Chapter Text
After the events of the clash beneath the chantry, the Nein are escorted back to the Cobalt Soul. It is, surprisingly enough, more of a protective thing than a prison thing, which is ideal honestly, and they are shown to a large room Beau recognises as a dormitory for the higher ranking librarians. Somewhere they can rest and recover and spend the night. The monks seem to know they would want to stay together; that, or they want to be able to watch them closely.
'You are well, Beauregard?' Caleb asks in that slightly halting manner of his, as though he thinks such a question might be presumptuous, or poorly received. Smart man. It might have been, but he says it only loud enough for the two of them to hear. The two of them, that is, and also Fjord, who is standing solidly next to her so that she can lean against his shoulder. But Fjord is pretending so hard and so well that he can't hear them that hell, maybe he really can't.
'Yeah. Yeah, I'm good, man.'
'You went down—'
'Ha. Went down.'
Caleb's expression goes carefully blank. Then, 'Hollah.'
'No.'
He shrugs. Awards himself with the smallest scrape of a smile. And, apparently satisfied that she is alright, if not perfectly hale, he turns and begins to make his way across the room that has been gifted to them. Strips off the grime-and-blood soaked coat as he goes. Shards of glass shake loose from the folds of that coat, clinking across the stone floor, and rather than try to clean it up now he just drops the coat entirely and collapses, exhausted, into his bedroll.
The others follow suit.
Yasha is still not meeting her eyes—anyone's eyes, really. Jester yawns as she and Cad check over all of them to make sure they're not going to die in their sleep. Fjord, too, follows them around—he has a bit of a swagger to his step, and Beau clocks it as his own brand of discomfort, a too-forceful projection of confidence. He moves to Nott, speaks quietly to her for a minute before setting his hands on her shoulders. As he concentrates, his hands begin to glow with a verdant light and it seems to be that light, or whatever caused it, that draws a modicum of pain and tightness from her face. He wanders Beau's way next.
'Poison duty, any poison to spare?'
Beau grins. Socks him light on the shoulder, careful to pull the punch.
'Hey, hey,' Fjord steps back, hands raised protectively. 'Careful! I'm feeling sensitive after today—if we were putting a number system to it, I'd only have, like, five hit points left. You could literally kill me with a finger,' he tells her, deadpan.
'Eh, you're not my type.'
Fjord groans. Wipes a broad hand over his face as he shakes his head. Sighing, he asks again, 'Poison?'
'Hell no. This body is a temple.'
'What?' His pain-and-exhaustion glazed eyes clear after a moment, a little. Enough. 'Oh shit, that's right, you can't be poisoned. Great! Because between you and me?' he leans in. 'I only have, like, one of these left and I'm gonna give it to Caleb—I don't think he's poisoned but better safe than sorry, am I right?'
'Good idea. Right now, a sneeze could make him explode like a kicked cat.'
Fjord chuckles. Pats her shoulder gently, pulls her in to knock their heads together before he walks away, leaving her there at the door. She watches as he carefully negotiates rousing Caleb, ducks the bolt of fire the wizard sends up toward the wall, narrowly missing singing Fjord and the draping banners at the end of the next bed.
Trying to pick apart the low murmurs, half habit, half to make sure she hasn't missed something, hasn't missed something important, she has to fight past her own exhaustion and the near-constant ringing in her eyes and, doing so, Beau almost misses Jester stepping up by her side.
'Hey.'
'Hey, you.' Beau sucks in a sharp breath when Jester leans into her, tucks her head against Beau's shoulder. She wraps her arms loosely around Beau's waist, an exhausted hug. After a fraction of a second, Beau hugs her back. 'You alright?'
'Mm.'
Jester's hair is soft as Beau brushes her fingers through it. Clumped in places with blood and dark ichor, and Beau nearly cuts herself on a shard of glass, but soft.
'Today sucked but...I honestly don't see how it could've gone better,' Beau continues. 'And you were amazing. Getting Yasha back—'
'That was Cad.'
'Sure, but you're the one that scried, the one that figured out she was...was still in there.' Beau feels Jester just shrug, noncommital. She tightens her hug in response, unable to do anything more. 'That thing you did to Obann was fucking sick too.'
'Oh that? It was nothing,' Jester denies, all coy, but Beau can hear in her voice that she's pleased by the compliment. She turns her head a little, adjusts her head just so, and Beau's heart gives an unwieldy thud against her ribs when Jester slots herself perfectly into the crook of her neck.
Beau swallows.
'You also—I didn't really thank you then, but you got me back up.' She tries not to straight up perish when Jester squeezes tight around her waist. Beau rubs her hand over the width of Jester's shoulders and upper back, firm and slow. 'Thank you for that.'
Jester nods. The tip of a curling horn nudges Beau's chin, scratches. Beau ignores it. Leans tentatively and then a little more weightily into the hug Jester offers. It's a sweet relief to trust Jester with a portion of her weight, the pain in her feet lessening somewhat, the ache in her fucked up ribs too.
Eventually, they split.
Everyone falls to sleep, except for Beau. There's an energy still singing in her bones, not needing to be punching out but more like she's searching for something that will properly settle her. Proof that they're safe, that her family is really safe. For now, she wants to make sure that the monks they were promised are guarding this section of the archives.
