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Chapter Text

Tu’uharbin Lighthouse

Third Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

20H, bright sun, easterly winds

Caleb Widogast,

I am copying here an excerpt from the historical records of Tu’uharbin Lighthouse, where I now find myself stationed. (My passive voice belies reality; I requested this post.) While not your usual fare, I hope it will interest the scholar in you nonetheless.

Built in 337 PD, Tu’uharbin Lighthouse remains the only stop of respite for ships circumnavigating this our most Northern continent of Eiselcross. During early explorations of Eiselcross, in the era of Othalos Kryn, preliminary digs suggested the presence of valuable minerals along the northern shore, including perhaps even whitestone, the source of that most coveted substance, residuum. Mining endeavors, well-funded by contemporary efforts to expand industrial production, were rushed into action, and though no whitestone was ultimately found (geological scholars believe the residual amounts initially found can be attributed to high-arcanum Aeorian debris which resulted in false positive readings), the area did prove fruitful in ores of iron, petrolath, and taconium. The demand for such materials drastically increased during the Southern Bay War, and Tu’uharbin Lighthouse guided a constant stream of ships in and out of the treacherous waters of Alseth Bay, laden down with raw materials that would make their long journey southward into the factories and arcane facilities of the far-away Dynasty.

Today, Tu’uharbin illuminates only the occasional shipping vessel, be it Kryn, Empire, or otherwise (under agreement of the Nautical Accord of 675), now that other mines, especially those in the southeastern Penumbra Range, produce the same raw materials with less risk and cost. The Lighthouse still remains crewed year-round, since attempts to automatize the rotating lens’ complex clockwork mechanism (primarily of Uthodurian Dwarvish make) have not proved successful. 

Perhaps I shall try my own hand to automatize the clockwork mechanisms, so the vigorous crank-turning I must do once a fortnight would be less strenuous. Though I suppose it would put me out of a job. I doubt anyone would notice for quite a while. It has been six weeks and three days since I saw a ship—Ursa’s Horizon, if my spyglass’ed eyes didn’t deceive me. She didn’t even come within signaling distance. By the ship records I found, I think her draught is too deep for the bay.

I must be boring you by now, and the stove is down to its last log. Yes, Widogast, a wood-fire. The woodshed outside is stocked to the ceiling. (I have discovered something new about myself: I enjoy the smell of fresh-cut wood.) The wildmagic of the whole area of the bay is greatly opposed to an ever-burning flame, and so I am reduced to simpler things. I have taken up your fashion of fingerless gloves, often wearing them around the house (a rather bare and humble place, you would think it) so that my fingers do not get entirely numb. I also have a newfound appreciation for fleece wool vests. I think you would find me a rather humorous sight these days. 

My enemies, too, would likely enjoy this sight of me brought so low. My hands stained with clockwork grease I have given up on removing entirely, since I am limited in my supply of ugly gray soap. My hair has been growing out, as well (as hair does of course, yet why was I surprised at this? I miss the feeling of my freshly shaved skull under my hands). I keep it in a messy sort of knot atop my head, a bit like Beauregard. It keeps falling out though, and I wish I could ask her for advice on how to keep it firmly in place.

By this point you are surely thinking, clever and logical as you are, “My Kryn friend, you know Sending. Why the old-fashioned paper and ink?” Sending, Caleb Widogast (let me briefly explain, since you yourself do not know the spell) is limited to twenty-five words. I do nearly the same tasks every single day. I pump the water for my meals. I feed the chickens. I carry in firewood. I check the ship logs. I make any repairs. I watch the horizon. Again. Again. Again. More minutes of every one of these days than I care to admit are spent thinking of you. And the rest of the Nein. How could I say anything in twenty-five words? It is both too few and too many.

Thus the old-fashioned paper and ink, Caleb Widogast. Forgive me that it is not of the highest quality. Pickings are slim here at the edge of the world. I hope—and here perhaps is my ego shining through, the palimpsest of my hubris—my words will help elevate the poor quality of the parchment.

I pump the water for my meals. My arms ache. (I keep waiting for muscles to grow. Maybe it’s too late for me on that front, I have chosen my path of academic weakness.) Once a week, extra trips for a bath in the copper tub I drag in front of the woodstove. I check the ship logs and resist doodling in the margins. I watch the empty, flat, cold horizon. Once a fortnight, I turn the clockwork cranks until my wrists ache and my brow drips sweat. As I sweat, I watch the counterweight make its long journey back up toward the lantern room so it can begin drifting down again, turning the great lens above, illuminating that empty horizon. 

And now, I can say, too, before I retire to bed, I write in your letter.

I wonder if I will have enough to write about. The days here are quite dull, no doubt, compared to the colorful chaotic life you are living. Maybe something in them will intrigue you, though. A man can hope. You, all of you in the Nein, taught me that much.

I hope this letter reaches you. I hardly need to explain the treacherous process of Teleport this far north, even with only an object. And even going into familiar hands. I will make a few copies, just in case. If none reach you via Teleport, I will have a stack to set in your hands when I see you again.

                                                             Your friend,

                                                             Essek Thelyss

P.S. Any return letter from you would be most welcome, though I understand much occupies your life which is more urgent than a lonely friend watching over distant waters. Still, I would consider any correspondence from you, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, to be like a ship cresting the horizon.

Chapter Text

Tu’uharbin Lighthouse

Seventeenth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

12H, freezing rain

Caleb,

I received your letter! In a rare turn, I was thankful for my isolation, because no one heard my startled shriek when your envelope popped into existence beside me. (I dropped the bowl I was washing, and it shattered but is now Mended.) I think I have read your letter seven times now and no doubt will continue to return to it. When we were children, Verin used to beg our mother to read the same story night after night, while I was the one always wanting something new. I think perhaps I understand him a bit better now.

I could not help but notice the absence of references to a certain mage in your letter. Naturally, I understand if you feel it’s unsafe to write about such matters, or if you do not wish to write about them at all! Only—please know that if you do wish to write about this matter (again, I trust you understand what I’m referring to—well, I hope you do—of course you do, you are a brilliant man), consider me a safe listening ear. Or rather, a safe pair of eyes to read about your troubles. I could even promise, though it would pain me to destroy such a treasured object, to burn the letters after. Or perhaps, wrap them around stones and throw them into the sea. The deepest place is off the northwestern side of the island, where about a hundred feet out, the sea floor drops off in a great cliff. I have not seen it, for I have not your penchant for Polymorph. I only know this invisible landscape from maps.

Enough of darker tides for now. In my last letter, I did not introduce you to my companions (“But Essek,” I hear you saying, as clearly as if you were sitting beside me. “I thought you were alone up there.”) I am alone, Caleb Widogast, in terms of humanoid companionship. But I do have four chickens. Three hens and a rooster. 

I must say, I have grown exceptionally skilled at cooking eggs. Were you to ever visit (an impossibility, I know, with your limited time and the terrible Teleportation risk), I would gladly boil you an egg and watch you eat it with great satisfaction. My selection of seasoning is sorely wanting, though. Sometimes I eat my boiled egg and think as hard as I possibly can of the taste of paprika, but it is still not the same. 

At the time of my last letter, perhaps I didn’t think of introducing you to my chicken companions because I hadn’t yet named them. Well, now I have. (I am feeling a bit silly as I write this, but oh, maybe just maybe I deserve this tiny shred of joy? Who does it harm, I suppose, if a bad man at the edge of the world smiles at the antics of a chicken?)

