Chapter Text
Even from the outside, the castle looks daunting and fortified. It looms above those in the streets of the city with spires stretching to the starry heavens above. The visible windows are alight with an odd, magical green light that would make the whole building look ghostly if it weren’t for the music and hum of chattering voices that can be heard from within. The lights shine against the slightly iridescent grayish stones of the walls.
Caleb absolutely does not want to be here. Even if he were the type of person to enjoy social gatherings in the first place, there is simply too much anxiety in the pit of his stomach due to the coming days for him to be comfortable. He is slightly mollified that his companion does not want to be here any more than he does, even as they approach the castle together, their arms linked together in a way that the trained eye would likely see as with forced casualty.
That, however, is not Caleb’s fault. His teacher had ensured that he had the tools he needed to blend in with high society. Expositor Beauregard Lionett, however… Well, it is easy to tell from the three years that he has known her that she desperately tries to pretend she is not of a social class that she was almost certainly born into. Caleb privately supposes that their positions are similar in a way, although reversed; he is a farmer acting as a nobleman. The difference is that now that Beauregard finds herself thrust back into such a political position where she has to smile and pretend she likes the people around her, she is ill-practiced.
“Smile, Expositor,” Caleb says softly, adjusting her arm slightly to ensure a more natural look.
Beau forces a smile as the two of them approach the gate. A Kryn guard stands there and looks at them expectantly, a list of guests in one hand and an ink pen in the other. “Names?” he says, looking a little suspicious to see the two humans approach.
“Bren Aldric Ermendrud of Rexxentrum and Expositor Beauregard Lionett of the Cobalt Soul,” says Caleb.
The guard looks down the list and nods. He crosses out their names and motions for a guard inside the castle grounds to open the gates, allowing the two humans inside. Caleb’s eyes trace around the people clustered together in clumps around the garden that surrounds the path up to the massive double doors to the garden. Most of the people around are Drow, but Caleb does spot a handful of goblins and one or two tieflings.
It also does not escape his notice that he and Beauregard are drawing quite a few stares as apparently the only humans present. They are speaking mostly in Undercommon, which Caleb doesn’t speak. He knows, though, that Beauregard does, and he can tell from the tilt of her head that she is listening in. He inclines his chin towards her to silently ask what they’re saying.
“Apparently one of the Umavi is looking for suitors for one of her sons,” Beau mutters to him, rolling her eyes. She groans and Caleb has to shush her. “Ugh, I hate shit like this. Everyone is so… fake.”
“It’s just one night,” Caleb reminds her, his voice low, “and then this is it. It will be over.”
“Well, the party will be over, and then we’re going to have to deal with a bunch of other shit,” Beau complains.
Caleb shushes her, shooting a glance around nervously, but there is really no point. Everyone outside seems too absorbed in their own conversations to really be listening in.
As they approach, the music steadily gets louder and the people feel more frequent. Another guard approaches them, his expression is refreshingly smooth as he asks how the two humans would like to be presented. They once again give their names and the Drow returns to the double doors of the castle, his arms folded primly behind his back as he announces, “A Mr. Ermendrud and Expositor Lionett!”
A few of the guests glance over, but quickly lose interest, which suits Caleb just fine. He is relieved to see that they are not the only humans there. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised, as this gathering is supposed to be a celebration for the end of the War of Ash and Light. The Dwendalian Empire has a few representatives around the room, mostly keeping to themselves but sometimes making an effort to mingle with the finely dressed Drow of the Kryn Dynasty. Caleb and Beau, although of the Empire, are not their representatives; they are there on behalf of their own organizations.
Although Caleb had been trained to be able to blend into high society like this, he finds his stomach in knots at the sight of the big and beautifully decorated room, crowded with beautifully-dressed people. It makes Caleb feel small and plain in a way that he doesn’t think will ever truly be conditioned away.
Caleb releases Beau’s arm and gives her a short, clipped bow. “Excuse me, Expositor, I must attend to my duties.”
Beau snorts. “You look so stupid acting all formal like that.”
“Look at where we are, Beauregard,” he says, sweeping his arm across the room to indicate the finely dressed people and the fine decorations.
