Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The travel to Xhorhas was conducted mainly in silence.

Stealth, always, is a firm part of their repertoire, but in this time of war Master Ikithon had impressed upon them just how dearly they needed to keep this quiet.

They are silent killers, beings of shadows and nightmares and myth, already, but for this mission – to sneak into enemy territory, into the heart of it, to make an attack against newly declared heroes?

For any other, it would be a suicide mission.

It may still be, for them. They are more than willing to die for the Empire, for what they are fighting for in this war, for Master Ikithon if he tells them that their death is needed.

She – she tells herself that, at least, and she knows Eodwulf does the same.

It does them no good to question the orders and whims of their master this late into the game.

The travel to Xhorhas, beyond just being silent, is travel conducted in a manner so as to force it to take as long as possible.

They cannot disobey Ikithon’s orders, not without risking their minds, but they can – stretch the wording.

They head into Xhorhas by way of the Graying Wildlands – they tell him that it’s in order to avoid the war effort, and any border patrols surrounding the Ashkeeper peaks, but –

This way will take longer.

This way will give them more time to –

Time to maybe figure out a way out of this.

A way out of being forced to kill for their Master, being forced to kill for the Assembly whose means and motivations aren’t even to support the empire, but rather to support themselves.

It’s an endless amount of miles away from the borders of the Empire, some tiny cave in the mountains in the north of Xhorhas, that she hunkers down into Eodwulf’s bulk to shield her face from the wind and tries to puzzle out – well, a way out.

Because – if they just run, Ikithon will find them. They are shielded from scrying, but that will not stop him for long, not to find two ghosts that escaped his shadow with knowledge of all his secrets. He will find them.

If they – it breaks her heart, to even think of it, but at this point, she honestly doesn’t know if that’s a learned response or a natural one.

If they ally themselves with the Dynasty – make their way to Ghor Dranas, allow themselves to fail at the mission that they’ve been sent to do, and beg for protection in exchange for giving up a possible key to the Cerberus Assembly’s downfall – they might live.

Terrified, still, and captured and kept prisoner and pressed for information on how to worm into their country’s defenses, but alive.

She doesn’t really see any other options.

It’s – a terrible thing, maybe, but she is a terrible person, and any option is already more than she deserves.

Eodwulf agrees with her. It’s not something they have to discuss, not really, not when they don’t know if their things have a lead back to Ikithon, some magic eye that he spies on them through, if their amulets even block divination magic, or are simply placebos.

She’s lived the past sixteen years of her life with him by her side, and only him, after Bren lost himself and then died, and he’s lived through the same things she has.

Missions gone wrong, because of bad intel. Secrets heard, from Ikithon, in the dead of night, the bright of morning. Things wrong in their own heads. Memories that don’t line up right, suggestion spells pulling at them in ways that nearly risk their objectives, webs cluttering the dark corners of her mind when she tries to sleep.

She hadn’t started to doubt what she was doing until it had been far too late to escape, and she’s spent years and years tied down by Ikithon’s strings.

This chance, this mission, might be the only chance they have to make it out.

She’s going to seize it and squeeze it for all it may be worth.

And if she dies in the process –

She wouldn’t wish that fate for Wulf.

But she knows what kind of person she is, and what kind of destiny she deserves.

Death, while not something she would seek, not when she has a chance –

She won’t let her mind stray down that path.

But –

No.

They have this chance.

He had been awake for twenty-four cumulative hours, coming down off another mission, when Ikithon had given them the details for this one.

A group assassination, he had said.

Of a group – formerly known as winners of the victory pit in Zadash, mercenaries of a sort, who had somehow stumbled their way into owning a religious beacon of the Dynasty and returned it to them, making them into heroes under the Luxon’s image.

They had given the Dynasty too much hope.

It would be best, his Master had said, eyes tight and drawn and narrowed, yellowing skin wrinkling in a spiderwebbed pattern of cracks, if that hope was torn away.

He doesn’t know anything about this group.

Vague descriptions, for the lot of them – two humans, one aasimar, two tieflings, a half-orc, either a halfling or a gnome or possibly a goblin.

A monk of the Cobalt Soul – someone to watch out for, Ikithon had cautioned them, though not someone to be unduly concerned with.

A few blade users. A ranged attack dealer, a cleric, and a lower level magic user, either a wizard or a sorcerer.

Nothing that would be too much of a challenge, not for them. Their lives are built around one purpose, and that is to eliminate who Ikithon tells them too, to gather what information that person or persons have and then rip it out of them before leaving an empty corpse behind.

It will not be a challenge.

Mostly, though, mostly because they aren’t going to kill them.

He knew, as soon as this mission had been given, and he had gone back to his room with Astrid, for one night before they were sent away – they had locked eyes, halfway through washing the blood out of his clothes.

He knows her intimately.

Knows the pattern of glances, towards the amulets that they wear, the bracelets around their wrists, the glass within the door, the window, that she believes they are being watched.

Knows, from her sweeping gaze, the way her fingers flex towards her wrist, the carefully angled nod towards that same window, that this mission is one they are going to fail.

They’ve been waiting for an opportunity.

He hasn’t believed he was doing the right thing in a very long time. Not since –

Maybe not since Bren died, five years ago.

The world that he was told he was making better – that world cannot be better missing Bren’s light.

It had taken his death for him to realize that it had been snuffed out by Ikithon.

Their parents had been traitors, that is true, and they killed them because of that, and Bren broke because he killed them and listened to them die and couldn’t handle the disconnect within his mind.

He killed his parents.

They were traitors, and that is why he did it.

But they shouldn’t have had to die, not really. Traitors they might have been, and that is still not enough to have signed their death warrants.

He kills people all the time. Traitors, spies, enemies of the Empire.

Faceless, to him. Nameless sometimes.

People who probably didn’t deserve to die at his hand.

Not for this empire, not on the command of his Master whose work is built on deception and lies.

Ikithon’s work – Archmage of Civil Influence –

He controls the masses. Manipulates them into supporting those he wants to be supported and demonizing those he wants gone.

He does not know the extent to which Ikithon’s influence goes, within his own mind. He may never know that.

But if this chance –

Outside of his watching eyes, he may have the chance to find out.

He’s a terrible person. He killed people, and tortured countless others, and tried to make Ikithon believe in his power as an agent of the Empire.

Inherently wrong, inherently terrible.

Maybe less, if he and Astrid’s secret thoughts are correct, and Ikithon’s influence had torn asunder their own minds.

Still wrong, but maybe – maybe less.

Some part of him hopes for that.

It takes them almost a month to make their way to Ghor Dranas, disguised as beast-folk on the outer edges of the plains and then as drow, the closer to the city they get.

It’s easy enough to hide and stealth their way into the city.

Easier still to find the house that their supposed targets live in.

On the outskirts of the district, she and Eodwulf hide in an abandoned shed, that smells like something’s died and was buried, months ago, and change disguises and clothing.

They leave their belts, enchanted with all sorts of things – minor healing spells, mostly, to keep them alive while they finish missions with no healer in sight.

Enchanted with tracking spells, too, maybe.

She doesn’t know. Can’t risk that, the not knowing.

Identify can only do so much, and the two of them were never the best at it, to begin with.

The problem with being a duo is that their duo was meant to be a trio, and sometimes that shows in the gaps between their overlapping skill sets.

They’ve filled those gaps in, over the years, but it’s still just patchwork.

Batting in the quilted edges of their souls.

The house is unmistakable.

Concerning, slightly, that these heroes have made themselves so visible, with a tree leaking sunlight spreading it’s way sixty feet into the air above the tower, but unmistakable because of that.

It only takes thirty minutes of lurking, around on that street, for the two of them to be noticed.

They had made sure, that morning, that their disguises had been just on the edge of off. A style choice there, a misplaced hair on the other side, a skin tone just a little too ashen.

He knows, without having to look behind him, that he’s being tailed.

It takes a mere matter of moments, and a few frantic beats of his heart as he feels his fate edging closer, for him to be kneeling, caught in a hold person spell, at the –

Not feet, because the elf in front of him is hovering a few inches above the ground.

At the hems of the drow in front of him, bedecked in silver finery, combed hair slicked back over his head, staring at them with a bemused expression that fades to awareness and harshness as he and Astrid feel their disguise spells fade.

“Oh, dear,” the dark elf says, voice almost musical despite the situation.

Their world descends to darkness.

It’s two hours after that that she kneels on the marble floors of the Bright Queen’s court, wrists and ankles bound, items searched and taken away, amulet included.

It’s only a bit after that, twenty minutes into her pleading for an exchange of information to save them, that she glances behind her and stares into a dead man’s eyes.

Chapter Text

For a long instant, her mind and voice falter, and she falls to silence, staring into a memory that nearly threatens to overwhelm her.

He is dead.

She had watched his body be buried in the ground, after watching him fade away for eleven long years. She knows – he is dead, and before that he was gone.

Not here, looking older and rougher than she’s ever seen him look, dressed in the same clothes as the dark elves surrounding her and looking like he hasn’t had a decent night’s rest or meal in years.

Her first thought, seeing him – looking into Bren’s face, that she knows should be rotting in his grave, not here – is that this is a trick.

Some ploy, to get them to tell the truth, some illusion pulled out of their minds to get them to talk. It’s – harsh, but an efficient tactic, and one she’s employed before.

Her second thought is that he looks like he’s spent years on the run, that has worn his body down, and that his hands are clenched in the way that means he’s trying desperately not to let other people see how badly he’s shaking.

The Queen, on her dais above them, ceases talking words that she hadn’t been listening too, anyways, and glances between them and the ghost.

Her voice rings out across the marble floors.

“Widogast, do you know these people?”

She knows that name.

It’s not – not his name. but it is the name of a family that had lived on the edges of the forest outside of Blumenthal, the name of a family that had died when they were all still children, before they had even known each other, died during one of the hardest winters in her memory.

The ghost wearing her dead best friend’s face –

He takes a step forward, and folds his hands in front of him, still tightly clasped so as to hide the shaking.

And –

His voice sounds –

Darker, almost. Rougher around the edges.

More like how Bren’s voice had sounded hours into a training session when he was only a few steps away from losing his voice entirely.

“I do, Umavi.”

The Bright Queen nods, and then gestures something to the same elf that had captured them earlier – she can recognize it as sign language, but not the one she knows.

Mostly likely the drow version of sign, just as there is a underdark version of common…

She shoves that thought aside. She can muse about linguistic differences later, but now –

Around them, the rest of the court drains out of the room, until the only people that are left are the Queen, that same elf, and a group of people behind them, the – she’s thinking less illusion, now, but she really doesn’t know what else he could be, alongside people that she reconizes as –

The group they were initially send here to kill.

Curious.

The Queen turns her gaze back towards the two of them, and she bites her cheek under her gaze, chains still weighing around her wrists and ankles.

“If you would continue, then. From the beginning, and with less – posturing, this time. You understand your place in this court?”

She bites her cheek harder, and doesn’t wince at the hint of blood.

Wulf, next to her, nods his head, eyes still directed towards the floor.

“We understand.”

And with that, once again, they are off.

She manages to keep her head from turning, too many times, to see Not-Bren’s face, but it’s there in the back of her mind and she and Eodwulf trade off spilling secrets.

She goes through her suspicions, regarding the true motivations of the Assembly. Uses of mind magic and necromancy. Her own doubts about the validity of her mind. How the war, without the assembly helming the government, may fall to peace.

She pauses, to take a breath, after detailing some of what she suspects lies in her own mind, and looks behind her, towards –

There are too many details, accurate ones, for this to be an illusion. She can trace out the shape of his books, under his coat, spellbooks in holsters. Find the lines of his component pockets in the same places he kept them when they were younger. See the scars lacing up his arms, that match where she can, even now, feel the bite of crystal fragments under her own skin.

She doesn’t really know what that means, if he isn’t an illusion.

What this ghost from their past is doing here, in this terrible present.

“Caleb.”

The dark elf, to the side of the bright queen, descends from the dais and walks towards them, standing over them with his long robes drifting, weightlessly, two inches off the floor.

“I know of what details, of your past, you have shared with me, and with the court. Am I correct in understanding that these two are former – companions, of yours?”

She twists her head back, eyes hungry, and watches Maybe-Bren’s face twitch.

He nods, and then gestures sharply, eyes tight.

“They were, yes. I had – what suspicions they express of having memories tampered with are accurate. I spent a long period of time, before escaping, nearly catatonic under the stress of a half-broken modify memory spell, that I was only able to overcome after it was removed from my mind. But – Shadowhand –“

He nods to the Bright queen. “And your Majesty – I do not know if they are here of their own volition, or have been tugged here to make an attempt on your life by Ikithon’s will.”

The Shadowhand – she’s guessing that’s his title – steps closer to them, nearly touching but still apart.

She bites her fingernails into her palm.

This is going – well enough, she supposes. She isn’t expecting to come out of this free.

Just alive.

Hopefully with her own mind intact, if that’s still possible.

The elf’s voice echoes in the empty expanse of the chamber.

“And these two – companions, acquaintances? Or closer, akin to your own group now?”

She doesn’t – that question, to her, doesn’t make sense.

She doesn’t know why that would matter.

Behind her, she hears the shift of clothing.

Whatever Maybe-Bren does, whatever face he makes, what gesture he conveys, has the Shadowhand’s eyes widening and the nodding, and the Queen above them leaning forward on her throne.

“Jester, Caduceus, Caleb – do any of you have a spell to remove curses prepared?”

Oh.

That – works, she guesses.

There’s the clatter of footsteps, behind her, that echo on the marble floors as they move closer, and she watches as a tiefling and a firbolg come in front of her, looking to the Bright Queen who nods at them in turn.

The firbolg kneels in front of Eodwulf, and starts to whisper something that she misses in the chatter that the tiefling in front of her expels.

“Hey, it’s Astrid, right? Caleb told me about you, a couple of times, when he was really drunk, you know? But I’m glad your not like, super evil, because then we would have had to kill you and that would have made Caleb so sad – Can I touch you?”

Her blue hair almost bounces as she kneels on the ground, one hand clasped around a holy symbol she doesn’t recognize.

“Was?”

“Can I touch you? So I can cast remove curse, and then if you have any memories that have been messed up or like, magicy mind control stuff then that will all go away! And it might be a lot, but it will be pretty obvious you aren’t evil then so you can probably –“ She glances up, towards the Shadowhand, and grins at whatever gesture he makes – “Probably come home with us!”

She’s – very confused.

Doesn’t really have – any other options? Though?

Her head hurts.

“Okay,” she says, and the tiefling’s hand reaches out to touch her own, just as she hears Eodwulf let out a sob next to her, and she whips her head around, one hand jerking at her chains to try and reach him –

Warmth washes through her, and for an instant that feels like an eternity, she’s floating.

She watches, with eyes clouded, as millions of webs in her mind, arcing patterns of thin black cracks that have spread their way across her memories shatter into motes of light, corruption turning golden as she relives memories previously erased, altered, hidden.

She –

Two months ago, she had walked in on Ikithon discussing how to secure the succession to the throne to a candidate of his choosing, and he had put her on her knees and erased that from her mind.

Three years ago, when he had tried to put in another round of crystals – she had nearly died. She had been sick, so sick, shaking with fever from infection, and he had erased weeks of dying from her mind and written it off as a failure.

Five years ago –

Bren didn’t –

She didn’t see his body.

Ikithon told her, and Wulf, that he had died, and implanted the memory of his funeral and memory service in their heads, and he had –

She had walked in on him, a week later, poring over maps and arguing with a guard over how he could have escaped.

And he had taken that from her.

He had made her think he was dead –

Ten years of betrayal and memory and torture and death cycle through her head, and she can feel herself start to shimmer, mind fraying from where she’s been frantically keeping herself together for years and years, ever since –

Sixteen years ago.

She had poisoned her parents.

Ikithon had –

Not traitors.

Killed them while they smiled, and eaten the food that she had prepared.

Watched them die.

She understands why Bren broke now.

Because this –

This is her, shattering.

She can feel her eyes dull as somewhere, inside of her, a part of her that she’s hidden away starts to scream.

He blinks, and his world has changed.

The firbolg, in front of him – “Caduceus,” he had said. “Caduceus Clay. Can I help you?” – that had touched him, and torn the clouds away – smiles, small and still so large in his frame, and stands.

He nods at someone, behind him, and Bren rounds his back and is there, in front of him, real and alive, and he can feel tear tracks making their way down his face.