The hens are Julianna, Ubiti, and Freya. The rooster is Bruma, and he is a right bully. Julianna (I must admit—do not tell the others) is my favorite. Her feathers are cream-colored with beautiful black patterning that is almost geometric. I wish I had any skill as an artist so I could draw her for you. Her little face is bright red, and she gives the sweetest tiny shivers when you pet the top of her head. (If I recall correctly, Yasha called this “giving scritchies”?) 

Sometimes I pick her up when I go to feed them in the morning. She is the only one who will let me. At first Bruma protested more than she did, but she seems to have set him straight and has convinced him I can be trusted to hold her. Sometimes I sit outside the coop while they scrounge in the weak winter grass around me, and I stare at the sea and my mind is very empty.

I’m sure you understand, what a rare and frightening and dear thing such a feeling is for men like us.

I have also not introduced you to the landscape of my new abode, so I shall try that now. I find myself envying the great painters (Jester, of course, included) who can capture the whole of a place in a small square of canvas. I am left to rely on my vocabulary. Of course, even if I could do more than weakly smear a paint brush around, I have no paint here and no canvas. Only this single quill, only this brittle parchment. (Some of the pages, you will have noticed, have text on the opposite side. They are torn out of the back of the meager collection of books here. Please forgive this transgression towards your beloved—that is, literature.)

Tu’uharbin Island is narrow, carved down to a sliver by the decades of sleet and waves. The sea currents keep it oddly free of snow, unlike the white mainland I can see to the south on a clear day. At the northern end is the lighthouse itself, with my humble quarters in its lowest level. The chicken coop and woodshed are nearby, along with the water pump, and at the southern end is the storage shed and boathouse (though nary a skiff has occupied it in years, only cobwebs and rot). There are no trees, only some juniper bushes that look as if they’ve been here since before the Calamity and plan to survive the next one, too. 

This is my tiny world these days, and I wonder if I shall soon be naming every pebble and blade of winter grass along with the chickens. 

I do have (don’t you dare laugh, Caleb Widogast. “Essek, how will you know if I laugh?” I hear you asking. I will simply know). I do have a favorite boulder. It is on the western shore, and sometimes if I finish my chores in time, I will go sit on it while I watch the sunset. It has a wide flat upper portion and a smaller lower portion that juts out, like the barest approximation of a chair. If the sun has been shining, the gray stone is warm to the touch and feels good on the backs of my legs. There is a band of some sparkling stone (quartz perhaps?) that runs all the way around it. 

I remember you told me once that this sort of band means a stone is “lucky.” I have a lucky favorite boulder. (Oh, alright, you may laugh, if only because thinking now of your laugh is a pleasant precious thing, though it does put an ache in my chest beneath my breastbone, because I am not really hearing the sound, and the memory is not enough. The memory reminds me of the silence hanging heavy around me. Of course, there is always the sound of the sea, which I have gotten used to. I imagine real silence would feel strange to me now, like when, after weeks aboard the vessel that bore me here, I stumbled on solid ground for a day or two.) 

Sometimes if I lay back on the boulder Julianna will come up behind me and try to peck at my hair. With how much she loves to eat the rare beetle she finds, I am not sure if I should be insulted. Sometimes she goes scratching under the juniper bushes and gets herself stuck and squawks and squawks until I help her out. Which then, of course, she goes right back in the next day, absolutely no sense of danger or risk, that one.

I have filled nearly a page about my chicken companions. You are probably wondering what has happened to your academic, obsessive clever friend Essek and hoping that friend will start writing you letters instead. I am sorry that this is all that I am today: a man and his chickens and his boulder.

Perhaps tomorrow, there will be some of that Essek within me again. I have been meaning to write to you about the marvel of engineering that the lighthouse lens is. I may enclose some copies of schematics, but please keep them to yourself. We both know the tendencies of my home nation to object to its magics being studied by outsiders.

I hear the telltale clanging of the counterweights, so I must go turn the clockwork. (I can feel your curiosity setting aflame at this half-formed description—I will explain tomorrow.) Hopefully I have not tired my hand too much in writing.

Eighteenth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

13H, freezing rain

I generally try to avoid looking over what I have previously written, lest my cowardice—always close at hand—convince me not to send you any letters at all. But this morning I did review what I wrote yesterday, and I apologize for my melancholy. 

However, you said in your last letter “I wish most of all, for you to be honest with me always.” So I shall leave the earlier pages in.

In the same spirit of honesty: I dreamt of you last night. 

It was a rather mundane dream, the type that would typically slide out of your mind soon after waking. But for some reason, I have been carrying it around with me all day and thinking of it often, like a rough stone the ocean wears down to a beautiful sphere. 

In the dream, we were at the Blooming Grove, and you were showing me a flower bush you had planted. The blossoms were pink and lush and many-petalled, like a chrysanthemum. You bid me to smell one and I did and I know that I enjoyed the smell, because I told you as much, and you smiled, but I cannot remember what the scent was like. 

Enough of dreams and flowers for now— 

I indulged myself with a second cup of coffee this morning so my mind feels rather bright and shining, and I wish to tell you about the lens. It is called a Frez’snel lens, after Auggus Frez’snel, an elven engineer from Uthodurn. The design is catadioptric—that is, utilizing both the techniques of refraction and reflection to produce a stronger and farther reaching beam without a prohibitive amount of glass and weight. The lens (and do not limit yourself here, Caleb Widogast, by imagining the simple single lens of an eyeglass or a cartographer’s magnifying lens). This lens is a 5 feet tall, 7 feet across, 2 and a half ton intricate construction of 252 cut-glass prisms, each placed just so. The lens floats upon a basin of liquid mercury, allowing it to rotate without disturbance, producing a regularly flashing beam. (A 0.5-second flash every 9.5 seconds, if you want to be precise. And unless I have misread everything I know about you, I do think you like to be precise.)

The ground floor of the lighthouse has the humble living quarters on one half (the woodstove, the Chest, the table, the sleeping loft), and the lower block of the clockwork mechanism on the other. As I mentioned, the lens above revolves, which allows the intrepid mariners of these waters to clearly identify Tu’uharbin by its timed interval. This turning is achieved by the vertical descent of cabled weights, translated into horizontal rotation. When the weights reach the ground floor (or, preferably, shortly before, but I have been delayed on this task before, for I am only a man—I trust you not to inform my employers of such shoddy diligence), the clockwork must be wound to crank the weights back up to the top floor.

My favorite place is the gallery, the wrought iron balcony that encircles the lighthouse on the top floor, outside the lantern room which houses the lens itself and its lantern within. On a windy day, it can be a frightening place to be, but on calmer days, I can stand at the railing and see for miles and miles. There is not much to see within those miles, except the gray sea, and to the south, the white blinding coast. I look at the nothingness all the same. Sometimes I look down at the tiny world of the island, which seems bright and colorful and lively by comparison. I can see the chickens scratching about in the grass. Sometimes I call down “Julianna!” and watch her perk up and look around for me, befuddled. The first time, it makes me smile, but I do not do it more than once. More than once feels cruel.

Twentieth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

23H, low pressure

It can be painful, at times, to see the evidence of my emotional existence, in this, the harsh media of pen and parchment. At other times it feels as if it is the only thing keeping me tethered to this plane. Like the words naughty children carve into trees in the park: ESSEK WAS HERE. There is a similar feature here in the lighthouse. Up in the lantern room, there is a lintel where every lighthouse keeper before me has carved their name. I have not added mine yet. It feels safer to be invisible. 