“Why bother doing ‘your duties,’” says Beau, bumping his shoulder slightly. “If all goes well, you won’t have to report back to him anyway.”
“Still, I have to at least pretend, don’t I? Who’s to say he doesn’t have eyes here. It is unlike him to just send one representative,” Caleb says.
“Sure,” sighs Beau. She begrudgingly pats his shoulder. “Be careful, then, and try to stay relatively close to me, just in case they’ve figured us out.”
Caleb gives her a small smile and an awkward thumbs up. Beau laughs and punches him lightly on the shoulder, making him stumble a bit. “There he is. Try to loosen up a bit. Assume, if you can, that he isn’t watching you and that you can just be yourself.”
“I- I’ll try,” he says skeptically, rubbing subconsciously at his forearms.
“Good. Now, I’m going to go see what kind of food they serve here in the Dynasty,” says Beau, starting to make her way over to the tables laden with food. “Meet me at midnight!” she calls out over her shoulder.
Caleb stands there awkwardly for a few moments, wringing his hands nervously before he forces himself back into his trained, soldier-like posture and expression. He tries to take Beauregard’s words to heart and remind himself that if the timing works out well enough he won’t have to do a full report to Master Ikithon in the coming days. Still, he finds himself making note of the things that he has been trained to take note of; he counts the windows, estimates how many people are in the room, and notices which faces he recognizes and those he does not, among other things. He knows that although the war is over, certainly all of the tactical information he gathers can be useful in the future; there is no detail too small.
That is why Master Ikithon is so fond of sending him on these missions now that Caleb has regained his trust; his memory is almost infallible. Being a human from the heart of the Empire makes him the perfect candidate for diplomatic missions abroad when he isn’t needed for seduction and interrogation back home. Although Caleb hates to admit it, he is quite good at his job.
Caleb moves from room to room open to the public for the ball, silently creating a map of the space. He is able to calculate how many rooms on this floor he is not allowed to go into, based upon the size of the castle visible from the outside and the doors that he can see that are either locked or guarded. Every now and then, someone approaches him to make the simple, flimsy small talk that always occurs at parties like this. Caleb greets them with a smile and stifles his Zemnian accent, doing as he was told and saying that he is here on behalf of Master Trent Ikithon of the Cerberus Assembly, who extends his sincerest apologies that he could not be here this evening.
At one point during the evening, Caleb passes by a room where there are a multitude of tables set up for dining, some of which are occupied and some are not. A group of people are performing on a stage on the opposite side of the room from a table with the fewest but finest table settings. He spies Beauregard ogling one of the performers in particular, a large woman with dark hair and fair skin, while another performer, a tiefling, winks at Caleb and offers him a rose before dancing away. More people file into the room and the music for the performers swells. The performance is spectacular, but the crowd is starting to make him a little uncomfortable, so he starts to try to head towards the edge. However, there are so many people moving around him that it is difficult to track things.
Caleb has always had difficulty with loud, crowded spaces. It is something that his master had tried to decondition him on, but had never fully succeeded. Beauregard has pointed out to him that that just made him less likely to acknowledge when something was wrong, and that if his mind worked a certain way it was going to be damn near impossible to change it completely, and Caleb had to admit that she was right. It has also made Caleb more cautious and careful about who he stims around; his master doesn’t stand for it. Neither Astrid nor Eadwulf really understand that quirk of his, but at least they do not tell Master Ikithon. Beauregard is the first person Caleb has known since his childhood that does not seem to mind. The first time he had flapped his hands near her, he was certain that she was going to yell at him, but she didn’t even blink.
Now, though, in the party there is simply too much going on around him for flapping his hands or fidgeting with his sleeve to help with, especially on top of the anxiety about the coming days that he is already trying to deal with. People are jostling around, bumping into him. There are more people arriving in the dining hall from elsewhere in the castle to prepare for the feast, or the last stragglers are arriving at the party and heading straight for the dining hall. This makes the hair on the back of Caleb’s neck stand up and he finds that he is suddenly desperate for a way out of the crowd.
This gets worse when the music starts to play somehow louder than it was before, as the performers seem to enter their finale. There are too many people around him and Caleb feels trapped.