He’s holding it together, though, more than Astrid, who’s curled in on herself, a keening noise that’s so quiet it’s almost imperceptible warbling in her throat.

Right.

Okay.

He needs to –

Protect her.

Anger burns in him, fire and brimstone, but he can’t – Ikithon is out of his reach.

He doesn’t want to –

Bren is here, and alive, and now kneeling in front of him, one hand outstretched.

His voice is older, and worn, and feels like coming home.

“Wulf?” He asks, quietly, and the Shadowhand clears his throat behind him, clapping his hands together.

He flinches, at the noise, too worn out to repress the reaction, and Bren’s face tightens.

“I think that that, is more than clear enough. We may, later in this game, have questions to ask of them, if they are up to it, but for now – Nott, the chains will unlock with the key you took from my pocket earlier today.”

There’s movement, behind him, a long sigh and fond tiny smile from Bren in front of him, and a goblin comes skittering to the front, feet tapping against the floor, long dress covered in embroidered flowers and – buttons? – swirling with her movement.

She narrows her eyes at him, but moves over and unlocks his chains, and lets them clatter to the ground.

She does the same for Astrid, and as soon as they are both free he moves, carefully, til he’s pressed up against her side, one hand grasping hers.

She doesn’t react, to the contact, still making that terrifying whine, and he can feel his ears twitch lower on his head, an almost-growl building in his throat.

Bren puts his hands out, placatingly, and he knows – that is Bren. He doesn’t know how, or why, but it is, and he’s so happy that he’s alive, and so terrified right now, his mind held together with thread.

“Eodwulf, vertrau mir.”

He shouldn’t, probably.

But he does.

He trusted him, and does trust him, and will trust him.

It doesn’t make what’s happening any easier, but maybe –

A little less awful.

Somewhere, inside of him, he feels hope.

The Shadowhand gives them a carriage, or wagon, or train car – he doesn’t really know, and he doesn’t really care. He knows that it’s safe, and dimly lit, and he’s on a seat, curled next to Astrid, watching buildings fly past.

The others – he doesn’t even know their names, yet – were walking, so it’s just him and Astrid and Bren and the Shadowhand.

Astrid is still – absent.

He holds her hand a little tighter, and blinks fog out of his mind. He can’t drift away, right now. Not with Astrid already locked in her own mind. He needs to keep her safe.

The carriage takes them to the house – the tree still glowing with condensed sunlight – and he half carries Astrid as they descend from the carriage and enter the house.

It’s a nice house.

There are murals, painted on the walls, fields of flowers and trees and lichen and mushrooms, sights he recognizes from the Empire and some from the Coast.

Bren leads them to a room filled with books, shelves lining the walls, and a table cluttered with alchemical equipment against the far wall – but one, too, with a veritable mountain of pillows and blankets in the corner that he immediately leads Astrid to, letting her down and curling next to her with a sob building in his throat.

There’s an exchange, of sorts, with the Shadowhand, but he leaves a moment later, and the room is silent except for his own panicked breathing and Astrid’s keening hum.

Bren sits down, cross-legged, in front of him, and stares.

He blinks, tears collecting in his eyes, and then smiles.

“Eodwulf, I – I’m so glad.”

He feels himself lean, and then shifts, so as to not have to let go of Astrid’s hand, as he collapses forward into Bren, his other arm hugging around his back as he stifles a sob in the soft fabric of his coat.

He smells like smoke and spell components, and its familiar enough after years of absence and emptiness that he feels –

Scared and near-alone, in a foreign country, his mind in shambles, and the safest he’s felt in years.

For a long time, they just hold each other, and cry about years lost.

Chapter Text

Hours of thinking, and dwelling in half-forgotten memories, and screaming later, she manages to wrench some awareness of what’s happening around her from the grip that Ikithon holds on her mind and focuses.

It’s hard-won, and tenuous, but she’s – alert, at least for now, and that’s better than the unreal state she was drifting in before, full of memories and screaming and people she couldn’t save.

It’s dark in here.

It’s – dark, everywhere, in Ghor Dranas, but in here, it is not the dark of the starlit day of the city, instead the darkness of a room closed off and covered, walls and a ceiling and curtains over the windows.

It’s dark, but there’s – she blinks, a stray tear falling down her cheek, and can find the outline of a door across the room, thin stripes of golden light illuminating its edges.

But other than that, it’s pitch dark in here.

She –

The dark had been safe.

She was hidden, there, after all, a creature of shadow that came in the night to kill –

It doesn’t really feel safe anymore.

(Is anywhere safe, now? Has anywhere been safe since she cooked her parents' last meal and killed them with it -)

She shoves that thought away, because – she can either deal with it and let herself drift off and fall away into the void, or she can suck it up and figure out where the fuck she is.

She hadn’t been – hadn’t been paying attention, earlier. They had moved, from the court, but she had been trapped in reliving her own memories, the taste of mushroom risotto thick and cloying and poison on her tongue.

Wherever they are, at least she and Wulf are together.

And if this is a cell – it’s one filled with soft blankets that she’s wrapped up in. She can’t tell what color they are – her dark vision is better than the average person, but it’s not on the level that Wulf’s is, half-elven heritage and all. She –

She doesn’t really care what color they are. It would be something to ground herself against, in this room, but it’s –

It’s dark.

She doesn’t like it.

It doesn’t feel safe anymore.

Eodwulf, next to her, huffs in his sleep and turns over, and she takes his movement as a chance to pull her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them in a facsimile of a hug.

Her hands are shaking, she notes absently, and she snaps, once.

The snap is mostly unnecessary. She’s good at making the somatic components for her spells as unnoticeable as possible, and for dancing lights, she just needs to tap two fingers together.

But the snap, itself, is grounding. Firm pressure, sharp noise.

She only creates one globule of light, and it hovers a few inches in front of her nose, dim and sending a wash of yellow over the room.

It is a room, she can see now, not a cell. There are bookcases, lining the walls, a table full of alchemical and chemistry equipment in the corner, a massive table pockmarked with acid scars and burn marks in the center of the room. She and Eodwulf are crammed into one corner, in a veritable nest of blankets and pillows.

They’re purple, and orange, and yellow, and green, she can see now, finely woven wool and softer materials that she doesn’t recognize.

A weird arrangement of colors. Like these had all been used in different parts of wherever this is, and were put in here for them, maybe. That doesn’t – it doesn’t make sense, for it to be soft.

She clicks the light out with another tap of her fingers as she hears footsteps in the hallway outside.

Gods, where is she.

The door creaks open, and more light floods into the room.

She can trace one of the scars bisecting Wulf’s eyebrow, now, faint in the light but real and bloody in her new memories.

The figure in the doorway stands there, light streaming from behind them, and she draws her knees in a little tighter to her chest, fingers twisting in preparation to cast –

She’s low on spells. Hasn’t had a full night’s rest, in gods knows how long, but she has enough left to keep Wulf safe, if it’s –

The light from beyond the room dims, and is then replaced entirely with a globule of light held within the person’s palm, and she’s left staring at the light dancing across Bren’s face.

She blinks, and he’s still there, terrifying and alive and older.

A cat – a cat?

It stays stubbornly existent when she blinks again, so she’s guessing that it’s real – winds its way around his legs, and then meows and approaches her cautiously.

She lets it sniff her fingers, and it does so, before nudging its head into her hand and starting to purr.

It doesn’t look a lot like how Frumpkin looked, from what she remembers of the few times she had met her before leaving for Rexxentrum, in the month or so she had known Bren before the Academy, but something about it reminds her of her anyways.

She hums in the back of her throat, and the cat’s purrs grow louder.

Bren crosses the room and sits near her, cross-legged, face set in an expression that’s heart-wrenchingly familiar, even after all this time.

“Hallo, Astrid.”

She pets the cat, and meets his gaze.

“Bren. You are –“

Stops, to end the sob that’s building in her throat.

“You’re alive.”

He nods, and she stops petting the cat for a moment to swipe wetness away from her cheeks.

“He – He told you I was dead?”

She laughs, low and bitter.

“We buried you, Bren. At least – he made us think that. Under the maple tree.”

She had hated that tree for years.

Couldn’t stand the thought of her best friends body trapped in its roots, but Ikithon had said no to cremation – and she knows why, now, because there was only so far he had thought to stretch the chained memories, but.

“I’m sorry.”

She glances up, and takes in how Bren’s started to clench his fists together, nails pressing half crescents into his palms. She makes a soft noise, and he blinks, looking down and then sitting on his hands.

“Why are you – you broke, Bren. Maybe I was mad – I wasn’t, but maybe I was – but I – we didn’t know the truth. You, obviously, managed to work your way around to it, and shatter in the aftermath –“ she hisses, blinking a fresh wave of tears away.

“you don’t need to apologize for that. We missed you, fuck, of course we did, but it wasn’t… he made us. It’s still – my fault, that they died, but he made us. We were just constructs of his will.”

Things made to kill for him.

Not even people, not really.

She doesn’t think that she’s been a person for a long time.

“I’m not,” Bren says, sounding frustrated, and she watches as his hands twitch from underneath his knees.

“I’m not sorry for breaking. That was… it wasn’t something I could have avoided. But I am sorry, for leaving, and for letting the two of you still be – controlled by him for so long while I was free.”

She can feel her own eyes widen, and she snaps her fingers, uncaring if the light wakes Wulf up. Golden motes swirl around her head, and they intensify as she stares at Bren.

“Don’t you – don’t you fucking dare, Bren. You were free. You – I don’t know what happened, but you got out. I don’t blame you for leaving us behind, any one of us would have done the same to stay safe – he was in our heads, Bren. Might still be. Don’t apologize for making a rational fucking decision.”

She knows, by the change in his breathing, that Wulf is awake now, but she doesn’t let that stop her.

She leans forward, and grips one of Bren’s hands in her own shaking one.

She’s tethered to this moment and place by the thinnest of threads, but she needs to make sure he knows this.

“Bren, you can be sorry all you want, but I’m so fucking glad you made it out. You – you’re free, and because of that we are, too, and we were sent to kill you and would have done it if we hadn’t been testing at the chains in our mind since the day he told us you were dead. You are – brilliant, Bren. Shining.”

Her words taper out, and she just stares, drinking in his face.

There’s a burn scar that she doesn’t remember, creeping under the scarf he’s wearing, a few more that she does, now, with fragmented memories patched together in her head.

He’s older, and worn. But his face –

He smiles at her, small and lopsided, and his eyes look just the same.

Right.

Okay.

This is real, then.

His eyes are alive.

The same blue she can track through some of the worst months of her life, in the time that Ikithon changed between torturing them and showing them how to be tortured. Blue that she’s seen shining with pride and rage and love.

Blue, now, that’s flecked with gold that glitters in the light.

(and that’s – wrong, isn’t it? The gold?)

Slowly, cautiously, she lifts up her hand and traces her thump underneath one of his eyes, a question in her gaze.

As she watches, he blinks, and then his face falls.

He gives her a sad smile, and traces the same movement across her own cheekbone.

“A leftover of – enchantment spells can leave scars. Your eyes, Astrid – he probably made you not notice, but –“

Oh.

In the light of the room, she wipes off a tear, and looks at it.

Actually looks.

And tries not to let it shatter her again when she sees the glimmering droplet of gold on the tip of her finger.

Her awareness blinks as she does, and an eternity of blankness in her mind later, as she pieces her focus back together, she’s almost lying down, head pillowed in Eodwulf’s lap.

He looks down at her, concern in his gaze, and she can make out the lines of gold on his cheeks, shining against darker skin.

His eyes are still – the same blue so pale that it’s almost white, but they look duller.

A cloud of gold over his iris.

His pupils are golden.

She wonders, for a moment, if her own eyes look the same.

It’s too –

Too much, for right now.

She lets her focus drift, and falls half-asleep to the sound of Wulf and Bren talking above her.

He’s tired, achingly so, but for right now it feels like he and Astrid are trading off shifts of being awake, and he would do a great many things for her, including staying awake now when every part of him is screaming for sleep.

“Are we – um.” He stops, and rubs at the faint scarring of manacles from long ago around his wrists.

“Are we prisoners of the Dynasty, just sent to be watched over here? Or – bait, or –“ he asks, and Bren waves a hand frantically, cutting him off and shaking his head.

“Nein, you are – Essek may have more questions, when you are both feeling better, but you are free to – leave, if you so wished, though I would hope that you didn’t, at least for a while.”

Not trapped here, then.

He doesn’t – they won’t be leaving anytime soon, but it’s good to know that they could.

If things turn bad.

“Where is – here? Your house?”

Bren nods.

“My – group, and I –“ his voice falters on the word group, like he’s about to substitute another word but stops himself, “- we were granted this house after an errand we ran for one of the arcanists. It is – granted on the behalf of Den Thelyss, but it has been ours for a while now. The tree, the murals, the garden – all of it were efforts made by the others to make this place home. This room is – a combination library and lab? I use it, as does Nott – the goblin, it’s complicated - that released you earlier, alongside her husband, whom you haven’t met yet.”

He pauses, and drinks in a long breath.

“I didn’t want to force you to choose a room, not to soon, or force you into my room, so this seemed like the best option.”

He hums, and taps his fingers against the back of Bren’s hands in a silent question.

Without a noise, the other man turns his hands over and laces his fingers through Eodwulf’s in a movement that’s sixteen years out of practice and still familiar as anything.

“Is your room – upstairs, then?”

He hadn’t been paying attention, earlier, much to his own chagrin.

Bren sighs, sounding somehow fond, and jerks his head at one of the bookcases.

“It is actually – Jester and Beauregard set it up so that when you pull on a copy of Tusk Love, the bookcase swings open, and my room is through there. If you – there is a room upstairs, but we can probably drag another bed or two in there, if you wish.”

If they –

“Bren, if you think we’re going to be able to sleep knowing that you’re an entire floor away, you really don’t –“

He stops himself before he finishes saying, “ – know us at all,” because that is too mean for him, even if Astrid could have made it a joke, but he knows that Bren catches what he had meant anyways.

Astrid shifts, from where she had drifted off to somewhere hurting, and stares at his face for a moment before blinking and digging her head a little deeper into his stomach, burrowing into his warmth.

Her eyes are distant, but more than that they’re clouded with the gold that he knows washes over his own in a glaze.

Another scar to add to the collection, he thinks, and then –

Wait.

He doesn’t – his own crystals were deemed a failure, years ago, but Astrid’s –

The most recent round for her had been barely two months ago.

And wracking his memories –

He doesn’t remember them being removed, which isn’t uncommon. He hasn’t been at her side for every hour of those months, but he remembers previous times, when she had burned with fever after a failed round.

If they haven’t been taken out –

When he lays his hand against Astrid’s brow, she leans into the touch, an unintelligible hum resonating in her throat that does nothing to draw off his mounting panic.

She’s warm, he notes, and when he raises his eyes again Bren’s staring at him in concern.

He shifts his hand, and presses long fingers against the rough cloth covering Astrid’s arms. They’re still in their vollstrecker robes, all rough blacks, and the texture grates against his fingertips.

What grates more, is the warmth he can feel almost radiating off of her arms, and the outlines of crystal fragments under her skin.

Not good.

Very, very much not good.

Bren meets his gaze, and his quiet certainty shows that he understands the meaning of his motions.

For right now, there’s nothing to really do but wait.

He and Bren have a thousand stories to tell each other, in the hours before Astrid wakes and they will need to figure out a way to remove shards without the backlash killing her.

A problem for whatever starlight passes as morning.

For right now, Bren sits against him, moved to be by his side, and his cat – a familiar, he understands, one almost crackling with the ozone taste of the feywild in the back of his mouth – curls up with them, and he waits away the hours til morning with kinder memories on his lips.

Chapter Text

Everything is gone hazy and dark when she wakes up, and it is disorienting and terrifying and has her cluttering back against the wall, mind reeling.

Not the library. Somewhere – it’s dark.

Rough blankets litter the ground at her feet. 

Her mind is – trembling, practically. Shaking itself apart.

She knew, on some intrinsic level, that her memories weren’t all there. It’s easy to figure out, when she has month long gaps in between missions, impressions that don’t line up and slide away when she tries to focus on them.

It’s different, though, knowing that and facing it. When divine light rips through her mind and tears the walls away, and she’s left shaking on the floor of this stupid house, in this stupid country, forcibly confronted with the fact that she hasn’t been herself in sixteen years.

She killed her parents.

She’s killed so many people, since then, but they were the only people she knew and loved and poisoned anyways.

