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Aloth was being responsible, really. Practical. He needed light to read by -- a lot of being a wizard was… mostly just reading, after all, and it was important that he be prepared for the next time they found themselves beset by skeletons or constructs or sentient slime mold. And it wasn’t as if there was another wizard around who could handle the arcane heavy lifting for the party, so he needed to take that responsibility seriously, which meant he needed to spend a lot of time reading, which meant he needed a good, reliable source of light. And they were away from Caed Nua and it’s many fine oil lamps more often than not, and it wasn’t always safe or practical to make a fire bright enough to read by, and it got cold in the Dyrwood and he didn’t have sleeves and… There were plenty of reasons, really, why he needed to be sitting as close to Elehal as he currently was.
The fire godlike, for his part, didn’t seem overly concerned with the state of their seating arrangements. He had glanced up, briefly, to smile at Aloth as he sat down -- Elehal smiled at everyone, all the time, of course -- before returning to the array of small notebooks he had spread out across the table they had claimed in an out of the way corner of the Charred Barrel. Edér had been drinking and chatting with Skerrion and a handful of other patrons for the better part of an hour now, Sagani was beating locals at darts on the other side of the common room, and Durance was… wherever Durance went while the rest of them enjoyed themselves. Off somewhere being unpleasant, most likely . Leaving the two of them free to sit and read or work in peace, and relative quiet. Aloth found himself feeling… content, happy even, sharing a companionable silence with someone, not feeling pressured to break it or think of anything to say. Here in the warmth and noise of a pleasant, respectable tavern, with good food and drink, surrounded by the sounds of safe, happy kith enjoying a simple evening among their neighbors, he could forget, almost, the strain and fear and uncertainty of the journey they were on.
Elehal sat hunched over the not-quite-big-enough table beside him, humming quietly to himself and copying the contents of the many small notebooks into a larger tome bound in brass and leather. Aloth had seen him paging through that same book several times along the road or in taverns like this one, but had never been able to make out its contents, and it hadn’t seemed proper to ask. Now, though… It was right there, open on the table as Elehal’s pen scratched across the parchment. It wasn’t as though he was taking great pains to keep whatever he was writing in there private, if he was working on it out here. Aloth leaned forward as subtly as he could manage, trying to peer over the large, distractingly well-muscled arm resting on the table beside the book. It was noticeably warmer here than he remembered the rest of the tavern being, and the light from Elehal’s fiery hair and the glowing cracks running across his dark, metallic skin cast strange, small shadows across the table. They weren’t really cracks in his skin, Aloth mused, godlike were still made of the same flesh and blood as any other kith on the inside -- he had seen Elehal’s own blood more times than he would have liked at this point, it wasn’t much different than his own, or anyone else’s. Certainly not the burning, molten-metal light that seemed to move beneath his skin, spouting tiny jets of flame on rare occasion, as if his body were only barely containing the blazing furnace of a soul it was wrapped around. He wondered if their pattern changed over time, if they felt different to the touch than the surrounding skin. Warmer, maybe.
Magran’s fiery tits, lad. Take the man tae bed already an get it ower wi. Iselmyr’s --blessedly silent -- voice broke through his thoughts, startling him into sitting back down much too suddenly for there to be anything subtle about it. Hou long are ye gon’ae make me sit here watchin ye pine ower him like some ninnying schoolboy?
Shut up. For the love of the gods, n ot now !
“ Something wrong?” Elehal glanced over his shoulder towards Aloth, his expression hovering around the edge of mild concern.
“No! What? No, I was just--” He prayed his face wasn’t as red as it felt, “It’s a bit warm. In here. I was… curious, actually, about what you’re working on.” There might still be a way to salvage this, somehow. “I didn’t think chanters used grimoires, or...or texts, in their casting.”
“We don’t.” Elehal’s face broke into a smile as he turned towards Aloth, lifting the book to show him the page spread he had just been working on. It was covered in plain, neat script and what looked like musical notation of some kind. “I know all my chants by heart, this is…” His expression darkened suddenly, as if realizing something painful for the first time. “I...don’t know what this is, actually, anymore.” He set the book back down slowly, a frown creasing his brow. Aloth’s face was still burning, but his heart rate and breathing were calming somewhat, and Elehal hadn’t seemed to notice anything amiss.
“ I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” He clutched his own grimoire nervously in his lap, running his thumb along its ridged spine, the leather worn smooth and shiny from years of the same nervous tic.
“ No, it’s- it’s fine.” Elehal shook his head, as if to clear his thoughts before turning back to Aloth with an apologetic smile, “I… A lot’s happened, is all. It’s still sinking in that things are...going to be different, now.” He reached a hand up to rub at one of the long, wicked-looking horns that grew from the sides of his head. “Still catches me by surprise sometimes.”
A loth nodded. He was having trouble keeping up with things himself, and he didn’t have ghosts whispering in his ears and invading his dreams at night. He also hadn’t recently been told, on no uncertain terms, that his mind was tearing itself apart and he was very likely headed for a long, painful decent into madness. “ Can I see what you were working on?”