There are many conflicting scents from the food tables surrounding the room.
People are bumping into him.
The wall of sound from the band seems to be crashing into him over and over again.
Beauregard is nowhere to be seen.
Caleb can’t think.
He can’t move.
He wants to scream.
Without really knowing how Caleb somehow manages to get to the edge of the crowd and flee the room. He supposes that his training must have kicked in to automatically send him away because the next thing he knows, he is in a hallway, breathing heavily and leaning against the wall of a hallway that does not look familiar to him. He supposes that with the large majority of the guests having moved to the dining hall, there are fewer other guards in other areas of the party, allowing him to go to a different space on the first floor of the castle. There are portraits on the wall of Drow dressed in fine clothing and small placards underneath them, but he is too out of sorts to examine them closely. He leans against the wall and waits for the world around him to stop spinning, utilizing the breathing technique that Beau had taught him to try to ground himself. He stares at the backs of his hands as if by the sheer force of his gaze he would be able to stop them from trembling.
Caleb is not quite put back together when he hears voices down the hall. His training kicks in and he slips into what he believes to be a nearby storage closet; in reality, it is a small, curving staircase that leads upwards and Caleb quickly figures that it is for servants to move about quickly. He would be concerned about being caught by one of the maids, but given the amount of dust in the air and cobwebs gathering in the corners, it seems that this stairwell hasn’t been used in quite a while. Unsurprising, he supposes, given its apparently odd location in the middle of what seemed to be a portrait gallery. As Caleb peers out from the door, he silently curses the fact that Astrid isn’t here; she is the stealthy one out of the three students, not him. She would have been able to find a better hiding place than an old stairwell.
What Caleb can see through the slightly ajar door is what feels like a platoon of Kryn guards. He starts to reach for his spell components as a reflex before his mind catches up and he reminds himself that the war is over and he is here as a guest, not an intruder. He curses himself for being so foolish, remembering Beauregard’s words; while this is technically his last mission for Ikithon, she was right in that he won’t be reporting back like he’s supposed to be. Caleb isn’t going to be expected back until later so that he would have more time to examine Rosohna, but by that time he will have been whisked away. They would leave partway through the party to look around the city before teleporting back through the Cobalt Soul at which point… well, that will come later.
Silently observing, Caleb realizes that there is a great number of guards moving through this one area not because they believe their castle to be infiltrated, but because they are surrounding three women. The first is wearing a long, white gown that sparkles in the green light of the hallway, an elegant, three-horned crystal crown atop her head. She holds herself with a grace that practically screams that she grew up in a privileged household, even as her turquoise eyes keep a close eye on her surroundings. Her white hair is in a series of intricate braids that trail down her spine and fall down to her waist.
The second woman has a more purple skin tone compared to the gray complexion of the first. Her hair is longer, falling down nearly to her knees, and rests in two identical braids down her shoulder. She is not wearing a dress, instead wearing a dark blue suit that is perfectly tailored to her feminine form. She wears a deep violet half cape that compliments her skin tone beautifully and although Caleb is too far away right now he can easily picture the sound of her heels clicking against the floor as she walks and talks to the first woman.
The third woman stands out from the other two because she is not a Drow. In fact, she is a goblin. Even so, she is wearing fine robes of a soft, rosy pink and an off-white. She has many trinkets and pieces of jewelry about her head and ears that sparkle almost as much as the first woman’s dress. Despite her size, she is able to keep up easily with the other two and carries herself with a grace not usually seen among goblins, at least in Caleb’s admittedly limited experience.
Watching them, Caleb knows exactly who these women are; these are the three Umavi of the ruling Dens of Xhorhas. According to his studies and his training, the three of them are akin to having three queens of the Dynasty. He stares, having thought that he would never see them in person. Their voices echo in the hallway as they speak to one another in Undercommon. He reaches into his component pouch and pulls out a pinch of soot and salt, tossing it into the air with one hand and tracing arcane symbols with the other. For a moment, the voices sound as if they are speaking from underwater before they snap like a rubber band and it suddenly sounds as if they are speaking in Caleb’s native language.