She fed them their deaths, and watched them die.

Poison drips from her hands.

She clenches her fist a little tighter in her hair, pulling at the strands, and scrambles back against the wall as she hears the sound of footsteps outside.

They pass without opening the door.

She isn’t sure why she’s in here, or where here even is. She had been –

Somewhere else. Not here, in a cave, not here, at Ikithon’s cottage –

She rocks back, and her spine hits the wall and sends a shock through her body that feels like clarity, almost, so she does it again, and again, and then stops when she hears the footsteps returning outside.

There’s – someone outside the door, and she doesn’t know who it is, and if she tried to speak right now Common is out of her grasp, and there is someone there –

“Astrid?”

It’s Bren’s voice.

Fuck.

She hums, and scoots away from the wall, closer to the door.

She doesn’t trust new Bren. Doesn’t trust that this isn’t – some test, by Master Ikithon, some strain at her loyalties while she’s really asleep at the cottage. It would explain – a lot.

Explain how nothing feels real, even the pain from her hands scratching at her arms.

Explain how she feels like she’s wrapped in blankets too tight, too sweltering, wrapped up and slowly boiling alive.

But she trusts him enough.

“It’s Bren. Are you alright? Eodwulf said that you ran.”

Zemnian.

Ikithon doesn’t –

He doesn’t like it when they speak it, because it ties them to their past and they need to be free for their futures.

She still speaks it alone, with Wulf, but –

A point in this being real, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Ja,” she gets out, and winces at the ripples of pain that sends through her throat.

She must make a noise then, some exhalation of pain that clues him in to something being wrong, because his voice responds, “Astrid? I’m going to open the door, okay?”

She flinches back, as the door swings open, and then peels her eyes open despite the pain that the light makes in her head to glare, wordless, at Bren’s – stupid face.

Stupid, stupid, face.

He kneels down, next to her, and shuts the door slightly, just enough so that it’s darker and she’s not still squinting.

He holds his hand out, not touching her, not yet – he keeps talking to her about how she’s allowed to say no to things she doesn’t want. How nobody will touch her unless she wants it. How –

They aren’t keeping her here.

If she wanted to leave, she could.

Part of her does.

Part of her wants to run, and hide, and ignore how she’s shattering in slow motion.

The larger part of her wants to stay here forever and break.

She nods, at Bren’s questioning look, and his hand ghosts over her own before coming up, palm out, to rest against her forehead.

He hisses, and pulls his hand back before reaching down to feel at her wrist, two fingers over her pulse point as she stares at him, heart rabbit-quick from whatever anxiety forced her into this room, back into the dark.

“Scheisse. Alright, let’s – are you okay to move? You have a fever again.”

Oh.

That would explain why she feels like she’s burning.

His hands take hers as she silently asks for help up, and as she blinks – she’s vertical, vision greying out at a pang of dizziness washes through her, and then she’s swaying and falling and with another blink she’s on the ground again, head between her knees as she tries to breathe.

Fuck.

No, seriously, fuck.

She doesn’t look up, but she can hear the dull clink of copper wire as Bren twists it around his hands and casts message.

“Wulf, can you – the closet nearest to the door. I can come and get you, if you need me to, but the others are not home right now.”

There’s a pause, and then he whispers, “Ah.”

It’s not a good sound, she feels.

There’s the soft pad of footsteps, the sound grating against her ears, and she flinches back, hands digging in a little tighter against her scalp, eyes still closed.

But, a moment later, she relaxes, because she knows the pattern of Wulf’s footsteps.

There’s a tap against her knuckles, Bren’s fingers, smooth where there should be roughness because she remembers when he managed to burn his fingertips badly enough that they scarred over smooth, at the cottage, before.

She blinks her eyes open, and the light is dim again.

It’s too warm in here.

She’s burning.

But Bren’s hands, when she blinks at him, feel like ice against her forehead, and she leans into it.

It’s too dark in here, for a second, and she forces her eyes open, staring at the glowing eyes of Frumpkin, Bren’s weird magic cat.

The cat’s magic feels fey.

Comforting, in a sense. Reminds her of the forests surrounding Blumenthal.

Reminds her of –

Tiny, buried crescent moon pendants that She and Wulf and Bren had dug up in the woods, on Midsummer, that had turned to dust and decay in her hands when she tried to wear them, old and corrupted from years of hiding in the dirt.

Where’s –

Wulf. She needs –

She forces her eyes open, again, from where they had fallen closed, and stares up at Bren and Eodwulf, talking about something she doesn’t care to pay attention to because it’s in Common and if it’s in Common it’s probably not important.

Tries to get words, to form actual coherency, in her mouth, and feels as they die in her throat.

It’s not usually her issue, not-talking, because she’s good at talking, good at twisting her words to spin confessions out of traitors, good at using them like the poison the swims through her veins, good at using them to whisper apologies to people she’s killed late at night when she knows no one’s listening except their ghosts.

But now – she’s exhausted, and her throat hurts, and her head hurts, and everything hurts, and it’s too dark and too bright and she’s hot, burning, and words are ashes.

She lifts her aching hands, instead, bright sparks of pain drifting where Ikithon had broken them years and years and years ago and they had healed wrong, that she’s been ignoring for sixteen years but seems overwhelmingly present now. Her arms ache.

Deep, and unpleasant, and sending shooting lines of fire down her arms.

She taps Bren’s foot, and he glances down.

“Help,” she signs, clumsy and with pain radiating from every motion.

Then, “Bed. Safe.”

Bren’s eyes, in the dim light of this closet, are too unlit for her to read the expressions that don’t cross his features, but she knows he understands.

“We can get you to bed. Will you let me help you?”

Oh.

The hallway feels like both an eternity and a split second.

Eodwulf half-carries her, Bren’s arms on around her shoulders, and they make a slow shuffle through the hall and back into the library.

Bren glances, then, between the nest of blankets in the corner of the room and the secret entrance to his room, and she watches with muddled understanding as he creaks open the bookcase and starts to drag blankets and pillows into the room.

A few blinks later, and she’s being laid down on a pair of mattresses shoved against the wall in Bren’s room, a mound of blankets strewn across them.

It’s soft.

Comfortable.

She hasn’t slept consistently on a bed in years.

(Weapons don’t need comfort.)

So even just this, the pair of mattresses that she and Wulf now sleep curled up together on, with blankets and pillows that are softer than anything she’s touched in years –

That is one of the things that make her more certain that this is reality.

Because if this was a test – Ikithon wouldn’t give her comfort.

Or maybe he would.

She doesn’t really know him. Never really did.

Eodwulf lies down next to her, pressed against her sternum, and starts up a low hum in the back of his throat, something familiar and just out of her grasp to name.

She loses time.

She never was the one with a head for numbers and constants.

That had always been Bren. She’s more likely to focus on something while time drifts out of her reach, minutes passing into hours without her notice.

Working without him, after he had broken, had for the few months until Eodwulf managed to keep time, been – stressful, to say the least.

Showing up late to briefings because she didn’t know what time it was wasn’t an excuse.

(There are scars, alongside her broken fingers, that remind her of that.)

When she –

She blinks, and there’s a damp cloth over her eyes, cold and soft and dark, and it feels nice, overwhelmingly so, and it’s another point in favor of this being reality, however terrified that makes her feel, because Ikithon doesn’t know nice.

He is not kind, not good, not right.

She sleeps.

And when she sleeps –

She dreams.

Light shines through dark canopies and sends shadow shapes streaming against leaf-ridden ground.

She’s running.

Not out of fear, or to escape, but she’s running towards something, bright and brilliant in the distance.

Her feet skid to a stop as she stares up as a tree, massive and scraping its way towards the sky.

There are flames licking at her feet, but she doesn’t feel them as she starts to climb.

The stars are beautiful.

And then, as she blinks, they’re gone.

Bren makes her cookies, burnt but still edible, in the kitchen of this place that he lives, now, and she eats them, and watches as they crumble to mold and mushrooms and rot in her hands.

She makes bread with unsteady hands, and watches as the tiefling from before eats it, and grins at her, and grins wider as blood starts to weep from her eyes and she falls seizing and dying to the floor.

Caduceus makes her food, and she doesn’t eat it, because she didn’t make it which means she can’t trust it, but she touches the spoon, anyway, when he offers her a taste, and she watches as her poison spreads out and contaminates everything and she lives weeks in a house of dead bodies.

She feels –

Not better, when she wakes up.

Less sick, she thinks, but more unsettled, memories creeping in at the edges of the shreds she’s stitched together to create a self.

Sitting up takes more effort than it should, but it’s accomplished with only the faintest nausea pulling at her stomach, and that’s good enough for her.

It’s dark outside. Well –

It’s always dark, here.

Not a good indicator of anything.

Wulf is still here, in between her and the wall, still sleeping, brow relaxed.

Bren isn’t, though, and that – she wants him to be here.

Wants him to be safe.

She doesn’t trust this here, this place, but she –

But he’s not here.

She’d switched over from components to a focus years ago, after half of her components had burned away in an explosion that had left her just barely alive and she’d had to fight off waves of guards with only cantrips. Now, she uses the gem inset in the bracelet she wears on her left wrist.

It’s just quartz. Not – anything rarer, she would have given over to Ikithon, for experiments and components and for the crystals that he was still trying to force work in their arms, before.

She hates having a crystal that close to her skin, but the alternative, of not having her magic, is worse.

She’s already spent years with shards within her. Having one just close is an improvement.

If she thinks, harder than just a passing perusal, she gets flashes of memory of the last few hours-days, snippets of her screaming in hoarse Zemnian while Bren holds her and burns her – that isn’t really. Furred and clawed hands on her arms, and blood.

She knows – that isn’t real. At least not entirely. Shouldn’t mention that.

There’s another, that’s calmer, where she’s burning but there’s ice, too, pressing into her and being carefully fed to her by soft unscarred hands. Another memory, where she’s bleary and half awake and shaking with something, fever and memories alike, while Bren’s hands hold onto her wrist and a wave of divine energy washes through her without fixing anything.

Another, where she chokes on the poison that spills from her like a wave.

That one probably isn’t real.

Hopefully, at least. She doesn’t want to kill Bren’s friends.

She raises her wrist, weakly, and musters enough magic to cast message, pointing her fist towards the direction of the kitchen.

“Where are you,” she half-whispers, half-thinks, and then lets the magic subside as she blinks darkness out of her vision.

She doesn’t get a response.

Grits her teeth.

Tries again, this time towards the garden, and is rewarded with a panicky sounding, “Scheisse – One moment.”

He must run down the stairs, because he enters the door less than a minute later, breath wheezing on the exhale.

She frowns, and points at him and then the bed.

He rolls his eyes and sinks down onto the edge of the mattress, and she carefully moves aching limbs over to sit next to him.

She leans her head against his shoulder, carefully – (poison, poison, poison, her mind whispers. You’ll kill him, he’ll die just like your parents, you’ll watch him bleed and fall – shut up.) and hums, something sweet and lilting from a lifetime ago.

He hums back, only slightly off-pitch.

“How long –“ she gets out, and then stops.

Good enough.

Her arms ache. There’s new bandages, there, and she can smell blood, almost.

They still ache less than they did – before.

“A couple of days. You were – the crystals were reacting. Caduceus and Jester helped to get them out, but you were –“

Bren’s voice cuts off in a cross between a sob and a sigh, and she leans in a little harder into his shoulder, humming increasing in volume.

“Ah,” she mouths, and leans a little harder against Bren’s shoulder.

Listens to him breathe, for a long silent moment.

She’s glad he didn’t get sick, when his crystals came out.

All three of them are too skinny, but he –

She worries.

She missed him, for so many years, when he had been broken and then had just been lost.

His hand finds hers.

“How about we get you some food, ja? And some for Wulf, once he wakes up.”

She – hesitates.

Taps him three times, across the knuckles, and he nods.

“I’ll let Caduceus know. We can probably move a chair into the kitchen, so that you can watch.”

Hums, again.

Okay.

That’s –

Okay.

“Caduceus is – the firbolg?”

Bren nods. “Ja. He is a – a good egg.”

The food, that Caduceus lets her watch him make, is good.

Eodwulf wakes up, halfway through eating, and devours an entire bowl of oatmeal while Bren watches in half-awe, half-disgust.

She falls firmly on the side of disgust. Oatmeal is bad.

She has a nightmare, that night, about burning, but when she wakes up, the room is chilled, and Eodwulf is next to her, and Bren is asleep against her thigh after she had practically forced him into the bed nest.

She falls asleep again, shortly after, and dreams of trees.

Chapter Text

They’ve been here for a week.

Seven days, and Ikithon has yet to find them.

Astrid’s nearly well again.

Better than she’s felt in years, she tells him one night, in the mattresses in Bren’s room.

They haven’t gotten healing in a long time, beyond that of what healing potions can do in an emergency and sleep.

But now, she breathes easier in the mornings, and the gashes where crystals used to sap away at her strength are gone from her skin. The scars remain, of course, but they match the ones on his own arms, the ones on Bren’s arms.

A set of cracked pottery held together with paste, the three of them.

He –

Little pains, that he’s been ignoring for years, have been resolved. Things that he had shoved to the back of his mind, cataloged as normal, gone, and he feels lighter than he has in years.

This place, for all its darkness, is lighter than anywhere he’s lived since he left Blumenthal.

He’s lighter.

It’s weird, being free.

Bren – it’s weird seeing him free and in his right mind, as much as any of them are. It’s weird being here, in this house, full of Bren’s new companions that he hasn’t really met yet.

Well.

Technically he’s met the clerics, in passing, when they’ve healed them, and he’s seen the goblin and her – partner? Husband? Friend? He’s not sure – moving around the place, using the lab when they aren’t in there, and he’s seen the half-orc and the other humans in the background, when he’s in the kitchen watching the firbolg make food, or sitting under the tree with Bren and Astrid.

He’s there now, actually, under that tree.

Soaking in as much sunlight as he can from the little jars that dot that branches.

Bren isn’t here.

He had to leave, to go talk to the Shadowhand – something about magic? He had been worried that it had been about them, about staying here, but Bren had reassured him that wasn’t the case, and he –

He trusts him.

Gods, he trusts him.

Most of the others aren’t here, either. Left on various shopping missions, food and weapons and armor and such.

It’s just him, and Astrid, and the woman that he thinks is named Yasha, up here.

She’s very tall.

Very uh –

Physically imposing?

He’s used to being around wizards, and magic users. His own strength, in comparison to theirs – something built from farm work as a boy, and the fact that he favored blades over magic, when he has the option – compared to the other mages, he was a muscled brute.

Compared to her, though, he feels small.

Not in a bad way. He knows that he isn’t the strongest, especially not anymore, after years of using magic rather than blades.

She looks like she could throw him into the sun, maybe.

Good thing that the sun isn’t here?

Well- the sun is here, obviously, he just can’t see it, and he’s actually really curious about how this whole dome works, whether the sun is just blotted out and the sky is a projection, or whether it’s actually a modified time shift that keeps the city in perpetual night –

Astrid pokes him on the shoulder and he stops mumbling in Celestial under his breath, smiling back at her exasperation.

Yasha is staring, again.

She’s quiet.

It doesn’t make him nervous, necessarily, but it makes him –

He doesn’t really know.

Out of sorts.

He glances back down, and resumes braiding the short strands of Astrid’s hair. He can’t get too many braids, not with it short – and she’s had it short since they were kids, so that’s not going to change anytime soon. His own hair, he – he wants to grow it out, again, but that will take a while.

For the first time in a long time, he has the chance to wait.

There’s a shift, from where Yasha’s sitting against the tree trunk, and he startles, slightly, at the musical sounds of Celestial that come from her mouth.

“You speak star-song?”

He looks at her, and she blinks at him, face blank but eyes – mismatched and more colorful than any other human’s he’s seen – bright.

“Yes,” he sings back, and watches as a smile starts to spread across her face.

“I do not mean to – make you uncomfortable. Ca-Bren felt it would be best if someone stayed with you, and the others had things to do.”

He shakes his head. “No, it’s – it’s fine.”

He’s figured out, at this point, that Bren’s been using a different name with this party, this – the Mighty Nein, a name that never fails to make him amused and confused in equal measure.

He should probably ask him what name he prefers, but –

Bren.

Their Bren, their flame.

Caleb is a good name, but it is the name of someone in the village who had died when they were kids.

Bren is fire still burning, relentlessly alive.

Astrid taps his knee, and he unthreads his fingers from her hair, letting her sit up on the grass.