Sometimes I allow myself a more gentle medium of expression. When the tide is low, on the southern end of the island, there are flats of exposed mud, and I go walking there. Amid the glistening stones and exposed shells, I crouch down and scrawl into the damp sand all the things that I cannot bear to bring to life in ink, knowing that the ocean will scour them away soon enough.

I found the strangest stone there two days past. (I will stretch myself and try to sketch it for you on an enclosed page.) It is oval in shape, rather flat, and about the size of my palm. Its main color is deep cool gray, though when wet it appears black. A large fleck of bronze and pink streaks through it. And in the middle of the stone is a hole, clean through. 

The moment I found it, I held it up to my eye and looked through it, my body moving of its own accord, without my command or thought, as if compelled by its own ancient tide. Only after staring through the hole for a few seconds did I recall the old children’s tales. In the tales (have you these same tales in the Empire, I wonder? What did your mother and father tell you at night to give you that delightful spooky feeling along your spine, exciting and thrilling exactly because of the safety of the warm arms and soft bed around you? I hope you will tell me some tales in your next letter, if I may be so bold as to make such a specific request.) In the tales, it is said that a hole in a stone is magic, that looking through it reveals things otherwise unseen. The fey, the Ethereal plane, invisible creatures, the leylines. The tales vary, as tales are wont to do. 

And isn’t it odd (oh I hope I have not lost you! Letters have the unpleasant experience at times of speaking too long without, as Fjord would say, “shutting the fuck up and listening for a minute”). Isn’t it odd that I have called it, without thinking “a hole in a stone?” Not “a stone with a hole in it.” That is how I always remember the tales saying it: a hole in a stone. 

… I have just sat and stared into the warm glow of the stove for a while trying to think of the words to explain while this peculiarity captures me so. It is hard to describe. How can the hole be the object, for a hole is defined by an absence of something! How can the hole exist without the stone? What would an island be if there were no sea? Is no land truly an island? Or is it the sea that is the intransmutable one?

Oh, I must comfort myself by thinking you would enjoy this line of inquiry, Caleb Widogast. If you were here, we could both stare into the stove, lost in thought, and for once someone else could get up and put on a fresh log and not I. And you could tell me what you think about the hole in the stone and its existence and its mystery. (Alright—consider that another gentle request. Please tell me what you think in your next letter.)

I have taken to carrying around the hole-in-a-stone in my pocket. A childlike indulgence, I know. 

Perhaps I can ascribe it instead, to a wizard’s tendency to hoard objects of value. I shall blame you, most kindly of course, for affecting me in this way. For getting me to consider, for the first time in my life, giving up a focus and instead trying out components. A nearly idiotic idea, here on this island, where my very existence is defined by scarcity. Once a month, a package arrives in the Chest of Dedicated Delivery, from the Urzin Supply Headquarters. Rice, dried fruit (do not ask me what kind, it all looks the same when reduced to mere chewy sugar as this is), flour, salt, cured meats, dry oats, chicken feed, and other essential and dull items. They are the precious components to cast the spell that is Continued Life for Essek Thelyss. 

(Oh dear—without an audience, I fear my jokes are getting ever-weaker. Julianna clucks at anything I say, so I am without an alternative judgment.) 

The Chest brings me these precious components of foodstuffs and supplies, and yet I find myself feeling much more invigorated when I receive an envelope from you than when I open the Chest after its soft popping sound. 

I wonder why that is. Your envelopes contain no nutrients, no tools, no occasional powdered chocolate of poor quality. Yet when I hold the paper in my hands and scan its inky scrawl…. Here, somehow, in my hands, is proof of you! Here, somehow, are your thoughts and your voice, the voice of a faraway friend speaking to a man at the edge of the world. 

When I read your letters, Caleb Widogast, I feel as if something within me is being fed which cannot be otherwise sustained with eggs or salt or freshwater. I wonder what such a thing can be.

This letter grows long, so I shall Teleport it to you shortly, and hope for its safe arrival.

                                   Your friend,

                                   Essek

Chapter Text

Tu’uharbin Lighthouse

Twenty-fifth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

9H, sunny, bitter cold

Dear Caleb,

I received your letter and feel great relief at your assurances that you are indeed enjoying my long-rambling thoughts and philosophical musings. (I will return to read your words again and again any time I am feeling self-conscious about the length of my letters. You have much to occupy you, Caleb Widogast. I have little in comparison, so I make what I have as large as I can.) 

As far as the enclosed draft of Jester’s latest creative project, I am not sure whether to thank you or curse you for including it. Jester Lavorre writing romance novels? Light help Exandria! Doubtless she will illustrate them as well? If she has not already had this plan, please pass along my suggestion in that regard. In the Dynasty, there exists a genre of, shall I say, romantic adult works which contain illustrations, so please assure her such demand exists. (Did you not ever come across such works in your time in the Dynasty? Yes, surely, they are kept rather private as such works often are, but I took you to be a man of indomitable curiosity.)

As for your responses to my esoteric questions: I especially enjoyed your excerpts from Nyche’s Theory of Nihilistic Transmutation. Existence and non-existence are inextricably linked, though polar opposites. They are opposing sides of a coin with no dimension, destined to never face one another. They are the veil itself. Is it strange to say it is comforting, to know that I am not alone in wandering these cryptic paths of thought in my lonely waking hours? Were all the great philosophic mages lighthouse keepers, I wonder? I must think they were some form of toiling, solitary folk, for it is in my tedious lonely work that I most often reflect on these puzzles of the mind.

I feel a very uncanny creature sometimes, when I pause in my chores, a hand full of chicken feed half-raised, to stare at the softly undulating horizon of waves and wonder if I, the man called Essek Thelyss, here on Tu’uharbin Island, am composed of more hole or more stone.

Then of course Bruma pecks at my shins and reminds me that to him, such things do not matter, only breakfast matters.

Ah, breakfast: Do you remember, in a past letter, when I wrote of making you a boiled egg? That idea has strangely persisted and even grown stronger. As I eat my own breakfast of boiled egg—after the chickens have had theirs, such is the natural order—as I eat my salted egg, I stare across the scarred wooden table where there is no other place setting, not even another chair. And yet I can imagine you there. Each day I let myself make the picture a little different. Perhaps today you sit on a barrel. The next day you stand, scarfing down your egg in a hurry. One day your hair is braided. Another is it hanging loose against your shoulders, and maybe on that day I have overboiled your egg, but you do not complain.

Are you feeling like Bruma now as you read this, I wonder? Pecking at my leg to get on with the point? I have no point, Caleb Widogast. If you see one in these lonely words, do tell me, so I might know.

Of course we must also discuss your other enclosed item. (Let this not obscure my gratitude if this was indeed a gift!) But I must ask if you truly intended to send along this sweater with your latest letter. (I have a humorous vision of you fumbling a somatic and Teleporting your sweater off of yourself along with your letter. If such is the truth, I hope you have another so you are still kept warm when your nights get cold. I cannot offer to return this one, because my nights are colder than yours, Caleb Widogast.)

If it is indeed a gift, I am humbly grateful. It seems to be, if I am not mistaken, one of your own sweaters, rather than one you purchased or had crafted specifically for me, judging based on its size. (I am of smaller frame than you. I know it has been some time since we have seen each other, but I have not gained that much muscle from turning the clockwork, and you once told me you have a good memory.) The coloring of the yarn is also similar to attire of yours I have observed in the past, favoring towards autumnal and warm shades. I do not have Jester here to tell me if such colors clash terribly with my natural skin tone. The only mirror I have is tiny and clouded, so it is of little help.