“...don’t understand why he’s being so petulant about this,” one of them is saying, the woman with the twin braids and the suit. “He knows it’s his duty.”
Caleb leans forward, intrigued. If there is turmoil among the Dynasty’s three most powerful Umavi, that is something that would certainly pique Master Ikithon’s interest as well.
“He is young,” says the goblin, gently patting her leg. “He is, what, a hundred and twenty-two already?”
“A hundred and twenty-three,” corrects the woman in the suit with a sigh. “I genuinely do not mind if he prefers a prince over a princess, but refusing to get engaged to anyone is simply lunacy. He knows the importance of this and he must have known that this was coming eventually.”
“You could threaten to have his brother inherit his position instead of him,” the woman with the crystal crown suggests.
“I’m concerned that that is what he wants,” says the one in the suit.
“He’s just being difficult. Trying to rebel,” the goblin says soothingly. “Just give him a bit of space and bring up the matter again in a decade or so.”
Caleb realizes that they’re talking about the engagement of one of the princes. While political shifts like this are always valuable information for Master Ikithon one way or another, there is very little that they would be able to do with the information as it is now. Admittedly, this perhaps is related to his lack of knowledge surrounding the prince in the first place. It could be worth mentioning for the sake that there is the possibility that a different prince would be taking up the duties of his sibling, but Caleb has to remind himself that he will not be reporting back as he usually does.
One of the guards seems to notice that the door is slightly open and beelines for it. Caleb scrambles backward and ducks behind the curve of the stairs. The door shuts and he can hear the musical clinking of a key ring and the click of the lock. Caleb sighs and leans against the wall, already knowing that Beau is going to chew him out for not sticking close to her. His gaze lingers around the cobwebs in the stairwell for a moment before he compulsively casts Prestidigitation to clean them. He begins to head upwards, which is the only way he can go given his lack of skill with a lockpick.
The stairs continue upwards for several floors, but Caleb does not pursue it further than he has to; while his every instinct is screaming that he should gather as much information as possible, overall he just really wants to get back to Beauregard so that if things go south he will have backup of some sort. He slips out of the door to what he hopes is the second floor to find himself in another hallway. This one doesn’t have as many portraits or decorations as the one previous, but it isn’t difficult for Caleb to come to the conclusion that they ensured that the downstairs rooms were made more presentable for the sake of the celebration and didn’t spend the time or effort up here.
As he walks, Caleb continues to put together a mental map of the castle, comparing this floor to what he saw downstairs. He quickly becomes disoriented, which is frustrating, because he never gets lost. The way that he sees it, navigating a new space in a non-combat situation is basic math. There is only a certain amount of space that, barring magic, a location could have. Floors lineup with each other, windows seen from the outside match their placement from the inside. Stairs that go straight up to the different floors more or less have similar positioning on the floor above. For this castle, however, the layout is bewildering.
Caleb comes to the conclusion that there must be some sort of enchantment on this floor of the castle to be purposefully disorienting. He continues on stubbornly for several more minutes before he finds himself before an impressive set of double doors that according to logic should lead to a set of stairs to the first floor, but likely do not; in Caleb’s experience, such fine craftsmanship is not usually reserved for simple staircases. He glances around and tugs on one of the door handles, peeking inside.
It’s a library. There are several rows of shelves that stretch towards the ceiling both to the left and right as well as a loft across the room from him with more shelves lining its walls and a couple of sitting areas.
All thoughts about leaving the second floor to go find Beauregard immediately leave Caleb’s head. He stares at the library like a man who has never had a drop to drink his entire life and he has just been presented with a sparkling river. He slips inside the room, neatly shutting the door behind him as he casts a couple of dancing lights, his own orange light mixing with the magical green and violet dim lighting already present in the room.
The globules follow him around as he starts to walk around, looking longingly at the shelves. Caleb picks a row of shelves at random and starts to head down, running his fingers along the spines of the tomes as he walks, enjoying the texture of them. Some have fabric covers, some are smooth. Caleb adores all of them and privately wonders what he would give to have access to a library like this. He stops next to one of the books and reaches for it when someone clears their throat.
“Excuse me, what are you doing here?”