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When Hassan sees Jaq charging up to his stand halfway through the breakfast rush, his first thought is, Typical Jaq. His second is, Is something on fire again?
Jaq shoves a customer out of the way and slams his hands down on the counter, cheeks dark pink with exertion. Hassan tries to lean around him to convey some sort of apology, but Jaq’s frantic motioning for the coffee pot cuts off his view—and there, yep, the customer’s flipped them both off. Hassan sighs.
“Uh, Jaq?” he says, futilely. “Can we maybe do this later?”
Nasima pokes her head out from the spice stall, her bandana already covered in a cloud of dust and cinnamon. “Is something on fire again?”
Jaq swipes the coffee pot off the burner and pours himself a mug, still theatrically out of breath. “There is—” he heaves, “—walking around—a dead lady!”
Over the sourdough loaves, Hassan and Nasima exchange an Essil Sibling Look. Of the little knot of vendors in this corner of the Spiralfare Market, they’ve never been particularly friendly—Hassan gets the feeling that he annoys Nasima, more than anything—but everyone is united in the experience of dealing with Jaq and Jasmine. When the Essil siblings set their minds to something, the mountains themselves shudder.
“A what?” Nasima asks, bewildered.
Jaq throws up his hands and says, again, as if it offers any clarification at all: “A dead lady is walking around the market!”
Nasima blinks, once, twice, and Hassan watches her face flicker through shock, confusion, and amusement before finally landing on her usual grim rationality. “Not your best line delivery.” She ducks back into her stall to wrap up a bottle of cloves.
“It isn’t a play this time!”
Hassan tries, placatingly: “Okay, but we’re kind of in the middle of the rush—”
“Stop holding up the line!” someone calls, and Hassan resists the urge to sigh again. He’d set up shop in the Spiralfare Market because it was beautiful, central to the city of Jrusar, which swelled around them like a churning sea, brightly-colored and full of life. Certainly it marked an improvement from the remote forests on the outskirts of the Wilds, where he’d spent his childhood digging up root vegetables and hauling water several miles each morning.
Still, in any place, the breakfast rush struck without mercy. “Are you even making coffee back there?”
“Hassan!” Jaq says again, excited and frantic, and for a brief moment Hassan thinks he might actually reach over and pull him toward whatever is going on—but then one slim arm winds around Jaq’s shoulders, and he settles.
“He is telling the truth,” Jasmine confirms, nodding confidently. “Absolutely a dead lady.”
Hassan dusts the grounds off his hands and privately says goodbye to the normalcy of his morning. The line has mostly wandered off now, tired of waiting for Jaq to stop holding it up. But he looks at Jaq and Jasmine, their earnest, mischievous faces, and can only feel mildly exasperated. The customers are grumbling, the sun is warming the cobblestones, and the Essil siblings are raving about a dead lady. This is about as normal as any morning gets.
Jaq looks over his shoulder, eyes narrowing. “Oh, shit!” He dives behind Hassan’s counter—Hassan panics, too, trying to make sure no knives fall off the cutting board onto his head—and balls himself up, peering furtively out into the crowd. “They’re coming, they’re coming—”
Jasmine cocks her head. “You know you look even more conspicuous now—”
“Well, if the dead lady comes after us, she’s gonna murder you first—”
“I’m a straight-up delight, she wouldn’t want to kill me—”
"You're an ass is what you are—"
Hassan looks up from the bickering siblings, searching the mass of people for whatever has them so worked up. A man in a business suit screaming about cigars—a woman laboriously weighing three different eggplants—a child scrambling through the legs of their parent, seeming bound and determined to trip someone up. He doesn’t see any corpse shambling through the streets.
Until—there! Two women weave through the crush, one tall and thin and very pale. Her arms hang down a little too long, like misshapen sticks, and her blouse and skirts look torn from the road, rusted with blood and age. A shock of white, lightning-bright, sears through her raven hair.
Could this be what had spooked Jaq so much? She doesn’t look like she wants to eat anyone. Not even the human walking right beside her, fragile and mortal and close enough to sink her teeth into—and then the human turns, smiling, and the dead woman looks back with an expression so bright it’s like the sun flooding the sky. Like she’s been waiting so long for the light to come back in this woman’s smile.
They exchange a few words, unintelligible under the hubbub of the crowd, but there's a sort of dazed, disbelieving happiness in their eyes: I found you. I can't believe I found you. The dead woman peers down with that same disbelief when the human reaches out to touch her hand, soft despite the pale flesh and the oozing talons. The human smiles. Her mouth goes tender around a name.
The sight of it makes Hassan’s chest ache; his parents had looked at each other like that.