You could perhaps use your imagination to picture me in this soft knitted sweater of yours, and write to me to tell me how you think it suits me. If you do so (if you close your eyes and think of my appearance, with that keen memory of yours), please know that my cheeks are now near-permanently windburnt. My hair, though my talent in tying it up has improved, is often dulled with dust and salt. My hands have cracked knuckles and a few new scars, along with dirty nails. The sweater hangs past my hips and the sleeves fall over my hands if I don’t push them back. If I crouch down, I can just fit my knees inside the extra space—a silly practice but I must admit it is rather cozy.

(I hope this all suffices to give you an accurate picture. Am I not shockingly provincial these days? You can be honest. I shall not be hurt.)

If I crouch down wrapped in the sweater in this manner around Julianna, she tries to also fit underneath with my knees, but her beak catches on the stitches, and I must shoo her out. When I first wore the sweater after its arrival to go feed the chickens, they seemed apprehensive. Anything new, you see, is naturally considered a source of danger. Besides its appearance, they can no doubt detect its unfamiliar scent. Unfamiliar to them, that is. Though I cannot name a single facet or ingredient in its pattern of scent, your sweater smells familiar to me.

Sometimes I forget I am wearing it, and I catch a passing whiff, and it is like you have just walked through the empty room. I have to stop in my tracks and catch my breath.

There have always been tales of solitary places like this being haunted. I wonder if this is what that feels like.

The wind begins to rise now, and I recall I left my ladder outside, so I must soon finish writing for today.

A final few words: last night it was bitter cold, so I kept your sweater on while I went to bed. Have you ever had the experience of a sound in the real outside world inserting itself into your dream shortly before you wake? I think the same happened to me, but with the smell of your sweater. I was in Nicodranas. It was night, on the ocean cliffs and suddenly you were there and you hugged me hello. I woke up and it was cold and morning and you were not here, but your scent was. It was disorienting, absolutely, but decidedly not unpleasant. 

Twenty-eighth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

16H, scattered clouds, pleasant

What an unexpected blessing, to receive a letter from you before I had the chance to send you another. I apologize, I find myself spending more hours sleeping lately—yes, sleeping, Caleb Widogast. I can tell you this, because you will not laugh or scorn me as a fellow elven friend might. This sleep eats away at my time of essential chores, which in turn erodes my time to put this quill to this parchment, though I assure you, I am thinking near constantly of matters I wish to tell you.

I had grand plans to save the portion of your letter that spoke of children’s tales, to read as I tucked myself into my lonely bed, in the hopes of giving myself a pleasing shiver of fright. Alas—my self control when it comes to reading your words is sorely lacking, and I ravenously read the entire thing in one sitting per usual. My reading place today was the rocking chair next to the woodstove, because that is where I was when I received your letter. (Typically I read your missives the moment one arrives out of the ether next to me, no matter where I might be. Once I received one while up on the gallery, and the wind nearly whipped it away before I caught it with Mage Hand. The thought of losing your letter like that—! Are you making extra copies, too, I wonder? That letter I clutched to my breast at once and went into the safe indoor air to read it, sitting on the top stair.)

Though I have spoiled my plan of the inaugural reading of its spooky tale, I have your latest letter sitting at my bedside table now, with all its epistolary brethren, and can read it again tonight before I sleep. They say children shouldn’t be told these scary tales before bed, lest they have nightmares, so doing so will give me a small delectable morsel of rebellion. (During this more frequent sleep of mine, I am having strange dreams, some I would call nightmares. I wouldn’t mind having a simple nightmare from a spooky story of yours. My other nightmares are anything but simple.)

But you spoke of pleasant tales, too. I was delighted (as I hope you well guessed) by the tales of the hole-in-a-stone as a Hühnergott. A chicken protector, a god of chickens! As soon as I finished reading your letter, I went outside to tell Julianna and her companions about this, even read them the portions most relevant aloud. I looked at them through the stone, and they looked at me very perplexed, but I assured them this was simply to discern their true nature and make sure they were indeed real chickens. (“What were the results?” I can hear you asking. Would it be a spooky tale of my own, for you to read again late at night, if I left such a question unanswered? No—I do not wish for you to worry.) They are all of them, I am happy to report, real chickens. As far as their true nature goes, that remains to be seen. I did not gain any particular insight. Perhaps the stone needs a catalytic circumstance to strengthen it, such as a full moon. Experiments, Widogast, require repetition.

Unfortunately, I have gotten too used to the stone being in my pocket to leave it in the chicken coop, to protect them from evil wandering spirits, as your tale suggested. I gently explained to Julianna that I am sure the stone in my pocket can protect the island entire, and she is quite safe. I trust her to relay such a message to Bruma and the others in the most convincing matter. She is my favorite chicken, and I am her favorite human. (Another joke, you see. I am the only man here, and not even human besides. Perhaps if you were to meet her one day, you would be her favorite human, and I, her favorite elf.)

Twenty-ninth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

15H, quite heavy clouds, ominous southeastern wind

Caleb Widogast! The greatest most lovely fantastical success today! I could hardly wait to tell you of it, I nearly Sent to you, but I did not wish to catch you at an inopportune moment. (I do hope this portion remains legible. Likely the tendency I already see to shape my letters more largely in this state will help with that.) I have made an incredible discovery. Not of arcana, my Empire friend, no no, but of something better to a man here at the edge of the world—whiskey, Caleb Widogast.

(A brief aside, for I am distracted by how much I delight in shaping the letters of your name, so allow me a moment to indulge: Caleb Widogast, Caleb Widogast, Caleb Widogast. Ah—if only the silly children’s tales of summoning were true! For now that I have invoked you thrice, you should be by my side. But I digress.)

I was working on repairs of the windward roof of the woodshed (yes, I do in fact know the proper end to hold of a hammer, if it can be believed) when an unexpected glint caught my eye. A previous lighthouse keeper evidently had hidden a stash of whiskey under the beam. (Could they float with dunamancy, too, I wonder? Why else keep such a thing so inconveniently located?) So of course, being the responsible and cautious man that I am, I carefully made sure the bottle was sanitary before drinking from it. 

That is a joke. My Light, it is even harder to succeed at the cadence of a joke in written word than it is in speech! No—the truth is, I wrenched the cork out with my teeth the instant I found this treasure, like an animal. I can tell you that secret, Caleb Widogast. I know I can, because I feel still, every night and every morning, the ghost of your lips upon my forehead, and the scent of the warm ocean outside a creaking ship hold.

I have nearly forgotten that the ocean can be teal and lush, and not made of gray infinity. I hurled the empty whiskey bottle, once all its gifts of loosened tongue and warmed limbs had been bestowed, into that gray infinity earlier this evening. Perhaps that was wasteful. I could have used it to store extra drinking water, or as a vase for wildflowers. 

Oh, Light, how ridiculous a thought. Wildflowers, of all things! I have not seen a flower in months. My violet skin is the most colorful thing here (that and Julianna’s red face, and the occasional pink sunrise), but my skin is most often covered completely, and when not, it is dirtied and dull. To see a flower, I think, would bring me to tears. That may be only due to the whiskey. Let me consider a moment—no, it is not only the whiskey. I have felt such violent longings for something bright and living in my sober days as well.