“Sure, ink should be dry by now.” Elehal slid the open book towards Aloth. He leaned forwards to inspect the pages before him and blinked in surprise – there was an enchantment on this book, a slight, nearly imperceptible shift of arcane energy about it. A simple waterproofing spell had been woven into the intricately wrapped threads of the Vailian-style endbands, he realized. Binders did that sometimes, if they had the talent for it, though usually only on commissioned volumes to provide an extra layer of protection for particularly important or valuable texts. He’d never seen one on a blank book like this one before. Elehal would have paid a significant amount of money for this book, wherever he had gotten it.
Turning his attention back to the content of the pages themselves, Aloth saw he had been right about the musical notation. The right-hand page, half finished, showed the familiar bars and notes of Aedyran sheet music, though the lyrics, written in small, simple letters beneath their respective notes, were unfamiliar to him.
Engwithan runes covered the majority of the left-hand page alongside strange, wavy lines that seemed to flow across the parchment, spiraling into and around each other from time to time. The lengthy footnotes beneath the runes were in Aedyran, however, and easy enough to read, although they were mostly references to people and writings he had never heard of before – with the exception of the names of a few Glanfathan tribes he recognized. This was a translation, he realized. Elehal had found, somewhere – he had no idea when or how – a fragment of an ancient song and translated it from a dead language into a living one. And not just the words but the notes – that had to be what the fluid, twisting lines were – the melody as well. He hadn’t known the Engwithans even had musical notation, let alone how one would go about reading or transposing it.
Aloth leafed carefully through the earlier pages – more heavily annotated sheet music, folktales and oral histories of places, many that seemed to have been recorded multiple times from different tellers, contradictions and divergences carefully marked and noted alongside possible connections to other verses, a few diagrams that appeared, after some inspection, to be comparisons of different musical “scripts” and scales. He felt his heart beginning to race again, though out of excitement, not embarrassment this time.
Fye, nought like some stuffy book-scribblin’ te get ye rod up, eh lad?
Iselmyr, this is amazing. Even you should be able to see that. Look at this.
Iselmyr responded with the mental equivalent of a thoroughly exasperated eye-roll.
“Elehal, this is…. How long have you been working on this?” he asked.
“ A good while now. I started… collecting songs, while I was on a Vallian ship. Music, stories, the… things people remember about places, about each other. Captain gave me the book when I transferred off her ship, her wife owned a bindery in Ozia I think she said. I was going to bring it with me to Tâkowa, see if it could help get me into the lore college somehow. But then, well… ” A trace of his earlier melancholy settled over Elehal’s face as his words trailed off.
It occurred to Aloth that he knew remarkably little about Elehal’s life before his Awakening. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised him, given how reticent he was about his own personal details, but it felt odd nonetheless.
“ I’m sure Rauatai and the college will still be there after we’ve dealt with Thaos and the… issue of your soul .” Assuming, of course, that they survived at all , but this was hardly the time to bring that up. He did his best to offer a reassuring smile. “Kana’s probably already making plans for all the papers the two of you are going to co-author.”
Elehal laughed, a deep, rolling sound that Aloth felt in his chest like the peal of a great bell. “I’m sure he is. He’ll have me spending the rest of my days slaving over manuscripts in some stuffy library somewhere if I’m not careful.” And Aloth found himself grinning at that himself. You could forget, almost, the darkness outside these walls.“You should do something with this though,” he said, handing the book back to Elehal, extremely aware of the way their hands brushed against each other as he did so, “This is an… incredible amount of research.”
“Oh! I- Thank you.” The flames of Elehal’s hair and eyes flared brighter momentarily, their color deepening to the rich red-orange of autumn leaves before returning to their usual state. “It’s really just… a record, I don’t exactly have the- the background to know how to draw any really meaningful conclusions from it. You’d need someone like Kana for that.”
Trying to hide or suppress his blushing was probably a lost cause at this point, Aloth decided. He could always blame the redness on the heat of sitting so near (out of necessity, of course) a fire godlike for an extended length of time. “Are all chanters as academically minded as the two of you? I thought wizards were supposed to be the bookish eccentrics of magic users.”
Elehal laughed again. He was in a good mood tonight, relaxed, enjoying himself. Aloth was glad of it. “No, not at all. Some are, of course, especially ones that come from the lore colleges or just that kind of … academic culture, I guess you could call it. But most of us are still just… that one person in the village that remembers the time someone’s great-great grandfather steered a canoe through a reef during that one really bad storm a hundred years ago. At the end of the day all you need to be a chanter is a story and a voice to tell it with. The rest” he gestured at the papers cluttering the table, “is important, but it’s not the heart of what we do. That’s the difference, I think. Chanting is an… older kind of history. More…” His brow creased as he searched for a word, “More about memory. It doesn’t matter as much if the things we sing about really happened or not as much as that they mattered to the people that heard them. And those things aren’t always the ones that get written down either.”
He stopped himself suddenly, his mouth twisting into an apologetic smile. “Sorry. That was probably a longer answer than you wanted.”
“Not at all.” Aloth shook his head, realizing he had been staring rather more than he had intended. “ I’ve never had the opportunity to learn much about Chanters. And I rather enjoyed listening to you .”
And he would remember, always, how Elehal – Elehal who was The Watcher, who was god-touched, who could not possibly have needed anything that Aloth was capable of giving him, – seemed to sit up taller at his words, shining brighter still against the yellow light of the guttering tavern lamps.