautifully in autumn afternoons.
I hope to see them for myself one day.
With all my heart —
His book is just what Caleb told her it would be.
The first handful of pages are in-depth explanations detailing and preserving everything Caleb had learned about the spell, before — before Nott found his book. The next focus on the Wish spell, and the rest, combinations of the two.
In the first half of the book, Nott had some grasp on the principles of the work Caleb had done. From him she learned about energy and nature and matter and their interactions, ley lines and the soul and its essence within the mind and the body, and she’s clever. From there, she could follow his work.
This is over her head entirely. He uses words that she’s never even heard before, words that could be in Common or Zemnian. She can’t find translations, even though they sound like Common, but they are clearly archaic and powerful. His diagrams are more webs than symbols, his notes are shaken from his typical neat script into scrawls with excitement, pages marred with dripped candlewax from many late nights.
And in the margins of some pages, in the white space below full-page diagrams, there are little notes, and some are addressed to her. They are idle thoughts, and ramblings, and clarifications when the authors of borrowed texts have sticks too far up their asses. They are little jokes in Zemnian. They are little bits of Halfling that he had been learning.
Caleb never told her he was learning Halfling.
She wonders — because he never told her what was in this book, not really — how many of those nights she slept by his side as he worked, utterly unaware of what he was doing.
She wonders how much Halfling he learned. She wonders how many of their stories and their songs she will never be able to teach him, now that he is dead.
Nott slams the book down, and hugs her knees to her chest. Her head hurts, and her heart hurts, too. She can’t follow any of this. She needs — she needs Caleb to explain it, she needs a teacher, she needs something else, anything else, anything but this prim and pressed script of a friend that she had loved with her whole heart —
“Hey,” Beau says gruffly. “You okay?”
“Look at that,” she snaps, voice hoarse from disuse. She thrusts a fist toward the book, unwilling to uncurl. “Just — look at it.”
Nott sees the moment Beau finds Caleb’s letter because her frown softens into grief, and her knuckles go white around the book’s cover.
“True Polymorph,” Beau says, voice suspiciously close to a rasp, “and Wish, those are the spells you need — ?”
“Yeah.”
Beau hums. She thumbs through more of the pages, movements slowing and speeding in time, and when she wipes her eyes quickly Nott graciously pretends not to see. Instead, she pulls her hood up over her head, and turns from the bright sunlight streaming into the cart.
A minute. A minute was all it took. A minute to find him, and it was a minute too long, and he had already bled out, and Jester’s diamond was useless.
He died smiling. He looked content. Nott feels sick. He’d laid a hand on the holster, as though he was directing Nott toward it. She’d rushed forward, and had tried to wake him, wordless but for screaming, and then she’d crumpled to her knees, and Caduceus had gently pushed her aside.
It was Caduceus who had unstrapped Caleb’s bag from his shoulders. It was Caduceus who had smoothed the jacket around his shoulders, who had pressed two fingers to the petals on the floor, the ones that had fallen from his hair, and turned them into earth.
It was Caduceus who had picked him up — because Caleb was so light, he never ate enough, for Caduceus it was easy — and said that they should bring him under the sun, at least, because he should not rot in the cool dark stone of a dungeon.
Not him.
Not her boy.
Fjord had followed Caduceus out, then Yasha, numbly. After a moment, Jester, who couldn’t conjure her trademark smile.
Nott had refused to move from her position, kneeling on the floor. After a moment, the silence in the cavern was cracked by a tremendous crash, and dust had shattered around her, and in the center of the cavern, there was Beau, chest heaving, knuckles scarlet, face wet, and not with sweat, and not with blood.
Her footsteps had echoed off the walls as she’d fled. And when Nott emerged from the dungeon, Beau was not with the rest of them. They’d had to wait, long into the night, before Beau rejoined them, stone-faced and absolutely stoic.
Here, weeks later, she says: “That’s the one you, uh...the one you wanted to learn, huh.”
“Yeah.”
Another wordless hum. Beau hands the journal back, and Nott accepts it, just as silent.
“You gonna learn it from him?”
Nott swallows, adjusting her cloak over her ears. She still keeps them wrapped in bandages. Her wrists, too. When Caleb’s bandages had come off his arms, she’d unwrapped her fingers. They’re firmly back in place, now. All of her wrappings are.
“Yeah.”
“Let me know,” Beau says quietly, and gestures toward the book. “If you, uh, need help.”
“Yeah,” Nott says. She clears her throat, feeling like she should say something else. “Thanks.”
Beau snorts. “Don’t thank me,” she spits, harsher than she probably means to. The knife that Caleb took to the chest, Nott knows, was not meant for him.
And Beau could not find either of their clerics in time.
“I just mean, uh, y’know...” Beau says, and gestures vaguely, with both hands. “If I can help.”
Nott shuts the book between her hands. The book holsters are sized for a body far larger than hers, but Jester could probably shrink them down.
For the moment, she tucks them in her bag. After a moment’s consideration, she gathers up all of Caleb’s books, and lines them carefully into neat stacks, sorted with a pattern that Nott doesn’t know, but that she guesses at. He would have laughed with her, and then he would have shown her what his pattern was, his hands gentle over hers.
He would hate to see her like this. He would hate to see any of them like this.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Nott says to the books.
Beau’s hands clench again to fists, and she looks away, brows stormy. She looks like Yasha.
Nott puts the books carefully in her bag, and buttons it neatly once she’s done. She shoulders the bag. It’s heavy, but nothing she cannot carry.
“I’ll need access to the library in Zadash,” Nott says, standing. In the distance, the Tri-Spires loom. Nott studies them for a moment. The library is only a handful of paces away from the southernmost spire. When she looks back, Beau is staring at her, surprise and — something else — in her gaze. “Will you take me?”
For a long moment, Beau is wordless. Nott doesn’t flinch.
Then, with all the sinewy grace of a panther rising, Beau pulls herself to her feet. She stretches, white and jagged scars stretching over her ribs, pulling herself together. Then she holds her hand out to Nott.
“Yeah,” she says, still gruff, voice worn, when Nott takes her hand. Beau gives their clasped hands a little shake. “I can get you there.”
Nott tightens the straps around her back, and makes her way to the front of the cart. The last time they passed through the gates of Zadash, Caleb had been reading, his shoulder pressed against Beau's, Frumpkin curled around Nott’s neck like a scarf.
Nott turns back to Beau, expression set.
“Good.”