All that said, even if I could use druidcraft to bring into being a single yellow cinquefoil, I now have no vase. The empty whiskey bottle shall slowly grow barnacles and fill with silt and protect a strange assortment of small dark crawling things of the ocean. It shall be a foreign home crashing down upon them like the flying cities of old, to be reclaimed. That—or, it will be dashed against some boulder in the coming storm I can feel brewing, and shatter to many pieces, that will be beat again and again through the surf until they are smooth and clouded enough to be called sea glass. And some future guardian of this place will, like I have many times, pick one up when wandering the tide flats, thinking not of the beauty of this gray infinite sea around him, but of a smaller, warmer, singular source of beauty, alive on the other side of the world, hopefully among wildflowers as such a beauty deserves.

Oh, how long I can speak, or write rather, with this smoked burning heat fresh upon my tongue. I have never liked whiskey until today. I know I have drunk it in your presence when you yourself had one, but I did not care for the taste. That is another secret. 

I can tell you all these secrets, Caleb Widogast, because there is this veil of the page between us. There is the weak, cowardly shield of knowing perhaps no one at all will read these words, thanks to the wildmagic of this lonely place. Perhaps these pages will Teleport to the center of a volcano, and then no one will ever know about this day where a man at the edge of the world felt the sharp edges of his aching heart smooth away for a time. 

This passage of this letter I will not copy. It will get to you, or it will not. I will, as Kingsley would say, roll the damn dice. Let them land on the number that they will! I see them tumble and spin, and I do not know if I want the final number to be the highest or the lowest. Here they stop:

I miss you, Caleb Widogast. Singularly you. 

                                       Your dear friend, 

                                       Essek

P.S. Julianna has not laid an egg in four days. Usually she is as reliable as the rising moons, with an egg every two days. She is not brooding and does still let me pick her up. But I swear that when I went out for an evening visit to them, Bruma was eying her with a hungry look which put me close to dread. Bruma, I told him forcefully, I thought by coming here I had escaped such cruel antics as those of the bloody Rosohna courtiers, circling the weakest among them, ready to claw out their eyes at the barest sign of diminishing power. Ahh—such a macabre path I have begun to tread down! I hope this tingling worry is only the whiskey stirring up the silt of my lonely heart, and Julianna will be back to her chipper self in the morning with an egg whose yolk is the color of the setting sun and whose golden sustenance shall stave off the pounding in my head I have surely earned this evening.

Chapter Text

Tu’uharbin Lighthouse

Thirtieth Thunsheer, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

13H, violent storm

My Dearest Caleb,

I dislike whiskey once again. I awoke to thunderous pain in my head, but then true thunder shook the walls. This is not an auspicious day to be as indisposed as I am. And how unfair it is, that though the whiskey dumped me quite readily into heavy sleep, it did not bar the door to the regular nightmare I have now come to dread.

Against my usual routine, I am writing this shortly after waking, as opposed to at day’s end. I shall have to check on the chickens soon. There is a rope line tied from the back door to the chicken coop for tempestuous times such as this, for a handhold, so I do not go flying off into the sea and leave the chickens to starve. 

As for the rest of the day, I will try simply to survive.

12H, continued storm

I am terribly worried about Julianna. I made several unpleasant trips back and forth to the chicken coop today after my first visit showed me she is in worse spirits than yesterday. My dread has calcified into true fear. My last trip I stumbled there with an old crate under my free arm. I then coaxed Julianna and a healthy pile of hay into it, covered the top with my coat, and rushed back to the main quarters. I should not have hurried as much as I did (she was squawking up a storm of her own, quite distressed and I know she hated to be out in the cold and the wet), for I fell once, and landed roughly upon my knees, because my hands were occupied with the crate, determined to keep it level and minimally jostled. I may be a pathetic waif of an elf, but I have more density than Julianna at least. The wind would take her in a heartbeat, and that I would not permit.

She is now bedded down and content by the woodstove, after having surveilled this new unfamiliar space. Her beautiful plumage is looking worryingly ratty and disheveled, and she wouldn’t eat some cooked egg I set out on a little plate for her. (It seems strange, I know, to feed her eggs, but that was one of the few pieces of advice I was given before my tenure here: that chickens can gain nutrients back from their eggs. I could find that lovely and meaningful perhaps, if my circumstances were not as they are.)

If only I was not left upon these lonely shores so ignorant! There are fourteen books on the shelf of this wretched place, and none of them about animal husbandry. Why was this automatically expected of me! Can a chicken get illnesses? Or curses? How would she have contracted such a thing? Will it spread to the others? 

Ah—I shouldn’t trouble you with my worries when you can do nothing about them. I understand it is hard to care about a person you have never met, let alone a chicken you have never met. (But oh, Caleb Widogast, I really do think you would like her. She may be only a chicken, but I can tell she has a sweet heart. And I have seen you take quite quickly to sad soft creatures who need a gentle touch.)

Before I retire to bed, I may try to feed her some oats. They make a pleasant treat. It will be the last of the sack, unfortunately. My delivery in the Chest usually arrives weekly, and would have arrived today but has not yet. Likely some underpaid grunt in Urzin is also sick with whiskey fever today and forgot to load the Chest on their end.

The queasy pounding in my head has not ceased all day. Still the rain and wind assault the walls around me. When I go to turn the clockwork—the process requiring several breaks to breathe for this substandard lighthouse keeper on this most substandard day—the wind echoes through chinks in the lighthouse tower, moaning like an approaching ghoul who somehow never arrives. 

A dismal day. I will soon retire to the relative comfort of my hard bed, wrapped in your gifted sweater which, most tragically, has begun to stop smelling of you. I imagine it now smells of the sea, and of cold rain, and of me—all things invisible to my senses nowadays.

First Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Thermometer lost; storm continuing

More storm today and tonight. The thunder woke me up, and then the booming of the waves against the rocks kept me awake. Sometimes the sounds are hard to distinguish from one another. Both shake my already roiling belly with their relentless bass-filled roar.

I cannot tell if the whiskey still haunts me, or if a new ghost has taken up residence in my bones. My head and stomach are both churning as if the island is a ship and not solid earth. Tonight’s dinner was broth, a dull golden powder mixed with the last of the water in the drinking jug. I am dreading going out into the freezing gale to refill it. The broth gave me little strength and I am struggling to keep it down, but to gain more strength, I know I must drink more broth, and for that I need more water. But to fetch more water, I need strength. Do you see the cruel loop, Caleb Widogast? Like a spell fed back into itself, I fear I will combust into nothing if this goes on.

Julianna seems mystically—though blessedly—unworried by the storm. I thought storms were supposed to trouble animals and beasts, but evidently she considers us to be perfectly safe. (Does this mean I am the true beast between the two of us?) She looks at me with a tired yet curious eye as the howling winds make the siding boards moan. I can hear the screeching of strained nails, and I swear sometimes it is also the sound of my bones between torn apart, with how they have started to ache. “What troubles you, my favorite elf?” she seems to ask me as my trembling hand pets her. “We are safe in here.”

But no, I want to scream, I am not safe, not anywhere.

Second(?) Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Storm 

Another day of storm. At least, I think it has been a day. It is hard to tell, without the rising and the arcing and the setting of the sun, or the retreat and the rise of the tide. I try to quiet my mind and listen to the internal rhythms of my body, a living being attuned to time. 

(Not close, in any sense, to your own attunement with it. I wonder if this unearthly skill of yours has any basis in dunamantic arcana…. This idea is especially intriguing based on your rapid adeptness of the dunamantic spells I was able to teach you in our time together.) 