The two of them link their arms together, as though they’ve been doing it for years, and take their basket of fresh eggs and leeks and tea into the rush of the marketplace.
“Come on, Jaq,” he says softly. “Look at them. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
—
Most of the folks in Spiralfare Market pass through every couple of weeks, setting down and picking up stakes like wind through the trees. If those merchants are the wind, Hassan’s little corner is the knot on the bark: they’ve clung here for years, small and persistent and a tad unsightly.
They’re not friends, exactly, but—there’s only so long you can spend crammed in the same corner, dealing with the same customers, before you either bond about it or kill each other.
During breaks they drag over upturned crates—they’d begged them off a vegetable stand a while ago and never given them back—and sit in a loose circle, playing cards and sneaking beer and gossiping. Today, predictably, all they want to gossip about is the dead woman and her human companion.
“Maybe they’re spies,” whispers Jaq, “and they’ve infiltrated the city.” A lanky boy with light brown skin, large ears, and a mop of chestnut hair, he had inherited none of the magic or effortless coolness of his sister. He makes up for it in pure drama.
Jasmine finishes Prestidigitating dead petals out of her sleeves and smirks. “Maybe they’re undercover as a couple, but they’re catching feelings.” Her magic flickers at her fingertips, as green as her eyes; sometimes, when Hassan blinks at them, they almost look like twins. Maybe that’s the fate of all siblings, when they travel so long and so close together.
“Maybe she’s a vampire, and her human lover is, like, feeding her or something—”
“Maybe they are running,” says Boran, and at that even the bright, bullheaded siblings fall silent. For all his gentleness, Boran looms: the oldest of their group and the quietest, a large dwarven man with a face as weathered as stone. A familiar sorrow lingers about him, like the scent of his honey and the dust of the ore he splits, carving out the jewels inside.
“Maybe they’re soldiers,” says Nasima.
At that the silence grows deeper, harsher. Boran reaches up to grasp his holy symbol. Spies and vampires are one thing; soldiers cut too close to reality.
Hassan remembers the woman with the basket of eggs on her arm, her bright, soft look, and a burst of protectiveness ignites in his chest. “Maybe,” he offers, “maybe they’re just two people in love with each other.”
Nasima throws down her cards. Her mouth slashes across her dark face, almost a sneer. “You’re too nice.”
“I’m trying to be kind.”
Her eyes lock on Hassan’s, sharp and glittering like black glass, and after a moment she sighs. “It’s gonna bite you in the ass one day.”
—
The debate stretches, unwieldy, into a full-on bet.
“Three copper they’re wood witches,” Jaq says after they hear about a rampage of living furniture in the streets.
“Five copper they’re from the circus,” Jasmine says after they spot them pushing through the crowd, accompanied by a bright yellow automaton, a spiky rock person with a glowing hammer, and a six-foot-tall faun.
“Maybe they’re criminals?” Nasima says when the Moon Tower comes down, biting her lip. “You owe me five silver if they are.”
“Dude, if we had five spare silver, rent would be so much easier. I’ll give you seven copper, that’s a bargain.”
And something in Hassan tenses and aches as he hears this, bitter as coffee, tough as overworked bread. He catches the two women in glimpses sometimes, laughing over the sweet tang of an orange, or gazing silently at each other as though they’re speaking in a language no one else can hear.
Sometimes the human woman, with her purple hair and pretty face, clutches her head. She staggers in pain, jolting against the sea of people, and the dead woman is the only one who can draw her out of it. Once, Hassan saw them in a corner, foreheads pressed together and scarred hands entangled, breathing softly through a well of grief; it was though someone had died for good.
“They’re just in love,” he insists. But only Nasima and Boran seem to hear him, and he knows neither of them believe it. For them, nothing could ever be that simple.
—
The women disappear after that—them and their colorful companions. Jaq and Jasmine add a few ridiculous reasons to their ongoing betting pool (“Maybe the vampire hunters finally caught up with them!” “Maybe they betrayed their spy agencies and eloped!”), but even the mystery of the spy-vampire-circus-criminal lovers falls away with the grinding cycle of the days.
Hassan bakes bread and brews coffee. Each morning he nods to Boran, bumps Jaq and Jasmine on the shoulder, and tries to smile at Nasima. The small rotten part of his heart wonders why he bothers, because she barely acknowledges it—but then, acknowledgement shouldn’t be why he does it. He has a feeling not many people have offered Nasima kindness without expecting anything in return.
It doesn’t lessen the sting much.