It’s incredible, what they’ve managed to grow up here. Grass and moss and the tree and flowers, mushrooms and lichen sprawling their way across the shadowed areas.

“How did you learn Celestial? I have been – meaning to ask Bren, but I haven’t managed yet.”

Yasha reminds him of Bren, in little ways. How Bren was at Soltryce, quiet and withdrawn until you got to know him. A quiet certainty, about them.

“We learned in school. A lot of old arcane texts, and verbal components of spells are in star-song. You?”

Astrid settles back down and lays her head in his lap.

She’s been quiet today.

“Just – always spoken it, I guess.”

There’s an energy, about Yasha, that makes him think about flying.

Something kept tethered.

A few things come together in his mind.

She isn’t – isn’t human, is she. The eyes, the Celestial, the hair, her energy –

An aasimar, he thinks.

Angel-kin.

Fallen, he thinks secondly, and the words fall out of his mouth before he can spin them into something less harsh.

“You are – descended?”

The word, in Celestial, for a fallen aasimar doesn’t translate well into Common.

Fallen is one way, descended another, broken a third. In Celestial, there’s a harshness – a misplaced note in the song.

A star going out.

Yasha sighs, and laughs, almost.

“Yeah,” she says, back in Common. “I – yes.”

He wonders, for a second, if she misses flying.

Yasha stares, up at the daylight sprinkled throughout the tree, and smiles with a fond absence at what she sees there.

“You know, I –“ she starts, and then stops, tilting her head.

Astrid murmurs something, from her position in his lap, that still is loud enough for all of them to hear. “What did you do?”

The other woman’s hands twist around each other, fiddling with a plain iron band on one hand.

“I don’t remember.” She looks back up to the sky, and he watches a tear streak its way down her face.

“Something bad. I was – I was married, before. And my tribe didn’t – we weren’t supposed to be. I broke the rules. They were going to kill us, and I ran, and they killed her, and I think –“

She looks sharper, almost, in the light.

A breeze ruffles the ends of her braided hair.

“I think I killed them. But I don’t really remember. We didn’t keep track, of the years, the same way the Empire does, so I don’t know – how much I lost. Years, I think, but I don’t know.”

Oh.

It’s familiar, in a way he wishes it wasn’t.

“I’ve talked to Bren about it before. Memories are – fallible, sometimes.”

She touches a hand to the bark of the tree, and looks back at him, serious.

“But what you are now, what you’re doing – that’s the most important thing. My friend, Mollymauk –“ she wipes another tear away, but grins a bit, “- you probably would have hated him, but that’s alright. He didn’t remember much, either, but that didn’t matter. Where you are, what your doing – where you are is the most important place.”

He takes Astrid’s hand without looking, already knowing that she’s reaching out.

He surprises himself with what he says next.

“I remember most of it, but I wish I didn’t. Or – I wish I remembered all of it. I think I’d rather know, and live with it, than wonder.”

She nods.

“That’s fair. But – what you did in the past? He manipulated you into it, even if you don’t realize that, yet. You chose to get out, and that’s more important.”

There’s the sound of birds above them as he tightens his grip on Astrid’s hand.

“Do you like flowers?”

Yasha shifts topic like water dripping through her hands, and he clings to the opportunity.

Blumenthal was named for its wildflowers, brilliant bursts of color every spring.

He misses them, sometimes.

Yasha pulls out a book, from somewhere in her bag, and starts to show him flowers and vines and leaves, pressed carefully between pages printed in a language he doesn’t recognize.

He and Astrid spend an hour, and then another, sitting warm in the sunlight and looking at Yasha’s flowers, and by the time Bren comes home, there’s a seed of warmth, deep in his chest.

Yasha is alright, he decides.

Kind.

Chapter Text

Eodwulf isn’t here, right now.

He’s on top of the tower, with Bren, because he had a panic attack (at least that’s what Caduceus had called it, because she doesn’t -  there is calm, and there is not-calm, and there is bad, and she doesn’t know what names those emotions carry other than that, but she’s starting to learn) and was still out of it, but it’s only seven in the morning by Bren’s estimate and one of them –

She’s worried about him, because she always is, but neither of them are going to eat if one of them don’t watch it being made.

So Wulf is on top, in the sun and grass and moss, listening to Bren tell folk stories, and she’s down here, in the kitchen, perched on top of one of the counters.

Caduceus is the only other person awake. She’s noticed that, over this past week, that the rest of the group, bar Bren and Caduceus, tend to sleep in well past when the sun’s risen.

She’s not used to getting this much sleep. The nightmares don’t help that, either, so she’s frequently awake before the sun’s –

Before when the sun would rise.

It’s not awful, living in the dark, but she’s glad for the daylight under the tree.

The entire house is illuminated by arcane lamps. It’s bright enough, with little shadows to catch her eye.

There’s a window, in the kitchen, facing the street, but the curtains are drawn tight across it, to keep them from curious eyes.

Caduceus hums, and finally reemerges from the pantry, a large jar with a thick piece of green and white checked cloth clamped under the lid. It’s glass, so she can see inside, but all she sees is a thick goopy mass of beige, little bubbles scattered throughout the bulk of it.

She raises an eyebrow, and Caduceus gives her a slow smile.

“This,” he says, setting the jar carefully down on the table, “Is Corrin.”

It looks almost like –

“My starter. Named after my sibling, because they were always kind of bubbly and I thought it was apt, since this batch is a split off from the main batch my family kept fed that was named Cornelius, after my great-grandfather, and my father.”

Lot to unpack there.

But – “Do all of the names in your family start with C?”

He nods. “All the ones that I know of, at least. Kind of a tradition, for the Common version of our names to be similar.”

He pries the lid off the starter, and she can smell the fermentation from her perch.

“Flour’s real expensive here, since they mostly use rice and have to import wheat flour from somewhere with more sunlight, but we’ve been managing so far. Bread will be for dinner, later, but for now – have you had pancakes, before?”

She scrunches up her nose.

“We didn’t, ah – not the kind you are making, ja? We made – they were flatter? And they had apples. Not really a breakfast food, not as sweet.”

Her mother had made them, as snacks when she was a child.

She had stopped, at some point, after apples became harder to come by, several hard winters and more and more crownsguard limiting the purchasable foods.

Wouldn’t have them again.

Caduceus’s voice cuts through her train of thought. “We can try and make those another time, maybe. I’m sure Eodwulf and Bren would like that.”

She nods, silently, and the firbolg continues to pile ingredients on the counter.

“The eggs are from the chickens that somebody down the street keeps, they let me have some of the ones they don’t sell in the night-markets – nice folks. Any preference for toppings? We have –“

He rifles through the pantry, again, and comes out holding a few jars. “Blackcurrant jam, honey, red bean paste, and I think I have some molasses – not the component kind, the sweet kind. Any of those sound good?”

She hums, and watches as his ears tilt.

“Honey for Wulf, blackcurrant for me and Bren?”

She considers, and then adds, “Maybe both honey and blackcurrant for Wulf, if you have enough.”

He likes sweet things.

“Sure, sure,” Caduceus says, and he starts to mix things together, starter and flour and an egg, other things that she recognizes from her parents’ kitchen.

He tastes the batter, before he even starts to cook it, and after a moment where he’s fine she tastes it too.

Neither of them die, so it’s probably fine. It’s not that sweet, but it’s good.

She stays in her perch on the counter, rubbing absentmindedly at the scars on her arm, watching as Caduceus pours batter into the cast iron pan he’d unearthed from somewhere, chipped on one edge and still solid.

The first one that he finishes, he spreads with jam and passes to her.

It’s one of the sweetest things she’s had in years.

Years, of rations and meals eaten on horseback.

Years of never really eating enough.

In the space of time that she spends eating, Caduceus as finished another stack of pancakes, and he spreads each one with jam with the same care, drizzling honey across a few.

“You want to take these up to Bren and Eodwulf?”

She nods, joints clicking but not hurting as she slides down to the ground.

“If you want to come back, after, I’m going to make the bread.”

She takes the plate, and meets his eyes.

It’s a little disconcerting, looking at Caduceus’s face, because she hasn’t –

She hasn’t met a firbolg before. And his eyes are pink, his pupils closer to a rounded square then a circle, and there’s a light in them that burns.

It’s kind of cool? She doesn’t have room to judge, on weird eye stuff, because her own –

She shoves that thought aside, as something to continue panicking about later, and pushes her way out of the kitchen on feet gone near-numb from the way she was perching on the counter, wincing slightly at the sensation of pins and needles that radiates.

Eodwulf is asleep when she makes her way up the stairs to the garden. She leaves his plate in a patch of sunlight and hands the other to Bren, who’s leaning against the trunk, Wulf slumped against him, reading from his book.

He smiles at her, and it’s not fake.

His eyes are blue, flecked with gold, and both colors shine in the sunlight.

She –

Genuine emotion is a lot right now.

She goes back downstairs without saying anything.

She doesn’t – doesn’t understand how he can show stuff like that.

Be so – emotions written out on his face where anyone could see them. Hands, moving and twisting like how he used to at the Academy, before Ikithon impressed social graces into the three of them under the threat of pain.

He isn’t doing well, not after what happened, but he’s holding it together a hell of a lot better than what she and Wulf are managing right now.

Making bread is something she hasn’t done in years.

Making food hadn’t exactly been a priority, when it had just been her and Wulf and Ikithon, and they had lived off rations and thrown together grains and mansion-food for years and years.

She had made bread with her father, a lifetime ago.

There were raisins.

Caduceus, by the time she’s made it back into the kitchen, has the dough already mostly assembled, and he hands it to her to be kneaded with a knowing look that she brushes off.

Kneading bread is – soft, and gooey, and it pulls through her hands.

A texture she hasn’t enjoyed, for years. It’s nice. A little gross – she’s going to have to wash her hands soon, or she’s going to lose it over the flour and dough starting to dry against her skin, but for right now it’s nice.

Caduceus moves the dough away, after she’s pummeled into shape with her smaller hands, and lays it in a deep ceramic dish, a towel the draped over the top. He places it on top of the oven, where a small banked draft of coals are still burning, and brushes flour off of his hands.

It sticks, slightly, in the fur on the back of his palms, like he’s halfway to ghostly.

Washing her own hands is a relief, and she sits on the stairs to the tower, tired in a way she can’t put words to, too-long pants brushing the top of her feet.

They hadn’t had any clothes, really, when they came her. Just their uniform blacks, rough cloth and made for missions, not living. Right now, she’s wearing a blouse that she thinks is Jester’s, tied tight as to not slip, and pants that she knows for a fact are Bren’s, because it’s the same fabric he’s been favoring since he was a teenager.

Both items are too large for her. She’s the same height, or something near it, to Jester, but the teifling is broader in the shoulders than her and more – muscular, overall, than her smaller frame.

Bren’s a good ten inches taller than she is, a fact that she hates. He had been smaller, once.

More appropriately sized.

His pants are cuffed three times already so that she doesn’t trip, and they’re still brushing the tops of her socked feet.

The socks, at least, fit. One of the others – Fjord, she thinks, but she’s still not solid on the names – had returned the other day with piles of things in tow, underclothes and socks and more blankets, all softer than she had ever had and more than she deserves.

It’s – being out of those blacks. Something about it makes this seem more real.

Like she’s actually here, sitting in borrowed clothes in a house in Xorhas, miles away from anything she knows, miles away from her previous life.

Makes it feel less like this is an illusion. A little more real. A little more –

She fidgets with the ends of her sleeves.

A little less like hell, and a little more like hope.

Movement to her right –

She whips her head around, focusing back in on the stairwell around her, and Caduceus puts his hands up, empty, a calm smile on his face.

He resumes moving, slowly, and hands her a mug.

It’s warm.

Smells like – lavender, almost.

She looks back up, and he grins at her, nose wrinkling with the movement of his lips. “It’s a lavender-mint. Looked like you could use something warm, right about now.”

She sniffs the tea again, and relaxes imperceptibly as the scent permeates her nose.

But – “Is this one of your – the dead people teas?”

Bren has warned her about those. Not a warning, that’s the wrong word – an acknowledgment, so that she wouldn’t panic and think she was drinking necromantic juice or something.

Bone juice, she thinks fleetingly, and muffles her smile with a sip of the tea.

It’s good.

Caduceus nods. “Yeah, it’s – the mint and lavender grew paired together. A branch of the Keats family. Terrible people, but it’s good tea.”

She takes another sip, and then carefully follows him back into the kitchen, sitting across from Caduceus at the table.

She was zoning out, again, because the bread has risen, sitting portioned out on a tray on the table, and the pancakes from earlier are gone, a stack of clean plates piled next to the sink.

Another thing, about this house, is that there’s running water, pulled from some well or city aquifer beneath the shadowed grounds. The last time she had that luxury, she had been at the academy.

Bittersweet, thinking about that, but the tea is neither bitter nor sweet.

Warm.

She sets the mug down once she’s drained it, and looks back at Caduceus.

“What you said earlier, about your family – how your names in Common all start with C? Do you – were your names not originally in common?”

She’s curious. Linguistics, languages had been more Bren’s thing than hers, but she learned Celestial and Sylvan alongside him, and picked up Undercommon in the years since he had faded away.

Caduceus hums, and then, in Sylvan, says a word that she takes a second to detangle in her brain.

It’s one word, in Sylvan, but in common, the closest translation is – one who walks with death and beetles, except not quite because the end of the word implies death and beetles as decomposition, combined into the same ending.

It’s a fitting name, for what she knows of him.

“You picked it yourself?”

“We all did, once we were old enough. Common names were for dealing with mourners, people visiting, and now – well, now everyone else, out here.”

“Bren knows Sylvan, you know, you could have – could have told him, and he could have told the others.”

Caduceus smiles at her, eyes wrinkling. “Does he? That hasn’t come up, to tell you the truth. I don’t even know if he knows that I know it.”

She rubs her fingers against the texture of her sleeve cuffs. Slowly, she says, “He probably – he knows that firbolgs are fey kin, so he probably knows. Maybe felt he awkward bringing it up?”

“Perhaps.”

For a long moment, the kitchen is silent again.

“Do you worship anything, Astrid?”

The change in topic is abrupt, but Caduceus's voice is calm as ever.

She hears the crackle of the coals in the oven, banked higher in preparation for baking the bread.

“No,” she says, a memory trapped between her teeth.

“My parents, though,” she adds, softly, a secret long held, “they did. Never told me about it much, because they didn’t worship an approved deity. Didn’t want to put the weight on my shoulders.”

Caduceus dips his head, and she watches the shadows of his hair across the table instead of trying to meet his eyes.

“Who did they worship?”

She tugs an inhale through gritted teeth.

The worst part is, is that she doesn’t really know.

She has – clues, she guesses, an emblem buried under the doorframe, honey at midsummer and works of art that she watched her parents leave for the elements in sacrifice.

She doesn’t know a lot about religion.

She doesn’t know.

Something on her face expresses that because Caduceus nods.

“Well – regardless. I’m glad that your path led you here.”

She looks up, sharply, and the firbolg is still staring at her with that careful gaze.

“I’m a firm believer in destiny. I know that isn’t everyone’s thing, but you and Eodwulf lived to make it here, ran so that you would be safe. Found him. Found us, even. I think that’s admirable.”

He raises from the table, and turns around to put the loaves into the oven.

She doesn’t believe in fate.

It’s a cruel world, that would force people to endure the things that she’s done so that she could get to this point.

But, she supposes –

She is here.

They did make it that far.

She spends the rest of the afternoon back up with Bren and Eodwulf, both awake, drifting in the sun-warmed grass, a slice of warm bread sitting heavily in her stomach.

Caduceus comes up after the bread’s done and handed out, and talks in Sylvan to Bren.

The stars shine beyond the sunlight overhead.

It's warm.

Chapter Text

Another week passes, and then another, and they are still here.

He learns a couple of things, in those two weeks.

One: He actually knows everyone’s names now. He hasn’t had – conversations, per se, with some of them, but he knows them, and they seem fine.

Two: The sun doesn’t shine in Rosohna (and it’s Rosohna, not Ghor Dranas, because these people have remade themselves away from the influence of the Betrayer Gods), except when it does, and he’s figured out how to track the moon to tell time. He isn’t as good as Bren, and he’ll never be, but he’s good enough to keep track of what’s waking hours and what’s sleeping. A touchstone in a strange land.

Three: The people that Bren’s allied himself with are fucking strange. He’s not going to elaborate on that, but.

Really.