Ah, see what happens when I try to quiet my mind! The sea floor of my mind is bare and quiet, scattered with tantalizing revelations I can pick up and pocket—and then the tide of you rushes in, inevitable.

I try to listen to the rhythms of my body, but they sound disjointed, as if beat out on a broken drum. Sometimes I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones, yet my mind races with dozens upon dozens of half-formed ideas. Sometimes my skin itches with a feeling that says “If I do not begin to sprint as fast as I possibly can right this instant, something will burst" and yet amidst this wild itch, my mind feels as damp and slow as a slug.

Which of these is the rhythm of evening, and which of morning, or midday? What sensation is telling me the sun is rising—somewhere, behind black clouds and furious rain? I do not know. If I once did, I have forgotten.

Other times, I blink like I have been trancing, but I have not been, and I have no idea how long I have been sitting in the rocking chair staring at the fire. It is a wonder the rockers have not worn grooves into the stone floor. But time must have passed, I reason, because there are coals where once were logs. But how recently did I last place a log on? I cannot remember. Yes, I have a memory of placing logs in this fire—hundreds of them perhaps. But they are all so identical that their true number or proximity in linear time cannot be discerned. They are like a stack of amber sheets holding preserved insects, all lined up just so, and viewed from above. A dragonfly, who flew before the flying cities of the Age of Arcanum, stares up at you. But how thick is the stack? Are there thousands of dragonflies below it, or does it fly alone?

This morning—or rather, since I know not what time it is currently, earlier this day (oh my, I am realizing the pointlessness of noting the when of anything at all in these letters! Everything I write of has happened before I write it! You are seeing my life from the perspective of a moment behind me, perpetually chasing me across the sky like the stars of Melora and Erathis. Forgive me every instance of such useless excess words in all my previous missives.)

When musing on this metaphor of amber, in preparation for writing it to you, I cast an Illusion of the blue and silver dragonflies I once saw in the Bright Queen’s botanical gardens. The colors made me shake to look at, so vivid were they. Even though I myself cast the spell, the image startled me when it came into being.

I have not casted much as of late. My rest seems not to be refilling my magical reserves as I am accustomed to. Perhaps this is a matter of elven anatomy and sleep? Does your sleep (if I may ask a question potentially racially charged) ever not refresh your capabilities fully? Pestering me, too, is a deep headache I cannot seem to shake, and which pulsed like the lightning of this storm when I cast this Illusion. I could not tell if it was from the brightness of color after so much dim grayness, or the casting itself. Either way, I soon shut my eyes and let the dragonflies fade.

I feel like I am wearing away in this place, a boulder turned to sand by the sea. But some chronurgy is at work to speed this along. That or I am simply made of too soft a stone.

Fourth(?) Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Clear, bright

Julianna worsens. She seems content to sit in my lap for hours while I rock by the fire. The storm has blown out at last, leaving behind bracing fresh air and clear skies, but the chill in my bones has not gone with the wind and instead remains.

So I do not resist in the slightest her insistence to sit still with me. The weight of her small body, the sensation of touching another living thing, feathers brushing across my palm again and again and again…it seems to feed some aching maw inside me, if only for a moment. Your sweater’s soft stitches upon my arms feel heavy, and yet also like nothing at all. My skin everywhere burns, but when I look, there is no rash, no marks. Only a tense feeling of almost. 

It is a hunger, I think I now understand, for the warmth of another’s skin to touch mine. 

Even if the Chest were not still late (the days are muddling, and I eat less and less, so how late it is, I can no longer discern), it cannot Teleport a living being. There is no little canvas sack I can open, no twine-tied box to be delivered, that will relieve this. I did not consider such a thing as touch essential until these days.

Can one be sustained on the memory of touch alone? I cannot be sustained by the thought of food alone, though I do think often of tomato soup and of black moss donuts. I cannot be sustained on seawater, I remind myself as I work the water pump until my arms ache while I stare at more water than a man could ever drink.

I still must eat and I still must drink, and it, too, is not enough to lie awake at night after a nightmare, thinking of how soft your cheek was against mine at the Blooming Grove. I long for the real sensation.

Sometimes I think that if the Dynasty arrived at my lighthouse door, I would go with them willingly to my death, if only to feel hands holding mine in that moment before the axe.

Ah, Essek, I shake my head at myself, then regret the movement, for it makes my eyes pound with a dreadful queasiness. Ah, Essek, you are too melancholy in your words today. Maybe you can forgive me once more, for such dark musings? I must be near bankrupt in my debt to you. Alas, I have not kept a ledger. It is up to you to tell me what I owe, and how I may pay it back.

Sixth(?) Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Racing clouds

An awful lightless day. Excuse the tears that will surely stain this page. 

Julianna died last night. I had set up a little bed for her in front of the stove, and when I woke up this morning she was cold and still. I could not believe my eyes at first, seeing this terrible sight. Nor could I believe my hands, who felt no warmth beneath soft feathers, no twitch of life. But even when I peered through my hole-in-a-stone, she remained there: silent and lost to me. No illusion. No trick.

I don’t know how long I cried there over her. It seems grief is the cruelest chronurgy.

Surely the lighthouse keepers in the past would have plucked her and enjoyed a treat of roast chicken and bone broth, and of course I have eaten such things in the past, but oh, Caleb, I just couldn’t bear the thought! I have buried her next to the juniper bushes and set a lucky stone upon the spot. I am enclosing one of her feathers for you, so you can see just a small piece of her beauty.

Do you think me terribly sentimental, Caleb Widogast? I feel sore through my whole body, as if every muscle has been working at the clockwork cranks for hours. How is such a sensation possible? Essek, I tell myself, this is a chicken.

Perhaps this unshakeable pain in my chest is all my fault. Maybe I should have left my Hühnergott in the coop after all. But that is only a children's tale. Maybe I shouldn't have given them names. They are only chickens. Light, but I can barely even write those words! I hate how they look because they are not true.

They are not only chickens, they are my companions on this cursed rock and now my favorite companion is gone. 

It is so dangerous to love, Caleb Widogast. How do you bear it?

                                   Yours,

                                   Essek

Chapter Text

Tu’uharbin Lighthouse

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Cold 

My Dearest, Caleb,

Saw a seabird across the bay today. It must be lost. Going to bed early this evening. My joints ache, even though no storm is looming on the horizon.

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Cold, strong wind

Tore off the fingernail of my ring finger on my left hand today when I slipped winding the clockwork. I will try to clean the blood off the page best I can.

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Windy

A letter from you arrived today. What its contents were, I cannot say. I saw it burst out of the ether next to me while sitting on the front stoop, and I went to grab it, desperate for this merciful break in my monotony. 

But the moment my hand reached it, a terrible howling sound screeched out of it, as a twisted black pattern of wildmagic rent it into pieces, and then into dust. The pattern scalded my palm with a burn like acid. I could not act quickly enough to salvage the dust, and the wind carried away.

I did see, in the moment before the rending, a dried yellow flower pasted upon the envelope.

So I thank you for that.

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Bright sun

Terrible ache behind my eyes for three days now. Barely enough strength to keep the fire going and the chickens fed. Please forgive my horrendous penmanship.

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Fast clouds

Nothing new to write of today.

Unndilar, Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Bitter cold

My head aches. I think I have a fever, but I cannot be sure. I am wearing most of the clothing here, including your sweater, and still I shake.

My throat hurts, but I know the source of that. This morning I stumbled outside to fetch firewood and fell to my knees and found myself screaming.