On the way back to their room—the monks having assured her, several times, that yes, Expositor, we are going to protect you, we won't let anything happen to your party, you can rest—she stops still in the walkway, one corridor leading to their room, the other into the main chamber of the library.
The Rexxentrum division of the Cobalt Soul stands in a half dozen towers, rather than Zadash's solitary isolated tower. In the centre of these towers, beneath a grand domed ceiling, is this chamber, the great Reading Room. And there in the centre of it is sat a woman in the flowing grey robes of a librarian. Her hair is long and her face serene, and Beau would continue on without comment if not for the fact that there in the middle of her forehead is a third eye.
Beau steps through the frame into the chamber.
'Did you know you've got a little,' Beau points to her own forehead. 'Just a little—right there,'
REALLY? the woman asks, in a voice that sounds much like Beau's own voice, that dry, barely-there voice that sits forefront in her mind as she reads. YOU SPEAK IN SUCH A MANNER EVEN TO A GOD?
Beau struggles to calm herself, heart suddenly gripped vice-like in her chest between seizing lungs. They'd faced a real fucked-up Obann today, and glimpsed a fraction of an ancient, god-like evil, but somehow none of that managed to shake her as much as hearing that simple confirmation. As hearing that voice in her mind, in the room all around her.
'So. Okay. So, you're like...real then.'
YES.
Beau nods. 'Cool. Ah—sorry.'
The old wrinkled face lights with a delighted smile. HOW LOVELY. A RARE GIFT FROM YOU. Something about the third eye and the growing smile assures Beau that the woman—the goddess Ioun, she figures—knows exactly how rare those apologies are, and that Beau's knee-jerk reaction to that being commented on is a sour get fucked, which she thinks but doesn't say. Because that is a god. Right in front of her. Whom she should not speak to in such a manner. YOU DID VERY WELL TODAY, BEAUREGARD.
Her name. From a goddess.
'I. Thanks—thank you.' Beau clears her throat. Glances awkwardly around to see if anyone had noticed the way she flushes a bit with the praise; there is no one close enough to see it, no one around at all—in fact, the Soul is eerily quiet and awash in a greying shadow that makes Beau wonder if they are still in the Soul at all.
Her boots, when she moves, make hardly any sound but the stone feels solid underfoot. She skirts around the domed chamber, closer toward Ioun and to the platform in the centre where she is sat, cross-legged. Despite being an actual, full-blown god, she looks like any other ordinary human—plus the extra eye—and when Beau moves closer, she gestures to a folded mat Beau thinks wasn't there a moment ago. Still. Gods. That's how they work, right? Mysterious and shit like that.
Beau takes her place on the mat, opposite Ioun. Folds herself into a matching pose. Her hands settle loosely on her knees and she lets her breathing slow, settle deep in her diaphragm. Her ki—deplenished, she had thought, entirely by the fight earlier in the day—ignites. She can feel it as it rushes through her body, carried along on the beat of her pulse to the points of pain, the places where her skin is still broken despite healing, those places her energy recognises as other, as wrong: bruises, contusions, the scraped skin stretched tight over sore knuckles. The great, barely closed gash in her chest that sends a low, warm pulse of pain through Beau with every breath.
As she rests her body, Beau feels her tired mind drain of the slogging exhaustion. She opens her eyes—wonders when, exactly, she had closed them—and looks across to the woman, the goddess, now with clear and focused attention.
Her skin is a warm brown, thoroughly wrinkled like ancient paper and spotted with age spots like spilled ink. The irises of her three eyes are a vivid, attentive violet and when she catches Beau's attention, she leans in.
YOU MUST HAVE QUESTIONS, EXPOSITOR.
She knows who I am, she actually knows who I am.
'Just a few,' Beau lies, putting almost all of her energy toward pretending to be cool and collected and not at all untethered beneath the gaze of her goddess, not at all like the entirety of herself has been taken apart like a book unbound at the spine and spread out page by page.
Her goddess laughs, a dry sound like rustling pages. GOOD. ASK THEM.
Morning arises broken and bright in a scattered prism through the stained glass windows. And panic.
'Where is she?' Fjord demands of their guard, a monk freshly shorn. He shakes them by the collar. Hard. 'Where is she?'
Caduceus hums a rumbling morning hum. 'Hold on. I can locate her, if she's close,' he offers. His eyes flutter closed, one hand reaching toward the light of the window. The flash of green from the strained glass seems to glow brighter, diffusing through the room until they are all drenched in it. He nods to the open door. 'She's close. Come on.'
Cad leads the way, but only barely. Jester is close at his side. Eventually, they come to a cluster of monks waiting—their eyes wide, murmuring with more excitement and surprise than any of the Nein's number has seen from these monks before—and the Nein dash forward, push through the crowd. After all they've seen, excitement is not what they need, not now, not yet.
It's immediately clear what the monks are interested in: there, in the centre of the reading room, is Beau. Sat on a low, round platform on a mat of lush heath-grey cloth and, surprising to her friends, appears to be meditating. Her chest rises and falls with slow, deep breaths. What causes Jester to lash out and grab at Caduceus, and at a monk on her other side, is the mark glowing upon Beau's forehead and the back of her neck—the light is thin, like watered paint, but glowing with undeniable power, purple and shimmering in the morning light.
There, set carefully upon Beau's forehead, is a crooked mark, lines turning in and in upon themselves at sharp angles. The eye of Ioun.