A bunch of weirdos.

He and Astrid fit, almost.

With every day that passes, he feels – better, in some ways. A little less ragged, around the edges, a little less hurting behind the glass.

With every day that passes, he feels worse in other ways. Ragged around the edges, and torn to pieces underneath. Like every moment that he’s here, every moment that he’s – okay (safe), he falls apart a little bit more.

There are many things that he’s been hiding for years.

Habits, pressed out of him by necessity and Ikithon’s obsession over presentation. Emotions he hasn’t let himself feel. Gestures, flinches, sensitivities he’s suppressed until he was moving in a fog of his own creation.

If he didn’t have to think about it, it wasn’t really happening.

This, he figures out fast, is not a good thing.

He had known that, on some levels, when it had started happening.

But it makes itself abundantly clear when situations like this happen.

Because –

He’s not sure where he is.

He’s clear now, at least, which is something, but he had drifted the morning away in a fog after a nightmare that had left him waking up shaking, and now he’s outside, and it’s raining, and he doesn’t know where he is.

It’s dark, which is obvious. It should be. The sun is a scheduled event, here, and it had made an appearance –

Yesterday.

He thinks, at least.

Maybe the day before.

He’s not panicky. He knows what that feels like, very much so, because his life is a fucking nightmare. Right now, he’s more just – confused.

A little apathetic, if he’s honest with himself.

A little “of course this is happening.”

But, right, where is he.

The buildings rise into the dark sky above him, some two, three stories. Residential, still, so he can’t be that far from the house, but they’re dark stone as opposed to purple wood, and a different style entirely.

He’s seen from the tower the changing roofs of the houses that surround them, and if he’s judging it right, he’s a couple of streets away now (at least), towards the outer edge of this district.

The moon isn’t out, right now, so it’s somewhere past morning but before evening.

Not missing that much time, then.

Good.

Still doesn’t really know where he is.

Not great!

With a sigh, he leans against the wall of the alley he’s in and sinks down, sitting sprawled against the ground.

He’s still in a wealthy area, because the ground is clean and bare of the muck that would run in the streets without running water.

He tilts his head back, and blinks rainwater out of his eyes.

Oh.

The moon wouldn’t be visible, would it, because of the clouds.

Right.

No idea what time it is, then.

He’s shaking, he notes absentmindedly.

Admittedly, he’s a little less clear that he had maybe asserted to himself earlier.

But the best thing to do, right now, is probably just stay here in the rain and shake because the alternative is getting more lost, and he can defend himself if he needs to, and Bren can find him, probably, or he’ll drown out here –

There’s movement to his left, and he stares, unnaturally calm, as a shadow looms around the corner.

Weird, that there’s a shadow. Shadows mean light, and most people here lack that need.

He doesn’t really need it. He can see in the dark, for as much as ‘seeing’ is when everything is painted in shades of gray.

The light streams across the corner, and he watches the shadow creeps down and then shrinks, and then forms behind the creature that approaches him.

It’s a cat, with a ribbon tied around its neck glowing with arcane light, and as it pads closer to him he recognizes the patterns of the fur.

Frumpkin curls up towards him, meowing pitifully, and he pulls him into his lap, taking off the blanket he’s wearing like a cape and placing it over his head and body like a tent.

He can’t see outside, now, which isn’t good, so he holds it with both hands above Frumpkin and keeps his own head out.

He hates being wet like this.

The bath in the tower is okay, because it’s warm, and he can wear actual bathing clothes, but wet like this, in his borrowed soft things and with the blanket clinging to his skin feels like he’s been woken up by a splash of ice water.

Like he’s tied to the chair in the basement, facing the wall, water poured in endless waves –

Frumpkin licks, under his chin, and makes another disgruntled meow.

For the briefest moment, the cat’s eyes flicker blue, and then the cat is gone.

The taste of ozone crackles behind his teeth.

For another moment, he is alone, and the rain is pouring, and he is drifting again.

Metal grinding away into dust.

But then, there’s a hand on his wrist, and he doesn’t react because the fingertips are smooth and warm and dry, and then there’s another hand and it’s small and cold and calloused, and then he blinks and he is warm, and he blinks again and he is dry.

Time slips between his fingers, and he blinks again and rubs his fingers against the soft fabric of the bed in Bren’s room.

Okay.

He’s – a soft muffled yawn, from his right, and he settles into the blankets.

This is okay.

He’ll figure everything out later.

The cat, lying sprawled out with a reassuring weight across his lap, slow blinks at him, and he blinks back, and time stays steady.

Good cat, he thinks.

Good cat.

Waking up and finding Eodwulf not in the room wasn’t the weirdest thing to have happened in these past few weeks.

It’s anxiety-inducing, certainly, but most things are to him, and he pushes it down and pushes himself out of bed, watching with a fond eye as Astrid murmurs something in a language he doesn’t know as he carefully eases the door open.

Yeza is in the laboratory, blearily blinking at a notebook, and he doesn’t look up as he passes by, just keeps muttering to himself.

He checks the kitchen first, and finds Caduceus, making oatmeal.

He checks the garden, next, and finds Yasha and Beauregard, asleep near each other, under Caduceus’s cave-like structure, and he re-lights the warmer next to them before heading back downstairs, brushing a few errant raindrops off his sleeves.

The war room is empty.

The fun room is empty.

It’s at this point, then, that he lets his anxiety turn to panic.

Frumpkin finds Eodwulf two hours, forty five minutes, and three seconds of searching the streets later, and he and Astrid guide a wordless Wulf back to the house with careful hands.

He’s been drifting, more and more, the longer that they’ve been here.

He’s talked about it with Caduceus, some nights. About how trauma can reassert itself once a person gets somewhere safe.

He –

He had spent five years by himself when he had his memories freed. There hadn’t been much time or space for safety.

He’s better now, a year and change into knowing Nott, months into knowing his friends, but before that –

It is not a matter of doing worse or doing better, but he understands what Astrid and Eodwulf are going through.

He’s still going through it. Might always be going through it. But while his is the background, the underbeat against his words and dreams and actions, something he can push away sometimes, Astrid and Eodwulf are living forcibly in the present.

Eodwulf’s drifting, Astrid’s paranoia, are both reasonable responses to terrible things, and it doesn’t make it better.

But they find him.

And he’s safe.

It’s at this point, after being directed to wear Eodwulf was, both by the calls of his familiar and the worried words of one of their drow neighbors, that he realizes Astrid and Wulf currently don’t share the same protection he and his friends enjoy.

It’s that thought, that call, that leads him to having Jester message Essek – a call that she ends with a little ditty, out of words, and is met with a chuckle and an agreement – and is here, in the upstairs war room, seated across from Essek.

Astrid and Eodwulf know that he is here, because he wouldn’t keep information from them, not with their cumulative history with secrets, but they had both chosen to stay in the other room.

He knows that they are listening.

He doesn’t mind. He would do the same thing.

Essek, as he always is, adorned in blacks and silvers and an elegant touch of dark purple, leans against the back of his chair.

He does not look, but if he were too, he would see that the dark-elves feet still hover an inch above the ground.

Essek’s gaze is intense in a way he can’t quantify, and it is one he doesn’t meet.

He opens, his mouth, and then closes it, one ear flicking towards the door to the other room.

He raises his hands, and signs in a fluid motion, “They are listening?”

It is not a surprise that Essek knows Common sign language, in addition to the Undercommon variant he’s seen used across the city.

He nods, and Essek continues, “And is that alright?”

“If that is alright with you,” he signs back, and the other man nods.

“The information that your –“ he hesitates, and the glance he sends towards Caleb is questioning.

He shrugs, and wrinkles his nose as Essek continues, “Partners - have given us fills part of the missing pieces with our dealings with the Assembly. The Bright Queen is currently in conversation with the Arcana Pansophical, and I will keep you informed of what those talks result in.”

He taps the table, and slides his eyes towards the door.

That information will be given after whatever happens, happens, he surmises.

It’s not unsurprising. Essek, and through him the Queen, trust them to an extent.

He would not blame them for not yet trusting Astrid and Eodwulf.

It is not that they don’t trust them. It is more than in this case, years of mind magic –

Trusting can be a hard thing with enchantment in the mix. He’s learned that lesson long ago.

“If you have need of us –“ he murmurs, and Essek shakes his head, face tight.

Essek is many things.

Kind is one of those things, once you dig your way through his polite veneer.

“We shouldn’t, but I will keep that in mind. I think you’ve done enough fighting for this war, haven’t you?” He whispers back, and Caleb taps his fingers in a careful pattern under the table.

He and his friends have been in Xhorhas for nearly six months. First, they had just been staying to find Yeza, and then staying to figure out what was going on with Yasha, and then staying for Fjord, and then just – staying.

The Dynasty isn’t entirely correct in this conflict, but it was safer than the Empire where over half of their group broke the law by existing.

They split their time in Nicodranas in here, and he tears open the circle to Yussah’s tower nearly once a day for Jester to see her mother and Yeza and Nott to see Luc. But –

The war grows ever closer to Nicodranas. Luc might be coming here, eventually, but that is a problem for another moment.

Now, though…

“Essek, I realized earlier – my,” he hesitates, and then decides to go with Essek’s word.

There might be better words, but he doesn’t know them.

“My partners – they are human, and they are here in Rosohna. While they did not take part in the initial gesture that got us our protective emblems, I worry for them here…”

He trails off as Essek’s eyes brighten, and the other man pulls two emblems out of some nearly invisible pocket along the side of his cloak.

He lays them gently on the table, and smiles. “Already ahead of you, Widogast.”

He chuckles, barely, in response, and pulls the emblems toward him. Identical to the one he has in his own pocket.

“If there’s anything – I offer this not as the Shadowhand, or as a member of Den Thelyss, but – if there’s anything you need, Caleb. Anything they need. Healers – not that I doubt Jester and Caduceus’s skills – but, healers, clothes, more furniture –“

Essek’s gaze is sharper than his usual calm, and it is that sharpness that has him leaning forward slightly.

“Essek,” he says, gently, and the dark elf meets his eyes, gaze dark and almost desperate, “Are you…”

He stops, as Essek signs, “Memories,” with a wry twist to his lips.

Ah.

He can understand that.

“Clothes would be appreciated. But there’s – you are already aware of my own preferences in fabric and form. Theirs mainly match my own. And Jester wants a piano.”

Essek blinks.

“A – piano?”

He mimes hitting keys, on the table, and Caleb has to swallow a laugh in his throat as the man’s fingers dance across the whorls in the wood.

“Ja. And maybe – if you can find one?” He mimes playing a violin, and Essek smiles.

It’s not his polite smile. This one is smaller, and more lopsided, and tinged with the barest edge of the pain he knows that he’s in.

“I can do that.”

Silence, for a long moment.

He returns his eyes to tracing shapes in the wood, and twists copper wire around and around in his hands under the table. It presses into his fingers, biting but not bruising, not bleeding, not yet.

“Are you alright, Caleb?”

Essek really is too kind, he thinks, and he shrugs.

With a shift of his fingers, he taps into the buzzing energy of the wards in this room that hovers on the edge of his awareness, and cuts out sound from leaving or coming in.

Only for a moment.

Only for this.

“Tired. Just – I missed them,” he whispers, and Essek nods.

“I don’t know how to be the one who’s holding it together, anymore.”

The dark-elf shifts in his chair, and then pulls out a scroll from his pocket.

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing a good job. And – this can be for all of you, if you so wish it. I have more copies.” He throws the scroll across the table, and he unfurls it with fingers he pretends aren’t shaking.

He reads the runes, and then again, and then traces with still fingers the inscription that runs the length of the bottom.

When he looks up, Essek is hovering, and he lets the wards drop again.

“Have a good day, Caleb.”

He nods, and then he is gone.

The scroll gets tucked away, in his coat, and then handed to Jester when he has a moment alone with her.

Something to benefit them all, maybe.

She’s very creative.

The Shadowhand gives them a way to keep themselves safe, if they venture into public without disguising themselves.

She isn’t going to do that, because that is the height of stupidity, risking not only her own tenuous safety but Eodwulf’s, Bren’s, his friends –

She wouldn’t do that.

The first time that she really leaves the house – not just to look for Eodwulf gone wandering, not just to sit outside, not just to walk around – she disguises herself as a drow, skirts brushing her feet with every step, and includes the carefully thought out details she left out from when she had been trying to have been found.

Bren and Eodwulf stay at the house. She’s not thrilled about that, but she’s with Jester, who’s nice enough, and Caduceus, who’s she’s halfway to trusting, so it could be worse.

She’s just –

She needed to get out, for a second, before she started pounding at the walls closing in on her.

It only takes a few minutes for the trip to turn into a mistake.

The crowd in the square isn’t large, by any means, but there are enough people there that when the masses shift, while she’s busy staring at intricate wood carvings of animals she’s never seen, she turns back to check in with Caduceus’s warm eyes and stares into a sea of strangers, instead.

She whirls around, skirts twisting, and cranes her neck, but she can’t see over the heads of the crowd around her.

No pink hair, no tall gray skin, no brilliant wash of blue –

Someone from behind knocks into her, and she bites down a hiss, arms coming in tight to her body, rubbing at her wrists.

Gods.

She stands on her tiptoes, and then – she spies a bit of blue-and-pink through a break in the crowd, and she starts to push through.

Hands she doesn’t know brush against her skin.

She realizes, three steps in, that she’s still on her tiptoes, but it’s pressure and grounding and lets her see so she ignores the ache and keeps padding forward.

The crowd parts in front of her, and then she’s standing in a gap, people still streaming around her.

She can’t see the blue anymore.

Can’t see much of anything, actually. The moon is dark, tonight.

Another person brushes against her, and she does hiss this time, low and tight, air escaping her lungs in a wheeze.

Not good.

Maybe if she –

She peers over a sea of white hair, and slowly forces her way towards an alley she can see in the distance, breaths coming faster as more and more people brush against her, clothes scraping in a way that sets the hair on her arms on edge.

Finally, finally, finally, she’s out of the crowd – and then she’s in the alleyway, sinking against the wall as she lets her concentration break in favor of fiddling with the quartz set against her wrist.

Right.

Okay.

She steadies her breathing, in what’s probably a futile effort, and twists her hands, magic caught around her fingers and manipulated into shape.

Please, she thinks, but the magic dissipates before her form shifts as another wave of panic washes over her mind.

Okay.

Okay.

Not okay.

Okay.

The world tilts around her, and every noise is too loud and she’s alone, but there’s someone looking at her from the end of the alleyway, a voice asking, “Hey, you good –“ in Undercommon before being cut off by the sound of a bark.

There’s a blink, and the smell of the ethereal plane, mist and moss and ghosts, and Jester’s dog is standing in front of her, growling at whoever’s at the entry to the street.

They move away, and Nugget keeps standing guard.

He sits back, so that he’s in her lap, and licks the side of her face with a rough tongue before turning and watching the world around them.

Okay.

Good dog, she thinks, and buries her face in his fur.

She’s calmer by the time Jester finds them. less on the edge of overstimulation, less about to shatter.

Good enough to wander behind Caduceus for another twenty minutes, one hand fisted in the draping material of his sleeve as she trails behind him.

Nugget sticks to her side the whole way home.

Chapter Text

He’s sitting on top of the garden in somewhere after midnight but before the would-be dawn, tracing circles in the dirt while Astrid and Bren sleep near him beneath the branches, when he hears Caduceus gasp, sharp and deafening in the silence on top of the tower, cutting off his previous snoring.

He creeps over to the mouth of the cave – not really a cave, just the roof that Caduceus had stone-shaped up here to make a dry spot for his blanket-nest – and Caduceus is sitting up, hunched over in bed, hands in a white-knuckled grip around his staff in his lap.

The firbolg lifts his head, and for a second, Wulf would swear that his eyes were glowing.

“We need to go,” Caduceus rumbles out, and the man stretches from his bed with a giant’s grace, stepping over tree branches to tap Bren’s foot lightly with the staff.

“Caleb,” Caduceus calls, and Bren grumbles a bit before peeking one eye open.

And then his other eye, as he comes to wakefulness suddenly, eyes locked on Caduceus’s face.

“Caduceus? What’s –“

“Where’s Mr. Fjord?”

Bren rubs his eyes, and points downward.

“In his room, probably – Caduceus, what’s wrong?“ he asks, but it’s words spoken to the firbolg’s back as he starts to stride down the spiral staircase to the second floor.

After a moment’s pause, in which Astrid blinks her eyes awake, the three of him follow him down.