Unndilar(?), Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

Relentless wind

If I move my head, a knife of pain strikes into my left eye, then races down my neck like a striking cobra, wrenching through my back and landing with a nauseating crash in my hip. 

Through this, I still made it to the chicken coop by way of the rope, to scrape at the bottom of their feedsack for a measly offering. I sat with them for a while in apology, huddled like one of their own, down on the straw next to their meager heating stone while the winds sought to find any gaps in the chinking, like a vengeful goddess looking for my sins. 

A few days earlier I had found a lovely stone of relatively egg-like shape and had placed it in Julianna’s roost. I stared at it until my feet ached and then I limped back inside.

Unndilar(?), Eight Hundred Thirty-Six PD

More pleasant

It felt warmer today (I cannot say if this is only my own perception of my fever ebbing—the last storm broke my thermometer, you see) so I donned my many-layered attire and wrapped myself in the quilt and sat out on the gallery for a time to watch the white-capped sea. Your sweater, it turns out, also suffices as a bulky scarf when needed. It smells, unfortunately, more like I than like you at this point. Just as the thermometer’s shattering has left me without reference to temperature, so has my solitude given me a blindness to my own scent.

But I am a man of logic. I know that I have not been bathing weekly, as I did so strictly in my early time here. I know that I have been fevered and sweating, and I wake up to damp sheets sticking to me even through the layers I wear to bed. I must smell like cobblestones stripped from Cognouza and left in the hold of a ship to rot. I cannot return your sweater to you now, out of shame alone.

(Do you remember me in my silks and satins and platinum, Caleb Widogast? Light, I scarcely do. Please hold that picture of Essek Thelyss in your memory for me. It has slipped out of my hands somewhere on this island, and though this place is small, though I know every pace of it by heart, I cannot seem to find where I dropped it.)

The ocean breeze up on the gallery feels heavenly on my aching forehead. I cannot write your letter there, out of risk of the parchment or my single quill being torn away into the wind and sea. (I am writing this, if you can guess from the frequent holes poked through, as if against a soft surface, from my bed. I slept much of the afternoon and now, cruelly, as night falls, I cannot sleep.) So I must rely upon my recollections of being in that place. I must think of the memory, then think of the words to describe it (in Common, no less), then move my hand in the shapes that we have deemed to mean those words.

How much easier it would be, for you to see through my eyes! How much easier it would be, to have your nerves running through my arms instead of mine, so you could simply know and understand, at that instant speed of sensation! 

Essek, I hear you ask (or maybe it is my own thoughts—ah, how my head swims these days!) Essek, why not say “How much easier it would be, if you were here”? The answer is simple: I cannot set myself up to hope for such an impossible thing. I would break under its weight.

Next day

Once more, I could not sleep when night fell, so I took the quilt—it’s become a rather pathetic filthy thing from all my dragging it about—and laid out on the uncomfortable metal grating of the gallery and watched the stars arc their way across the dome of the sky. The steady pulsing beam of the lantern light kept my eyes from ever fully adjusting. But I could still just see, far above beyond its glaring streak of light, the aurora beginning to dance across the stars. 

I watched it for a long while. Perhaps too long. At some point, my hat slipped off and fell through the slats, and even now, safely inside, my ears are aching and burning as the blood returns to them. (When I did finally rise, when that ethereal shimmering gauze of light had faded, and I could tell in a deep animal sense that dawn was now closer than dusk—when I tried to roll to my side to sit up, it took me a few tries. My muscles felt stiff, my joints frozen. I longed, as a man in a desert does for a cool glass of water—I longed for a hot bath. The very memory of such a sensation felt like a mirage. My journey down the stairs back to my bed was not graceful.)

I watched those green-white feathery curtains dance across the backdrop of stars for long minutes, beating out their time with the pulse of the lantern’s light. Their rhythm, that strange disturbance of magnelectric particles by the sun, was similar to the ever-changing reflections on a blue tropical sea, or to dappled sunlight on a forest floor beneath a many-layered canopy of leaves. How can this be, I wonder, this kindred dance across disparate phenomena? Why is it that the melting rivulets in the patch of ice outside the back door resemble the winding paths of great rivers seen from far above? 

Does every particle, every substance, hear the same music and therefore perform the same dance?

The slumbering scholar within me scoffs at such a thought. At the most essential particle level, matter does not have ears. So how would they hear music? There is no grand orchestra, no conductor. 

Now that I suspect that the emptiness of the Chest is not, in fact, a bureaucratic oversight, but rather a passive execution, I can be honest on this parchment about my heresy: I have not believed in the divinity of the Luxon in decades. 

And now that I suspect that I will never leave this island (for I can feel my health failing, and with it, my arcana, and the last dregs of my meager bravery) I can be honest with you of this scholastic heresy, in turn: on nights like this, the thought of a great designer, a cosmic conductor is comforting. 

All cannot be chaos. All cannot be nothingness. Let something exist. Let me exist. Let you exist. 

Some days later

Do you remember when we first met? My fate’s path has been so distorted since then that the memory is an oddly painful one. (No small thanks to you and the Nein for that—if my fate were a cloth, you have thoroughly twisted it, wringing out every last drop of inevitability and destiny.) I do not like remembering the furious fear I felt at seeing this Empire mage retrieve from his candy-pink bag, blatant evidence of my selfish mistakes. I do not like remembering disliking you. It takes some time traversing the past for the memories to become pleasant. 

The first pleasant one is the night I took you up on your invitation for dinner, though it, too, is colored with streaks of guilt and shame. I was trying, yes, to get closer to you all to discover what you knew. (You knew too much. In my most anxious moments, I still think you do.) But I also enjoyed the taste of Lionett wine and the sticky crumbs of pastries and the clamor of conversation and the heat of the hot tub around my bare ankles. (Light, how modest I was then!) 

I felt so sure, when I met you, that death was racing up behind me, fast approaching with my penance in its gnarled hands.

Perhaps if I end up dying up here on the edge of the world, I will finally do something with my life that causes no one any pain or trouble.

I say again—please don’t try to Teleport to me. The wildmagic here is dangerous, made stronger still by the magnelectric concurrence of the leylines, and by the unforgiving landscape should anyone arrive even slightly off course. (And besides. I have no eggs to cook you for breakfast. Perhaps not even rice. I am too afraid to look into the sack to know for sure.)

I can hear you in my head arguing back with me, Caleb Widogast. Consider this point, please: I do not want to see you arrive on my shore sundered like a shipwreck, disintegrated like your letter whose contents and flowers are lost to me forever. 

Just as your letters have sustained my soul’s life, feeding its desperate hunger, I think the horrid sight of you dead would kill me as simple as a Word of Power might.

I know this, because of the nightmares. Oh, I have never told you the details about them (or rather, it—there is only one nightmare, whispered to me again and again), I realize now. I do not want to add one more stone to the teetering tower of regrets that is my life, so I shall tell you. Until now, I have only scratched its truth in the ephemeral low-tide sand, only screamed it into the wind. 

I have a recurring nightmare, of the sight of you dead in Cognouza, which wakes me with a choked off scream, and I cannot find sleep again for a long while. I have had that terrible sight of you in my memories for a long while. But it is only recently, in my time alone on Tu’uharbin, that this nightmare has latched its claws onto me. I used to wonder why that is. Why now, why here? Now I think—now I know—it is because I am in love with you.

Chapter Text

It is an hour till sunset when Essek sees the dragon.