They all work the holidays—the Morn of Largesse, because it’s the best time to earn a surplus before fall; and Highsummer, because none of them observe it. (Boran, the only faithful among them, follows the Allhammer.) Still, the music from the temples reaches down through the spires, the banging of golden gongs and the drums stirred in tribute to the Dawnfather. Hassan imagines a festival full of light, turning the streets into rivers of it.
“What are the Allhammer festivals like?” he asks Boran eagerly. “Is it like this?”
Boran looks up from his chunk of quartz and frowns. “No,” he says, as if it’s a stupid question, and everyone laughs.
Hassan blushes. Maybe it is a stupid question; they had a few clerics of the Wildmother in his village, but none of the Allhammer. Worshippers of the god of craft tended to congregate farther north, in Uthodurn, or in the Cliffkeep Mountains of Tal’Dorei. Boran himself came from Wildemount, and when he spoke, Hassan could hear the years of salt and brine collected on his tongue, of ships and sailors and portkeeps.
“Allhammer’s nowhere near as stuffy,” Jasmine says. She nudges her brother, who has taken over cutting the poppy arrangements. “Do you remember that Highsummer in Whitestone—”
“No one appreciated my rendition of 'The Ruby of the Sea'—”
“To be fair, we were both pretty drunk at that point.”
“The Allhammer doesn’t have really have festivals,” Nasima cuts in, restocking the spice displays. Hassan, briefly, feels a flash of surprise: since when had Nasima gotten interested in the Allhammer? “Some people hold feasts and drink, but...”
“The Allhammer is the god of home and hearth,” says Boran gravely. He rubs the facets of the quartz, then reaches below his tunic to touch his holy symbol. “Of family. On Deep Solace, you reflect on the home that you have made and give thanks for the people who fill it.”
Jaq cuts his eyes over lazily, but something guarded flickers underneath them, as hard and furious as steel. “And what if the people filling it were assholes?”
“Jaq,” says Nasima warningly. Jasmine touches her brother’s shoulder, a shadow passing over her face.
Boran tilts his head. “Then maybe the Allhammer was guiding you somewhere new. I don’t know.”
He lifts the quartz in the palm of his hand, and the hollow of it catches the sunlight, like a broken shell filling up. “My family and I once made crafts to offer at the temple. No drums.”
Jaq sighs, mutters something, and goes back to trimming the flowers.
The day passes. When the sun goes down and the night air sharpens over empty streets, Hassan helps the siblings collapse their tent and loads Boran’s stones into his cart. He sees Nasima covering their crate circle with a tarp, in case it rains.
As they all break off toward the hazy shape of the spires, the sand and the reddish rocks cut by stubborn sprigs of wildlife, Hassan thinks: where are we going? It would make sense for gods to guide special people, like the dead woman brought back to life, and the human whose magic crackled at her fingertips like lightning. But he can’t imagine a god like the Allhammer guiding them, the ragtag vendors who sell spices and flowers and coffee to the people of Jrusar.
Besides, the Allhammer rules over home and family. Most of them have not seen their families or their homelands in a long time. Maybe they never will again.
—
“Hooly shit,” Jasmine whistles, “they’re back.”
The last week of Sydenstar had dawned cloudy and grey, the air strung tight with tension. More Greenseekers march in the Spiralfare every day—a drug bust, people whisper, or just a power trip. News from the underground says that the nobles of the Mahaan Houses are contracting mercenaries from the Paragon’s Call, who put on a good show at their ball a while ago. Something seems about to crack.
Which hasn’t been good for sales. Hassan’s been pulling in enough to survive, but the margin for bad days keeps getting slimmer and slimmer. He worries for his friends, too: Boran, who’s grown old even for a dwarf, and Nasima, who winds herself tighter and sharper each day as though she’s bracing for an inevitable blow. Once, he caught Jasmine hunched over ink-stained ledgers, face wavering like she couldn’t decide whether to rip them up or cry.
(“I could spot you,” he’d offered.
Green eyes as sharp as pines bore into him, and a storm of emotions passed over her face: rage, pride, embarrassment, shame. She ground her teeth and then, after a long moment: “I would pay you back.”
“I know,” Hassan said.
Jasmine met his gaze, weighing his honesty, then broke away. She suddenly looked much older than she was, much older than Jaq. She said, “Don’t tell my brother.”)
Now, though, Jasmine’s voice is bright and wondering, and Hassan looks up from his dough to see hoods and cloaks flashing in the crowd. A sliver of a pale face, a curl of lavender hair. Jasmine’s right—they’re back, and they’re running.
Jaq squints at them, too, and after a moment says, “Okay, I’m not saying you’re right, Hassan.”
Hassan blinks: “What.”