The door to Fjord’s room is already flung open by the time that they make it down the stairs, and Bren strides in with a worried look, he and Astrid trailing a few steps behind.

Fjord –

He’s sitting, half hunched over the bed, wheezing with each inhale, something dark and vicious dripping from the corner of his mouth, a puddle of – seawater? Seawater and blood, he realizes, and he exchanges a desperate look with Astrid.

Somethings happening here, something that they don’t have the information to process.

Bren takes a few steps into the room, and settles next to Caduceus on the bed, fingers starting to twist in the hem of his sleep shirt.

Caduceus hands rub out a rhythm on Fjord’s back as the man continues to spit out salt water.

For a long instant, the room is silent except for Caduceus’s voice, rumbling out, “That’s it, just breathe – just breathe, Fjord –“ over and over again, a litany against the backdrop of a man choking on the saltwater spilling from his lungs.

Beau, behind him, her voice sharp –“Move, please – Sorry –“ and she and Jester push their way past them into the room, Nott and a half-asleep Yeza hot on their heels.

Jester kneels before Fjord, uncaring of the blood and water, her hands already aglow, and she lays hands against his knees, pushing divine warmth through him.

It’s strong enough that he can feel it from across the room.

The trickle of blood, dripping from the corner of Fjord’s mouth, stops.

Silence, again, for a few moments.

“Right,” Fjord says, voice gravel in his throat.

“Right.”

He sits up, coughs once more, and shrugs Caduceus’s hand off his back.

“Sorry, ya’ll.”

There’s a clamor of noise as every other person voices overlap, protests building until Fjord opens his mouth again.

“Cad, I think – we need to head back to that tree. I need to – this ain’t gonna last long.”

There’s a clatter of sound, and a sword materializes out of thin air and lands with a crack and a splash into the puddle of saltwater.

Fjord stares at it, for a moment, and then points his palm at the wall, and whispers, “Eldritch blast –“

Nothing happens, and he stares at his hand.

“Yeah. Not gonna last long, like this.”

Bren tilts his head. “He has – again?”

Fjord sighs. “Again.”

Beau kicks the edge of the bed, and grins at the room at large, sharp. “Guess we have a tree to go to, huh.”

He glances at Astrid, and she blinks back at him, confusion written in her eyes.

When he looks out, again, Bren’s frowning at the two of them.

His eyes dart from them, and then to Fjord, and then back to them.

Jester, however, is the one who speaks.

“Astrid, Eodwulf, I know you guys have only been here for like three weeks and things are still like, not great and kind of shitty, you know? But Fjord’s demon god thing is messing with his brain and his lungs again, so we have to go to this big tree out of the city to go ask the Wildmother to let him be cool and naturey and like, alive? Instead of water serpenty and dead.”

Astrid blinks, next to him.

“Sorry, what?”

Beau cuts in. “Fjord has this whole warlock thing going on, except he didn’t really choose to be bound to his patron and his patron is also like, super evil. There’s this tree, out in the Barbed Fields, where the connection to the Wildmother is really strong – we made this plan in case this happened again, which it did, so we need to head out there.”

Astrid’s hand finds his at his side, and she holds on tight.

It’s not normal, for her to look for comfort like that –

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, and her mouth is pinched tight.

Her hand in his is nearly trembling.

“Are you leaving us here, then?” She asks, and her hand clenches tighter on his.

Bren’s eyes darken in the low light of the room.

He shakes his head, sharply, and Astrid relaxes.

“No, I wouldn’t – either I stay here –“

Fjord almost growls at that, and then blinks and curls in on himself a little bit more.

Nott’s yelp of anger at that suggestion has almost the same energy.

“Not that, then – if you are comfortable with it, then you would come with us, I guess. There isn’t really – Yeza would be here, but.”

Yeza waves, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

He winces, inwardly.

It’s not that Yeza isn’t – he’s perfectly nice.

They haven’t really talked. But –

He and Astrid are – if they got confused, or woke up from a nightmare with spells on their lips, daggers in their hands, if Ikithon came – Yeza couldn’t stop him.

He couldn’t stop them.

But Bren and his friends could, probably, and that’s why he’s stayed, in the first place, so that other people would be safe, and even though the idea of leaving here, leaving this house, having to fight again makes his blood ice in his veins, he has to – there is no option, here.

“We’d rather go with you.”

Astrid answers for him, and he’s glad for it.

Jester and Beau nod, and Bren gives them a faint smile.

Nott wrinkles her nose. “Shit, what are we going to do about the moorbounders?”

What the fuck is a moorbounder, he thinks, as the Nein swirl into action around them.

A moorbounder, Astrid learns a few frantic hours later, is –

Something out of her own nightmares, maybe.

Something that seems to have been built specifically to make Bren happy, for sure.

His group bicker, on the way to the stables, about who’s riding where, but they work it out by the time they are there.

Fjord and Jester and Beau, on one moorbounder – Yarnball, she learns, which is a funny name for a mount, but who is she to judge.

Caduceus and Yasha and Nott on the other, sandwiched between the two larger beings, on a moorbounder named Clarabelle.

Named, of course, after another one of Caduceus’s siblings, given the C-name. He’s – his naming habits are interesting.

She and Wulf and Bren are on the third moorbounder, that Bren refuses to tell them the name of until Jester, happily, says, “And that one is Jannick! Caleb named him, but we don’t really know what his name means because Caleb won’t tell us…”

She trails off as Wulf chokes on a laugh behind her, and she lets a smile fall across her lips.

“Bren, did you – you fucking named a cat –“

“It’s a good name,” Bren interrupts, and Wulf plows right on ahead – “You named your cat after – Gods, Bren. My gods.”

Jester scrunches up her nose in confusion, and she pouts.

“It’s like – you know how there’s the word phallic?”

The tiefling’s head bobs up and down, eagerly.

“It’s like that, but for vaginas,” she explains, and the group around her cracks into laughter.

“Shut up,” Bren mouths, but he’s smiling.

He smiles a lot now.

Sometimes they’re fake, like how he used to smile back at the academy, but other time’s they’re real, and it hurts, a little bit.

What hurts a lot is the hours of riding that they embark on next.

The moorbounders aren’t exactly comfortable, is the thing – their backs are oddly shaped, and they have to go slower to account for the heavier loads of passengers, the normal galloping turned into a rocking canter that’s grating against her senses for hours and hours of riding through the dark, through ghostly fields, and then into blinding sunlight as they venture into the cracked earth of the ground surrounding the city.

She and Wulf had pressed their way on the outskirts, of these fields, not risking going in.

They, now, are plowing full speed, passing by stones jutting out of the ground like jagged teeth, scars of the calamity that wrecked the continent.

They don’t stop to rest until night falls, proper night, darkness creeping over the badlands.

She’s exhausted.

She and Wulf slide off the moorbounder, and stand around awkward and useless as the group bustles around them, Caduceus building a fire and setting food cooking, Bren starting to pace a circle around the group, Jester and Fjord and Beau collapsing on top of each other in a pile that looks not at all comfortable, for all that it’s probably comforting.

Caduceus starts handing out meals, some stew he’s managed to warm up over the past few minutes, and they sit on the ground, slightly separated and confused, as Bren continues to pace in a circle.

A minute after they sit down, there’s the taste of magic, thick in the back of her mouth, and the circle Bren was walking forms into a dome, the same dusted brown as the cracked earth around them. Bren pops his head out, for a second, and gives the group a thumbs up before going back inside.

She and Wulf follow, and the rest of the Nein do as well, piling in and settling into the small space underneath the dome. Bren is sitting by one edge, and he beckons them over as the other group members start to bicker, bedrolls being set out in a pile.

“It’s just a Leomund's hut,” he says, near-whispering, and he gestures to where the group is starting to form a mass of bodies, curled into and against each other in a formation she can only begin to guess at the arrangement of.

“Nothing can enter unless I allow it, including magic effects. Safe enough, for the night. Beauregard and I are probably going to take first watch – you don’t have to take a watch, but just to let you be aware.”

She nods, absently, and peeks her head out again. The sun has set now, and the stars and moons are bright in the sky.

There’s just enough room in the bubble for her and Eodwulf to curl up against each other and Bren without touching anyone else. That’s – probably for the best, she thinks.

It’s going to be bad enough, sleeping in here with the sounds of six other people that she doesn’t know all that well. Having to be in contact with them –

She’s starting to know them, and starting to like them, but that’s too much.

It takes hours for her to sleep.

But, eventually, to the loud backdrop of snoring and Bren and Beau’s muttered conversation outside, she does.

Her sleep, for once, is easy, and dark, and uninterrupted.

It’s nice.

It makes the battle that starts around her as she’s forcibly shaken awake that much worse.

Chapter Text

When Eodwulf wakes up – torn from a nightmare that was full of blood and screaming, some his own, some Bren’s, some Astrid’s, one he’s had night after night after night – the screaming is no longer just in his dreams.

Instead, it’s all around him, the sound of crossbow bolts hitting flesh, the whir of magic, evocation, conjuration – he ducks as a firebolt flies only a few inches above his hair, and scowls at Bren who isn’t even looking at him, focus locked on the combatants.

The dome is gone, and around them – he counts two, three shadow wyverns, diving towards them, another two circling in the sky above.

He flinches, almost, when an acid arrow is tossed into the air, the liquid dripping down as it hits one of the wyverns that screeches, loud and terrifying.

In an instant, his mind fully pulls himself from the dream and into waking, and he pulls the dagger at his hip.

The ruby set within the weapon glints in the moonlight.

It flashes as he casts his first spell – the dagger lengthening, ruby still present and glowing brightly, the dagger now a full out sword in his grasp, and he hums under his breath as the sword then flies out into the air, towards the wyverns.

With a flick of his wrist, it cuts into one of the masses of shadow, and there’s a piercing shriek as a wing is torn through, the creature now spiraling to the ground. Astrid, up and fighting next to him, pins it out of the sky with a blast of acid through its eyes, and the body falls, limp and plummeting until it impacts the earth a short while away, the darkness clustered around it dissipating as it falls.

He whirls around, Astrid at his back, and with one movement strikes at the wings of another creature, his other hand directed toward its head as he pumps a cantrip through his palm, frost jutting out in an icy wave that smashes with a splintering force into the being’s illusory skull.

He curses under his breath as the wyvern stays aloft, and prepares another cantrip –

Astrid, from over his shoulder, gets off a magic missile before he can release his spell, and he nudges her carefully with his hip, eyes fond –

He lets loose a blast of frost at a wyvern that’s getting a little too close, and surveys the rest of the group.

Jester is standing almost over Fjord, baring her teeth and growling into the face of a wyvern that’s sunk to the ground to attack them. He watches as the cleric slams its skull in with a spectral lollipop, and Fjord beams up at her, hands held protectively in front of his chest.

Fjord’s powerless. Right.

On his other side, Beauregard is standing, fists clenched at her sides, glaring at the sky as Bren, near here, fires off bolt after bolt of fire, grimacing slightly each time he does so, power crackling around him. The other cleric, Caduceus, has Nott on his shoulders, the goblin firing off crossbow bolts into the air as the firbolg holds a look of concentration on his face, divine energy crackling from him in waves of force that he can almost feel resonating off of Beau, Bren, and Jester.

Yasha is near Beau, hands tight around the pommel of her greatsword, glaring into the sky.

But he shouldn’t get distracted – his spectral sword strikes down one gloomstalker, and then another, and he scans the sky, finding none in his range, and he turns –

Astrid, at his side, yells in a harsh guttural tone, and starts to sprint towards Bren.

Bren, who’s been left standing alone, Beau and Yasha yards away, striking the shadowed body of another wyvern fallen to earth.

Bren, who’s kneeling, one hand pressed to a wound seeping blood at his side.

Bren, who has one hand raised, nearly touching the wyvern – bigger than the rest, darker, eyes like fire and coals – that’s rearing up on what passes for its hind legs, mouth agape, black energy swirling in its maw.

It’s an instinct born of years of fighting alongside him, and then years of mourning him that came after that spurs him to sprint forward, outpacing Astrid in a moment, and hating her continued presence beside him as he steps into the path of the energy.

He’s in front of Bren as it barrels towards them, and he shoves Astrid to the side, ignoring the guilt in his throat as she hits the ground palms first.

It’s instinct, too, that tells him that even as he reacts, shield spell raising, that this is going to hurt.

And it does.

His world goes dark to the sound of Bren’s screaming and Astrid’s gasp of pain.

Wulf crumples at her feet, a trail of blood forming from the corner of her mouth, and she wrenches herself onto the ground and onto her knees.

She doesn’t need to stand to fight, not yet.

It’s with almost a roar that she unleashes poison in her bones, and watches as the thing in front of her sickens and fades and dies into wisps of shadow that dissipate under her blast.

She knows as the poison leaves her that it was a waste of energy. Too much, too fast – should have conserved her spell slots, should have brought her hands down, shouldn’t have breathed enough poison to ruin an entire family, shouldn’t have -

Shouldn’t have done that, she thinks absently, as another wyvern comes up before she can react, a wing swinging down and she flinches backward –

Bren’s arm, steady, blasts the creature into the void from whence it came in an instant.

His hand is on her shoulder then, gentle, a gentleness that she doesn’t deserve –

She lowers her arms, and stares at black starting to creep up her fingertips, her wrists, her forearms -

Why did she do that? Better her, than Wulf, better her, than Bren, better her than the Nein -

Fuck, she thinks, bemused, almost, as her eyes roll back and she falls back, poison spreading like blood in her veins.

Everything aches when he blinks his eyes awake for the second time that morning.

Not a horrible pain. Not bad.

He just - aches.

Jester’s hovering over him, worry clouding her brow, and she glares at him.

Worry – Bren, he thinks first, and then Astrid in the same instant, and he sits up, keeping the pain he feels at the motion locked in his mouth.

He casts his eyes about, and – Astrid’s still out, on the ground, but Caduceus is hovering over here, hands alight with a golden glow as he pulls what looks like living shadow out of Astrid’s arms, black and viscous and dripping –

Fuck, he thinks, and then echoes the word out loud as he tries to stagger up and falls directly onto his butt.

His fingers dig into the cracked ground as he wheezes in another breath, staring at Jester as she mutters words he can’t figure out at the moment.

Where’s – Bren, he thinks, panicking, but –

He’s only a few feet away, on the ground as well, head between his knees as Beau rubs slow circles across his back.

Bren looks up and waves, weakly, at him, before putting his head between his knees again.

Too much, too fast, too close to nightmares and darkness and shadows, he thinks, and the next breath he takes is calmer.

He carefully reorients himself back to Jester’s voice, and the babble of Common rearranges itself into understandable words as he makes the effort to translate in his head.

“-Wulf, can you hear me? I need you to lie back down, okay?”

Oh.

Okay.

He lies back down, and Jester’s hands are on him again, warmth flooding through his limbs and chasing some of the pain away.

For a long moment, he stares at the sky.

There’s the low sound of conversation, near him – Beauregard’s voice.

“Caleb, they’re okay – do you want to patrol for a bit? Keep watch?”

Bren doesn’t answer verbally, but there’s the flutter of feathers, wings, the displacement of air, and a giant eagle takes from the sky from where Bren had once been sitting.

The bird soars above the party, blotting out the stars for a moment as he passes overhead.

Beau’s voice again.

“Jessie, Caleb’s going to keep watch with me. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you sure, Beau? You took first watch earlier –“

“I’m good, Jes. Get your spells back, ok? I’ll make Caleb take a nap once we get to the tree.”

Jester hums, sleepily, and moves back towards the others.

Cautiously, he pushes himself up, and rubs dust off the back of his hair.

Astrid’s up now, as well, and already making her way over to him, collapsing down in the dust.

She leans against him, and he lets her take in the contact.

Jester and the others are laid out in their bedrolls again, Nott draped across Yasha like a purring blanket, the others cuddled into each other in a replica of last night’s arrangement.

It’s smart of them to get more sleep. It’s probably – two, three in the morning?

He doesn’t have Bren’s knack for time, but that’s where he would guess, based on the position of the moons.

He winces as Beauregard sits heavily across from them, his own gaze glancing away to trace the cracks on the ground.

“Hey,” Beau says, and he winces harder at the tone in her voice.

He hasn’t talked to Beau much.

She seems –

Intimidating?

He’s not scared of her. He’s not really scared of anyone in this group. More – concerned, by where her allegiance lies, by what she’s telling the Cobalt Soul, by how Bren seems to seek out her comfort –

Well.