He is sitting on the gallery, and the metal grating beneath him has just passed from cold into warm, soaked by the sun of the long day. He is idly watching the sea, waiting for the strength to return to traverse back down the stairs. He can’t quite feel the tips of his ears. 

The dragon is flying in from the northeast, low golden sun blazing off its blue scales. Essek should laugh, he supposes, or scream, but he does neither. His arcane focus hangs on his belt, but he doesn't reach for it. 

He can hear the dragon’s leathery wingbeats. Probably this is a fevered hallucination. Probably he caught the lantern light full in his eyes and his mind is playing tricks, turning the floating ghostly shapes into sensible corporeal horrors. Probably the wingbeats are only the sea upon the rocks below. And if it is truly a dragon, what can he do? What would any spell from one wizard mean to a blue dragon? Still, from old instinct, he inhales, assessing his stores of arcana. 

Enough to levitate a pebble, thereabouts.

So be it, he thinks, and moves his hands only to pull the quilt more tightly around himself.

He blinks, and the dragon is gone. There—there’s that answered. But when Essek begins to shut his eyes, a tiny shape flickers in front of the inferno of the golden sun, a shape that is not a bird, nor an errant leaf on the wind.

It seems to be, impossibly, a Caleb shape.

Essek finds himself clutching at the bars of the gallery railing, eyes struggling to focus. The Caleb-shape is plummeting tens of meters towards the open ocean surface. But it cannot be Caleb, because Essek told him not to come. It cannot be Caleb, because Caleb would not have miscalculated the ending timing of a spell such as this.

The shape suddenly slows in its streaking descent, and undeniable recognition at last shunts into Essek’s mind. Feather Fall. He sees the gently flapping sleeves of Caleb’s brown coat, as if they are wings bearing him slowly down into the waves. Shaking like a just-birthed fawn, Essek pulls himself up by the railing to peer down at Caleb’s form as it plops into the waves. It is a calm day, but the ocean here never truly stills, and Caleb looks tiny in its gray expanse. He starts to swim towards the island, a simple determined breaststroke. 

In his next frantic breath, Essek is running down the stairs, one long spiraled controlled fall, all the way to the front door. As he reaches it, Caleb is hauling himself out of the water, soaked and shivering. Essek notices the dark splatters of seawater on the pale granite boulders, the smudges Caleb’s boots make in the mud. If this is an illusion born of fevered madness, it is quite detailed—and this strokes his ego enough to settle down his panic. 

The unfamiliar sound of his own voice, creaking and crusted over, is babbling: “You fool, you damned fool, Caleb Widogast, you reckless idiot of a man.”

The molten sound of Caleb’s voice, like a plunge into a hot bath, overlaps with Essek’s own. “I thought— I tried…. My timing— I used up all my spells so I cannot take us out until I sleep, I just had to hurry, I hoped….”

Essek is stumbling over the gravel and grass, quilt dropped behind him somewhere, and Caleb is scrambling over boulders, until they are within arms length, both shaking, small little men. 

Caleb closes the distance as his wet hands reach up and hold Essek’s face in their wide soft grip.

The cold and the contact zing through Essek like electricity, from his cheeks down through his bones, rooting him to the ground. Caleb presses his damp forehead against Essek’s burning one. The man’s touch is like a foghorn across a quiet empty sea. It is overwhelming. It is drowning him. But opposed to swimming upward, he instead clings tighter to the anchor plunging him down, fingers holding tight to the lapels of Caleb’s coat.

“I hoped I wasn’t too late,” Caleb whispers, scarcely louder than the night breeze.

Essek leans back and looks up at him. The evening star has lit up, floating behind Caleb’s left ear. “Too late for what?”

Caleb kisses him. 

His lips, too, are cold, which blooms worry in Essek’s chest. Hypothermia.… he begins to think, but he cannot form so long a word, so long a thought, beneath this burning press of life against his long lonely mouth. There is a clunk inside Essek’s chest, like a counterweight rising, and with an unheard screeching groan, his heart begins to turn again. 

It is not a long kiss. As Caleb pulls his mouth back, eyes searching for Essek’s like a captain scanning an empty horizon, Essek feels something damp and prickly between Caleb’s palm and his cheek. He gently tugs down Caleb’s hand and turns it over. In his palm, though slightly crumpled and frayed, is, unmistakably, Julianna’s feather. 

With a shaking hand and fever-slick fingers, Essek pulls out his hole-in-a-stone from his pocket and raises it to his eye. It is easier this way, to look at Caleb, in this small circle, this island in his vision. He sees blue eyes, bruised with exhaustion. He sees golden freckles and a scruffy amber beard. He sees a look of concern and confusion and compassion. It is easier to feel that look fix upon him like this, from through the stone. 

“To make sure you are real,” Essek explains in a whisper. Then he passes out, collapsing forward into warm darkness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Essek wakes, it is morning, and he is in his bed. The sheets are tangled and damp around him, but his skin feels cooler and his head clearer than they have in weeks. The events of the day before race through him, and he sits upright quickly. 

Caleb, carrying him inside. Caleb, tipping mouthful after painstaking mouthful of broth between Essek’s quivering lips. Beef broth, of all impossible things to taste here at the edge of the world. Caleb, peeling off Essek’s boots, to rub painful life back into his cold feet. And Essek, there-but-not. Essek, pulling away like a paper dragon in the wind, and Caleb, his kite-string—

The room is empty. Essek opens his mouth, tongue pressing into his top palate, about to breathe sound into calling out Caleb’s name—but he stops, dreading the unbearable silence that might follow. If Caleb has left, then he has left. But let Essek not have to hear the undeniable absence through an unanswered call.

Anyway—there is a faster way to find him, if he is still here. He can see the whole island from the gallery in a moment. Essek drags the quilt off the bed, wraps it around himself and stumbles out of the room. He begins to climb the spiraling stairs, one hand on the wall to keep him from toppling over. 

As he stops on the landing to breathe, to keep his vision from closing into blackness, he catches a whiff from the blanket that is undeniably Caleb . His mind, still kicking itself out of its own damp sheets of sleep, suddenly recalls dim memories of the night before. Essek woke himself up coughing. Dark, heavy, violent coughs. In waking up, he found himself leaning back against Caleb’s chest, who was sleeping propped up against the headboard. Caleb snuffled awake and tenderly held Essek’s shaking form through the spasms. The memory-dream of his voice fills Essek’s mind as he stares down at his hands clutching the edge of the next stone step. “You’re alright, I’m here. I have to sleep—I have to take us to the Grove in the morning, but I’m here. Have some water…. Good, now lay back. Here, on my chest—there, like that. Shhh. You’re alright. Shhh….”

Essek starts again to climb the stairs, nearly on hands and knees now. Before he gets to the top, a movement from outside the window catches his eye. His mind registers it as fluttering autumn leaves, which of course cannot be true. 

He blinks. It is Caleb.

Caleb, amber hair dancing wildly in the ocean breeze, shuffling about in Essek’s thick workboots, is down at the chicken coop with a bucket near overflowing with feed, tossing out handfuls for the waiting chickens. The tossed feed glitters in the silver dawn light.

Essek slumps into the windowsill, still wrapped in his quilt. He reaches, fingers fumbling, into his pocket for his hole-in-a-stone, feeling its soothing cool shape press into his palm.

But he doesn’t raise it to his eye. He simply holds it, as he watches Caleb and the chickens, squinting against the pink glare of the rising sun.