That’s not concern. That’s just – misplaced jealousy, maybe.

He couldn’t be there for him, he missed him, he mourned him, he found him but he’s different now, has friends and a life and a –

Gods, he’s blathering.

“Do I need to get Caleb to take you back to Rosohna?”

His eyes snap back up towards her face, and she stares at both of them, steady.

Her fingers tap against the weights on the ends of her sash.

“He will, and he’ll stay there, if you do. Because –“

She gestures towards the splotches of blood still seeping into the dirt.

“You stepped in the way of the blast. You nearly killed yourself with blowback from your own spell – I know it’s hard, right now. But if you’re going to pull that kind of shit, self-sacrificing stuff like that, I need to know.”

He sides eyes Astrid, and she’s holding her hands tightly in her lap.

“It was going to hit Bren,” he starts, and Beau rolls her eyes.

“And he would have been fine. He’s got an evasion ring, area of effect shit like that rarely hits him.”

He stops.

“I know you guys are probably used to working on your own. But – we protect each other, ok? If that had hit Caleb, Cad or Jester would have had him back up in an instant. I can run fast as shit, I would have been over there if he had gone down. But you guys – I know that you probably wanted to protect him. But we do that, too. Getting yourselves hurt is just going to hurt him, as well.”

“I didn’t – I usually don’t catch myself with spells like that. I had just seen – Wulf went down in one hit, and I panicked.”

Astrid’s voice is smaller than it usually is.

Rawer.

“Yeah, that too. Listen – years of the shit you guys went through, you did what you had to do to survive. But, like. It’s only been a couple of weeks since you got here, right? And even just that – that much of a break from constant fighting, and you guys were coming off of years of patched over injuries, years of pressing through pain – I don’t think either of you are at peak performance, right now.”

He starts to draw his shoulders back, a protest building in his throat, and deflates as his hip shifts and he grimaces at the pain.

He knows that she’s right.

“Maybe that move would have been a better strategy when you were at full strength, but right now it’s just – vaguely suicidal. And if that’s the intent – if you’re looking for sacrifice like that, I need to know that.”

She jerks her hand up, in a vague motion at where Bren’s still circling in the darkness above them.

“We need to know that, so we can figure it out and keep you guys safe.”

He doesn’t need to think before he starts to shake his head, Astrid echoing his movement a beat behind.

He doesn’t –

He can’t die.

He has a lot of things to fix.

Beau studies their faces, and her own frown lightens.

“Yeah, I thought so.”

She sighs, and stares up at the stars alongside them.

“If this is too much, Caleb can take you back. He’ll stay, if you need him to. Fjord’s shit is kind of wrecked, but we’re going to figure it out.”

He shrugs.

He doesn’t like it out here.

Rather be in the garden, sun warm and sleeping, than out here in the dust.

But better here with Bren than without him.

Beau keeps staring at her long after Wulf’s fallen asleep, and her own eyes keep skipping from the monk’s face, dancing around to avoid her gaze.

Wulf is still leaning heavily against her side.

That – that hasn’t happened before.

She’s cast that spell so many times.

Dragon’s breath – not the best use of spell energy, maybe not the most efficient one, but it’s something she falls back on, something with range but still easy when she’s on the ground.

She usually goes with acid, though. Fire, sometimes. Frost.

Not poison.

Never poison, actually.

It says something about where her brain’s been that that’s what it defaulted too.

Hitting herself with it was just – an error made in desperation.

She’s done that before.

Never that bad.

Never enough poison that seeped through the nicks on her fingers from where she’s been biting them, enough poison to swim through her blood and knock her out in seconds.

She’s tired, but it’s too much to sleep right now.

She hates sleeping, anyways.

Might as well be awake –

Right.

Beauregard is still here, isn’t she.

And she’s chewing on her fingers again.

Great.

She gingerly lays her hand back down in her lap, and fights down the urge to scream into the dark.

She’s on edge.

Keyed up in a way that she hasn’t been in a while.

This happens after fights, sometimes, is the thing. Energy that she can’t shake out. Enough that she wants to hit something, break something, scream loud enough to summon the devils out from her soul –

Gods, she’s tired.

“You want me to try and get some wire or something, give you something to do with your hands?”

Beau’s voice cuts across her spiraling, and she looks up, bemused.

“Wire?”

Her voice is still too quiet, but she’s trying to keep from screaming, so give her a break.

“Yeah, like –“ Beau twists her hands around, mimicking something, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Caleb does it, when he’s all on edge. Or – I have some bacon, if you want food. Or, wait –“

She rummages in her pack, and then through her pockets, and then grins as she pulls out a small metal object.

“I got this for Caleb, but I forgot about it – it’s like, a puzzle cube? There’s a reward inside, but I don’t remember what Wursh put in there.”

She tosses it over, and Astrid fumbles it, barely managing to snag it out of the air before it hits Wulf’s chest.

She glares, slightly, at Beau, and the woman shrugs.

Beau taps the side of her goggles.

“Sorry, I forgot about that darkvision thing.”

She rolls her eyes and turns the cube over in her hands.

There are buttons, on it, and some interlocking gears intermixed with smaller ones she can just spot in the light of the moons, and a tiny lever on one edge –

She presses it, and one side of the cube unfolds, revealing more sliding buttons underneath.

Hm.

It takes her most of the hour to work her way through the layers of the cube, and by the time Bren is down again, human-shaped, she’s peeled gears away until she’s staring at a tiny glass bead, hanging by a gossamer thread in the center of it.

Bren comes over and sits next to her, a single dancing light circling his head, and as it passes she can see the bead better.

There’s a crisp flow of stars, in it, that swirl as she rolls the marble over her palm.

Beau wanders away, at some point, and Caduceus rises to take watch, but she’s not paying attention.

In the remaining hours till dawn, she pieces the cube back together and calms down from the brink with each locking gear.

She’ll thank her, later, when she has the words.

The cube goes in her pocket, and as the group wakes, they ride on once more.

Chapter Text

Waking up the second time, at least for him, goes more smoothly.

It’s weird.

He wakes up calm, and steady, but he really shouldn’t be, even though he is, because he doesn’t recognize this place.

It smells like flowers.

And when he blinks his eyes open, there are flowers, a field stretching as far as the eye can see.

He’s warm. The sun, above him, glares, brighter than he’s seen it in years, bright enough that he has the squint to peer past its haze of light.

Lavender surrounds him, an endless – well, not endless. He can spot houses in the distance, smoke from kitchen fires drifting into the cloudless sky, but for a mile, two miles, as far as he can see in some spots, he’s been set adrift in a sea of flowers.

He’s alone.

But there’s a tree in the distance, towards the houses – tall, and massive, the trunk wide enough that even from this far away he can see that he is dwarfed in comparison to it.

He starts walking.

Flowers wither and die in his path, and he walks on.

It takes him – an hour? Two hours?

Some bit of time in this endless flowered field before he realizes that he – he knows this place.

Knows it well.

Knew it, well.

Astrid isn’t here, which means that this might be another dream, another nightmare he’s been locked into, and he misses her, longs for her, longs for Bren –

But he keeps walking.

In the distance, the tree stands.

In the distance, behind it, he sees Blumenthal.

Maybe they’re there.

He doesn’t really want to keep walking.

There are memories, locked there. Ones that he doesn’t want to think about, or puzzle through, or acknowledge.

Doesn’t seem he has many choices, though.

He keeps walking.

She wakes up terrified.

It’s apt, she thinks, as she blinks her eyes open to darkness, that her nightmares feel like waking.

She’s alone, in this dark.

Well –

Above her, as she blinks sleep out of her eyes, there are a million glowing pinpricks of light, stars and swathes of purple sky faintly illuminating the tiles beneath her.

She knows this place.

Knew, this place.

Well enough to know that she was never alone here. Risky, to come up here by yourself, with no one to cast feather fall if you slipped – fell –

(Jumped, but she wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that. Not now. Not here.)

Her hands scrabble against cool tiles, and she accidentally dislodges one.

It slides down the roof, picking up speed, and she counts the seconds as it goes over the edge –

Four seconds later, she hears it faintly shatter against the ground.

Not a nightmare, then.

A little scary – she’s alone, and it’s dark, and she doesn’t like that, not after those times she was in the same situation but awake, and hurting, and terrified, but above her the stars are shining.

With a shakiness she tries to shove down, she creeps down the roof, sliding slightly until she’s near enough to the edge to peer down, at the city streets below her.

 There’s no one on the streets, and the pattern of candle and lantern light illuminating the streets below is off, almost, a pattern that spirals rather than originates in the grid she’s so familiar with, but it’s still clearly what she expected.

She scoots back, up until her back hits the wall of the highest tower, and sighs.

She hasn’t been here, in this spot, in years.

Never came up here without Bren, even after graduation. Didn’t feel right.

Stargazing with only one other felt wrong.

The stars look just as they do in her memories.

Rexxentrum doesn’t, not necessarily, but her mind is fallible.

But the roof is the same.

If she walked around the edge of this wall, she would find the window that leads into the dead space above the largest lecture hall, where she and Wulf and Bren would sneak in and listen to upper-level theories, dissertation presentations, arguments.

If she walks the other way, she’ll find the carefully hewn handholds created by tens of hundreds of students that came before her that lead up to the high tower, to the spot where they said –

If you wish something, there, it will come true. Only if you do it at night. Only if you do it because you need it.

This is a dream.

But wishes are dreams, too.

She stands, one hand on the wall, and walks.

And then, she climbs.

The tree grows larger with every step he takes.

He doesn’t remember a tree, being there, but he hasn’t been here in sixteen years. It’s not that strange, that his mind would attempt to change this small world in his memories.

Eventually, he reaches it.

It’s an oak tree.

Brilliant leaves, green and dappling the ground around him with shadowed light. Acorns, just a few, tossed into the dirt. A squirrel that he spots for a half second before it disappears around one branch.

It looks almost like the tree in Xhorhas. A little smaller, a little thinner in the trunk, but almost the same.

There’s no one at the tree.

He doesn’t know why he was expecting there to be someone there, but he was.

He keeps walking, past it, and towards the houses that solidify as he gets near them, mist and dream taking physical form.

Not his house.

(Even if this is a dream – he couldn’t do that.)

Bren’s house.

Still standing.

He blinks, and steps fade from his awareness, and he’s standing on the porch steps, one hand poised to knock on the door, the other fisted in the soft material of his shirt.

He’s still wearing the borrowed clothes, from Fjord.

Weird –

He knocks.

A pause.

Another.

And then the door creaks open.

The climb is easier than she remembers it being.

Not that it was hard before – she had only made this trip once, after graduation, and it had been laughably easy after months of training, despite the pain in her arms.

Easier now, that her arms aren’t aching with every shift of skin.

She pulls herself up to the lip on top of the tower, and sits for a moment, staring at the sky.

She couldn’t see it from the roof below, but the tower is different.

Above her, leaves block out the stars.

Definitely a dream.

Some combination of the tower in Xhorhas and the tower here that her brain has amalgamated into one.

Well –

Good, she supposes. She can get higher now.

She climbs the low hanging branches and up, higher and higher until she’s perched on her toes on a branch that sways in the faint wind, closer to the stars than she’s ever been before.

She had come here with Wulf, sixteen years ago.

Made a wish.

She had thought, then, that it hadn’t worked. That she hadn’t wanted it hard enough, that it was too much, that wishes were dreaming and she was too old for dreams.

Wished that Bren was there, with them. That they were together, and safe, and didn’t have to kill anyone anymore.

It hadn’t come true then, but maybe it just took time.

Because –

They aren’t safe, maybe, because there are a war and a Master to kill and minds to rebuild, but they are together, and she doesn’t –

Might never have to kill again, unless she needs to, unless she wants to, unless she makes the decision herself.

No longer a weapon to be pointed in fired.

She holds tighter to the branch beside her, and closes her eyes.

She’s dreaming.

But she has a wish to make.

The door creaks open, and there’s no one there.

He wanders through an empty house with impatience, searching, and searching, and searching.

No one.

There’s things here, the same furniture and paintings that he half-remembers from the one time he had visited Bren’s house before leaving for the Academy, but no people.

It’s in Bren’s room – covered in books and shelves of rocks and cheap components, the bed unmade and covered in a veritable pile of sheets – that he spots a sigh on life.

Under the bed, meowing curiously – and then out from under there, cocking its head at him and then leaping up so that he’s forced to gather her into his arms – is a cat.

Frumpkin, he thinks.

Not Bren’s new familiar.

Grey fur tickles against his throat, and she licks the underside of his chin.

He pets her, and sinks down against one wall.

He can wait here, until he wakes up.

There’s a cat, after all, which means Bren –

He should be there soon.

He can wait.

She sits in the tree for what feels like hours, counting constellations and staring at the stars.

She’s still alone, but it’s peaceful here.

Or – it was, before she flinches at the sensation of tiny legs across her skin and instinctively lets for of the branch, falling a few feet before catching herself on a larger one, hanging by her fingertips as she scowls at the spider crawling over the leaves above her.

Why her brain manages to have spiders in an otherwise nicer dream –

Her fingers slip, and she falls.

Fuck, she thinks.

Wind whips her hair into her eyes, and she shoves it back with one hand, the other scrambling to touch against her focus –

Her focus, that isn’t there.

She’s falling, and she’s falling, and she’s falling –

For a moment, she closes her eyes, and stares into the giant unblinking orange one lurking underneath her eyelids.

And then she hits the ground.

He waits.

The cat in his lap falls asleep, the purring subsiding after a while, and he keeps on waiting.

It’s getting darker outside.

He’s dreaming, but he’s still tired, and it’s the tiredness that pulls his eyelids shut.

Moments pass, and the minutes, and the hours.

And for a moment, when he opens his eyes, he sees orange.

But he blinks, and it’s not orange, it’s blue, and pink, and red –

He stares up at Bren, and his friends, and gives him a faint smile.

The cat in his arms dissolves into dreams again as he stands, taking Bren’s outstretched arm.

“Hallo, Wulf,” his friend says, quietly.

“Want to help us find Fjord?”

Hit isn’t the right word.

Splash – might be.

The ground that she had been about to plow into fades to water an instant before the collision, and she hits freezing waves with enough force to send her under.

She surfaces, sputtering, and dives down again before a wave could overwhelm her.

It’s a good thing that she knows how to swim, because the waters around her are freezing and dark and deep, deep enough that she can’t feel ground beneath her.

There are no stars, here, now.

She treads water, and ignores the doom creeping over her senses.

This is a nightmare, now.

Probably.

Unless she’s decided that water is her friend –

An eye blinks open near her, and then another, and then hundreds until she’s surrounded.

They aren’t looking at her, but rather at a point in the distance.

Any direction is cue enough, in this, and she starts to swim.

She sees the half-orc before he sees her. He’s standing on the surface of the water, tendrils of green and seaweed wrapped around his legs, shouting something in an accent she doesn’t recognize at the sky, words in a blur of Common and Orcish and other languages, swears that she’s only heard out of the mouths of sailors and swears that she remembers from the pompous idiots she had met on a mission to Tal’dorei.

He spots her, eventually, and his face flickers and then darkens as she approaches.

He shouts something, against, and the sighs, reaching down to haul her upward.

Somehow, she stands on the surface of the waves.

“Hey, Astrid,” he says, accent firmly affixed once more.

“Sorry that you got caught up in this. Seen Caleb – Sorry, Bren or any of the others, yet?”

She shakes her head, shivering, and he sighs again.

“Yeah, okay.”

He twists his palm, and a tear appears in front of him, one that leads into a dark mass of trees and undergrowth, snow blanketing the ground.

“Let’s find ‘em, yeah?”

Together, they step through.

Chapter Text

She and Fjord walk in silence amidst the trees.

It’s beautiful, this forest, hazy and still clearly a dream around the edges of her vision. The snow blankets the roots and branches, and softens everything. Clean white over dark sodden bark and ground.

She isn’t cold, despite the snow.

A benefit of this being a dream.

“This is the Savalier Woods,” Fjord says, and she glances up at the half-orc, a grimace writing itself across his fade.

“If we kept walking, maybe – six miles, that direction –“ he points, at somewhere off in the distance, and she hums, awkwardly.

“We’d reach Shady Creek Run. If this wasn’t a dream.”

She scoffs, and Fjord’s eyes dart over to her.

She might – maybe, just maybe – be a little angry.

Just a little.

“Since this is a dream, care to tell me where we are going?”

Fjord sighs.

He nods his head, and she glances forward again, watching as a wall forms out of the mist in front of them, snow topping the points of the dark rusted iron.

“I’ve never been here.”

She looks back at him, sharply, and watches as his frown dissolves into something a little lighter.

“This is – it’s where Caduceus grew up. Watch the thorns.”

He pushes himself up and over the wall, and she follows suit.

There’s less snow inside of the wall than there is outside. Where there isn’t snow, the ground is blocked by dense growth, purple-black vines covered in silver-tipped thorns spreading amidst the bars of the wall and creeping over the ground.

“There’s thorns outside of the wall, too, but I’ve never seen them in this wood, not where I was. Just heard descriptions.”

She steps carefully over the vines, and she and Fjord walk through the mist to another wall.

Less snow inside of that wall. Less thorns, too.

More grass and moss and lichen, peeking out from the undergrowth.

“If this is – part of whatever shit you have, going on, why are we here?”

She keeps walking, straight on towards the next wall coalescing out of the mist, and then stops when she fails to hear Fjord’s light steps next to her.

“I don’t know,” he mutters, and he steps past her, one hand splayed out against the side of his armor as he points with the other.

“Well –“

He hesitates, and then moves ahead of her, stepping over the third wall.

After a moment, of silence – no birds, no wind. Just stillness and the smell of stagnant water – she moves past the fence with him.

Around her, the mist shifts and then reforms, grass and moss and a field of flowers growing near-instantaneously under her feet, vegetation taking form as she continues to walk, following Fjord.

“This is a graveyard.”

She almost trips over a headstone, in the instant after she says those words, and a flower crushes under her foot.

“Yeah.”

Ahead of them, a stone building rises out of the mist, the steeple high.

Fjord stops just short of the doors.

With an intake of breath that almost sounds like peace, he kneels.

She stands, a few paces behind, feet in the flowers and mind drifting, as useless in this moment as she is during any other, and watches as his head bows, and silence takes over.

For the first minute, she watches.

For the second, and then the third, the fifth, the seventh, the tenth – she paces.

After that, she gives up being near here – because, look, this is some personal god business, and she might have been drawn into this dream world against her will but she can at least give the man some privacy – and she starts to wander.

The graveyard is beautiful. Or – Fjord’s interpretation of it is. She doesn’t doubt that his conception of it is colored by Caduceus’s descriptions of the place, by his own desires, his own needs.

She recognizes some of the flowers. On one patch, set against the gate, there’s bluebells, dandelions spotting in clumps and daisies along the edge of one headstone. She walks, feet stepping soft in the grass, and glances at Fjord from time to time – still kneeling. Still silent.

There’s vines starting to grow up around his feet, but she can –

She’s not an idiot. Fjord’s mind, leading him to this place – somewhere sacred to the Wildmother – when trapped by his patron. The vines are a good sign.

This place isn’t real. The temple – temple or house, maybe. There’s nothing inside it, just an empty stone floor that matches the stonework that forms the outside of the building. No signs of living, no bedding, no food – just cold stone floors.

But the stonework outside – in some combination of Fjord’s memories of Caduceus’s stories and some aspect of this dream realm that he’s trapped her in unwillingly, the outside looks real. The stone is rough against her fingertips as she paces in a slow circuit around the building, and the carvings are intricate, showing flowers and trees and mushrooms, things rotting and things growing and things returning to the earth.

She makes a full circle around the exterior, and reaches the front again.

Fjord is still kneeling, head bent and hands palm down against his thighs, but the vines have started to flower.

The carvings on the front of the temple are something to behold.

Just visible above Fjord’s head is a mass of vines, wrought into the stone with enough deft that they look lifelike, flowering and forming the circle of Melora’s symbol. Above them, the vines turn to branches, and then leaves, and then stars, a canopy of stone life that then gives way to the night sky carved across the walls until – there, at the peak of the steeple –

She blinks, and the image of two moons, one waxing, one waning, stubbornly remains.

She knows that symbol.

Had dug it up, once, in the forests outside Blumenthal – tokens of metal that had corroded away to dust in her careless hands, so long ago.

She hadn’t learned who it represented until years later, at the Academy.

The Archeart.

A forbidden god. Not an evil one, but a chaotic one, a deity of art and magic and wild.

Why would their symbol be here –

There’s a crack that rings out, suddenly, and she takes a defensive stance, eyes locking back on Fjord as she gathers energy in the palm of her hand. She doesn’t have her focus, in this dream, but she can cast some things without it – it hurts, every time, channeling raw magic through her wrists like that, but she is more than used to that particular pain.

But Fjord is still and silent, the vines around him still swaying gently, flowers bobbing with the motions of his breath.

She whirls around, soft clothes brushing against her legs, and there’s still nothing.

For a long moment, she stares, breath too fast, eyes wild, and slowly, she pulls her hands back in.

Another crack rings out, behind her, and she turns back, only to catch the edge of a brilliant light spilling from the emblem atop the steeple, that light coming down, silvered and catching on the edge of Fjord’s head to drape her in brilliance from chest to toe.

She stares, again – and the light fades.

“Sassa?”

The voice echoes in the dead silence of this graveyard, and she doesn’t –

No.

She does, and she turns around to see Wulf, and Bren, and the rest of his party picking their way through the headstones behind them.

Her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t really know why.

Wulf takes a step forward, and then another, and she steps towards him, meeting him halfway to join their hands together, fingers lacing together to press against familiar scars.

Bren steps up, next to them, and nods his head at Fjord’s back.

“How long has he been –“ he stops, and makes a vague gesture at where the vines are encircling the warlock’s armor.

She shrugs, words locked in her throat.

She doesn’t want to break the careful silence of her mind.

The Mighty Nein, minus Fjord, eventually settle around them, taking a seat in grass that now, with the presence of Caduceus, is softer, greener, more flowers and more moss. From where she’s sitting, she can see furniture and blankets and dust through the stained glass of the temple.

They wait for a time.

She doesn’t know how long. Her attention drifts, in this, like she’s wandering without a destination. Like she’s stayed up too many nights in a row and is falling asleep with every blink she takes.

But eventually, eventually, the light grows brighter. The greens more vibrant, the blue of the sky lighter.

And Fjord stands, the vines still encircling him.

When he turns back to look at them, he smiles.

His eyes are no longer the slitted gold that she had seen previously.

Instead, they’re a brilliant, deep, dark blue.

Chapter Text

Getting back from the tree had been less arduous than the process of getting there. Fjord - eyes shifting back to gold, outside of that dream state, though still with vines and flowers tangled through his hair, his armor, greenery verdant in his step - leading the charge on Moorbounder-back, through the barbs jutting from the ground and back through the ghost lands surrounding the city.

That had been a few days ago, and the house had returned to the same - not calm. Bren's friends could not, truly, be described as calm. But back to what she had been tentatively getting used to.

Eodwulf is napping again, head in her lap as they sit in the warm sunlight streaming off the boughs of the tree above them.

She is – awake.

Very, very vibrantly awake, in a way that has her fraying at the edges.

The sunlight is too bright.

The grass is too prickly, itching through the thin fabric of her pants – still ones borrowed from Bren’s friends, because she hasn’t been able to hold herself together long enough in public to buy some fucking clothes and Bren wants her to be able to pick, because choices are something she’s been denied long enough, blah blah blah –

There’s too much noise.

Eodwulf’s breathing, steady in her lap, is the only thing that she wants to hear because it’s familiar, it’s comforting, it’s the sound she’s worked alongside with for years, but it isn’t the only sound up here.

From here, she can hear the sounds of carriages clattering against the cobblestones outside as people make their way to the marketplace, to work, to temples, the beat of horse hooves and oxen dragging carts behind them, people clamoring to greet each other as they rush about their business.

This isn’t a busy street, but right now the noise drifting off from the people below is deafening to her ears.

It’s only her and Wulf up here, right now. Bren had been here, but he had wandered downstairs a bit ago, muttering something about making sure Nott wasn’t blowing up his library – prompted by the explosions they had heard, most likely, or just by the fact that Nott seemed explosive in general.

Just as she’s thinking that, there’s another brilliantly loud boom from downstairs that has her hands flinching, pressed against her ears as she hears the muffled shouts from downstairs.

They don’t sound panicked, more excited, but it’s loud and she wants quiet.

Not too quiet, though, because Eodwulf is asleep and if she can’t hear then they aren’t safe so she needs to be here, be awake and listen for people, for enemies, for rain about to pelt against the stone tiles of the roof, for anything that could hurt them.

Listening is exhausting.

Being here, with Eodwulf asleep in her lap, looking peaceful like he doesn’t spend his waking hours cringing from touch and fading out of focus, being here, in the grass, angry and tired and scared, being here, in Xhorhas, the farthest she’s ever been from –

She can’t say home. Can barely think it, late at night, when she dreams of flowers and sunlight and festivals.

This isn’t home yet, this house in this strange land full of things she doesn’t understand.

There’s the sound of – a plink, somewhere against the roof, water colliding with tiles, and she drags Eodwulf backward in a swift movement, on dislodging his head from her lap for a moment before settling back against the tree trunk, bark rough against her back.

Above her, it starts to rain.

Gods.

She hates the rain.

Hates it, hates it, hates it.

It’s one more noise among many, and now it’s drowning out the sound of the street below, and she can’t hear them downstairs anymore, which means she can’t hear anyone approaching, and Eodwulf is asleep, and she needs to keep him safe, and she can’t do that with this blasted rain –

A droplet breaks through the canopy above her and lands, heavy and startling and awful, on the top of her head, and she shivers as it slides down the length of her neck.

There’s a flash of color, out of the corner of her eye, and she whips her head around to the stairs, watching with narrowed eyes and tense muscles as red – purple –

Oh.

Bren climbs out of the stairs, holding the trapdoor open with one hand, and gestures to the two of them.

“Come inside, liebling, you’ll catch your death out here.”

His voice is just barely audible over the rain, pounding against the tiles, but she hears him.

Eodwulf wakes up at the sound of Bren’s voice, eyes open and alert in mere moments.

He sits up, and she holds his hand as they dash through the rain to the trapdoor.

It’s loud inside, now, too.

She winds her way down the stairs, still holding Wulf’s hand, the other pressed against the wall as they spiral down, down, down, the noise growing louder the closer she gets to the ground floor.

Jester, and Beau, and Fjord, and Caduceus are all in the room below her, in the bath that’s been built into the base of the tower, chattering and splashing and making a variety of conversation that she can’t parse out the words of, it’s just noise.

Bren leads them past them, past the kitchen, past the training room, and into the lab.

Nott’s in here, her husband alongside her, alchemical equipment set against the back wall in favor of the table that spans the middle of the room.

Probably not working on anything explosive, then, given that the shield spells Bren’s woven into the floor and ceiling are inactive, runes dark.

Nothing acidic, either, given the nice table.

Instead, she watches as Nott gestures, and color splashes against a stretched out canvas, a brilliant purple that she hasn’t seen in that vibrancy – probably ever.

There’s a couch, in the library now. Something Fjord had dragged in, a day ago, something soft and beaten up and more comfortable than any chair she’s ever sat in. It’s that couch that Bren leads them too, draping a blanket across both of their laps as he sits against the armrest, perching precariously on the narrow surface.

Her attention drifts as Nott continues to mix colors.

It’s still too loud, even inside.

The rain, against the window.

The scrape of Nott’s brush and stirring rod, clanking against glass and rasping across canvas.

Eodwulf’s light snoring as he falls more deeply asleep against her on the couch.

Bren’s muttering, reading from some fiction book.

Normally, it’s fine.

Normally, she can block out the background, block out the incessant noise that’s pounding like a war drum in her brain.

But right now, it’s so much, and she’s –

Her skin is tight against her knuckles as she clenches her fist, head pounding, vision swimming as she tries to quell down the rage that’s brewing like thunder in her bones.

She wants it to be quiet.

Why, gods, why can’t it be quiet –

She slips out of the room and heads to the kitchen, feet tapping out an uneven melody against hardwood floors.

The kitchen is empty, but it’s still too loud, the noise from the bath and the rain and people outside magnified as it clamors around the pipes and metalwork and pans, and she near-growls, deep in her throat, hands fisted in her hair as she paces, once, twice, three times around the length of the dining room table.

Nowhere in this house is –

Upstairs is rain, pounding and heavy, and down here are people.

The basement isn’t an option for other reasons.

(Chairs, and blood, and screaming, and crystals and pain -)

She blinks, and she’s in front of the sink, water running, hot.

Her hands ache.

She spreads her fingers, and watches as the red on her hands from the heat seeps away, the slight pain fading.

Thunder rolls in from outside, and she presses her hands against her ears again, the noise forcing its way in regardless.

Her head hurts.

For a moment, her vision sways, and she stumbles from where she’s started to pace again, feet losing their already uncertain rhythm as she manages to catch herself against the countertop.

Noise, again, and then there’s Caduceus, still dripping slightly, tall and colorful and making sounds that she refuses to translate into Common from the doorway.

She stares at him, face blank, and slides down so that she’s sitting against the cabinet.

She can’t see his face, now, but she watches as he comes closer, and sidles away as he gets too close.

More noise, words in Common and then –

She parses the Sylvan out of habit, because the words sound fluid on everyone’s tongues and nothing like the mash of consonants that Common forces into words.

“I’m going to get Caleb, alright?” Caduceus is saying, and she stares at his feet harder, anger brewing stronger.

She doesn’t – doesn’t fucking want Bren here.

She wants to sit against this cabinet, and scream, and let the noise overwhelm her until it’s silent in her head again.

She doesn’t fucking need him to come here, to be concerned, to waste more effort on her than he already has –

But she blinks, thoughts whirring and trapped, and Caduceus is gone, and Bren is there.

Jester, too, standing in the doorway, dripping water onto floors more expensive than anything she’s ever owned, anything her parent’s owned, anything in the entire town of Blumenthal.

“Astrid, are you ok? You keep –“

Jester’s voice is even louder than usual, amplified in the empty space in her head, echoing pain and exhaustion and anger –

She’s up and on her feet in an instant, snarling, and in another, she’s moving, arcane energy powering her steps until she’s running, sprinting, rain soaking into her hair and clothes as she moves through dark streets, dodging pedestrians and drow and goblins as she keeps running.

She runs, and runs, and runs.

Stops, when her ankle turns as she passes a curb and she swears, Zemnian harsh in her throat, but she keeps going, long past their street, long out of the neighborhood and then out of the city.

She doesn’t know how long she runs for.

Long enough that she’s past the darkness. Long enough that she’s traded city streets for warm sunlight and a field of brown grass, swaying and silent and dry.

Long enough that in the space between blinks, she’s sitting, shaking, hands still fisted against her ears.

Long enough that she doesn’t know how long it’s been by the time she hears Eodwulf come up behind her.

Everything is still aching and horrible in her head, but she recognizes the unevenness of his gait, one knee not bending as much as the other, (and she remembers why, remembers training, blades, pain that she had been told how to do and learned how to inflict and never learned how to heal because she breaks things, she is broken, she doesn’t fix, isn’t fixed -)

“Hey, Sassa,” he says, quiet, and the sob that escapes her lips surprises her.

Her mother had called her that, once.

Once upon a time, when there were flowers and dinners and family and home.

A long time ago.

The sun’s setting, now.

She’s been out here for a while.

Long enough that –

Eodwulf’s hand finds her forehead, and she hears him hiss.

“You know you have a fever?”

It’s a rhetorical question.

He knows she didn’t.

And she didn’t.

She doesn’t –

Things get muddled. Pain, and discomfort, and hunger – they’re all things she’s used to ignoring, used to pushing down.

Used to enough that now she doesn’t figure them out at all, and just keeps going until she –

Another sob builds in her chest, and she coughs along with it, tears sliding down her cheeks.

Keeps going until she’s breaking down in a field of dead grass.

Eodwulf’s arm settles around her shoulders, and she lets him, the pressure grounding and calming as she continues to cry, thoughts twisted and joints aching and head hurting.

He leads her home, eventually, once the sun is long past set, back through the streets and alleys of the city, back to their glowing house, back through the entryway.

Back through the library, that’s silent.

Back into Bren’s room, that’s quiet except for Bren’s breathing and a cat’s gentle purr.

The blankets on the bed are tucked down where the mattresses are pushed together.

An invitation.

One that –

She’s exhausted, and hurting, and blurred, and she climbs in between Wulf and Bren with no hesitation because in between them she is safe.

And she is.

Safe.