“I’m not saying you’re right, but—the dead lady’s got a ring.”
It takes a second for the words to sink in, but then an unexpected flush of joy blossoms in Hassan’s chest. A ring! They’re married! Their smiles, the first time he had ever seen them, shining like they were all the light in the world; and the way they had held each other close, and the way they had laughed and laced arms and walked in step, adoring of the all the things about themselves others feared, because there was nothing to fear together; now they had promised that feeling to each other always. His chest feels tight with the sweetness of it.
“Stop grinning like that, you look weird,” teases Jasmine, smacking him with the flower paper. But she looks out at the hooded figures—wives? fiancees?—holding hands as they make their way through the marketplace, and softens. “I guess it is kind of nice to see someone’s happy. Although they could still be undercover assassins.”
“Undercover married assassins,” says Jaq.
“Undercover married assassin vampires!” Jasmine pauses, then leans her elbows on the counter and smirks. “How do you think they proposed?”
“They probably tried to kill each other,” says Jaq airily, “and then were all—I was sent to kill you! No, I was sent to kill you! But I fell in love with your scintillating eyes and your decomposing flesh, so let us flee into the night together!”
“And now they’re on a mission to hunt down their former agencies. Also, they totally stole that ring.”
“In a daring heist!”
“It is a good ring,” Boran chimes in, smiling faintly. “Nice cut.”
Jasmine nods with a broad grin and spreads her hands. “Maybe that was the proposal. You’ve got a nice cut, wanna marry me?”
Jaq leaps away from the counter, face twisting in disgust—“Ew, never do that again, Jas!”—and Boran lets out a shout of laughter, deep and rumbling. Watching them, warmth swells again in Hassan’s chest, like the memory of sunlight breaking through the trees in his village. He tries to bottle it, remember the feeling, because—
He glances over at Nasima, grim-faced, watching the sky. For a flicker of a moment their eyes meet, and she doesn’t have to say anything at all.
—
As the day draws to a close, thick clouds gather in the sky. The wind turns low and dour, and Hassan feels the first stinging precursors to rain, the chill of autumn that has begun to pervade the spires in earnest.
Hassan helps pack up the tents and cover the crates in tarps. Jasmine checks her coin box one last time before grimacing and Mage Handing the buckets into her own cart. “Are you guys gonna be okay?” she calls back. “If it starts raining, the mud’s gonna be killer.”
“We’ll be fine,” Nasima says, and Jasmine rolls her eyes.
“You have the oldest-ass wheels out of all of us. Even Boran.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Jasmine shrugs, rudely gesturing to Jaq, who’s already taken the driver’s seat and is frantically motioning for her to hurry up. “Okay, but you better not die in a ditch somewhere. We’d miss your grumpiness.”
The corner of Nasima’s lips lift, and she nods, and Jasmine jumps into the back of the cart with a two-fingered salute. “See you later, then!”
And then it’s only him and Nasima. Hassan finishes loading his cart and watches her: struggling under the weight of glass bottles and damp canvas, a small dark figure against the storm. Would she accept help from him? Would she bristle with anger that Hassan was even offering? He thinks of the blank, frustrated looks she had given him when he tried to reach out, of the sneer that had crossed her face when he suggested something could be as simple as two people loving each other. Maybe it would be more respectful to leave.
“Why are you staring at me?” Nasima asks, and Hassan quickly looks away.
“I was wondering if you wanted a ride home. I, uh, have newer wheels.” Nasima’s eyes narrow, and he puts up both hands in surrender. “No tricks! I just—seems like a bad night to get caught outside.”
For one long, agonizing moment, Nasima studies him; it feels like burning away all the foliage to reveal the bare, ugly soil underneath. Hassan tries not to let the frustration well up. He understands—he does—and it’s unfair to her, maybe, but. They’ve worked with each other for years now. Doesn’t she know what kind of person Hassan is? Doesn’t she know he’s her friend?
But then Nasima nods, sharp and deliberate. “Alright.”
“Um,” says Hassan, dumbfounded. “Yeah. Sure. Alright!”
So Hassan hunches over in the driver’s seat, trying to avoid the worst of the rain, and Nasima stays a silent, prickling presence in the back, and the cart trundles awkwardly through rain-soaked streets into the heart of the Core Spire. Hassan has never seen where Nasima lives—has tried not to ask her, in case it hurts—and finds himself wondering if he might understand her better if he knew. His parents had filled their home with bits of themselves: the cast iron from his grandparents, assorted keys from flea markets, scribbles on the wall from before Hassan had decided to put his limited artistic skills toward bread. Would Nasima’s be the same? Does she have a place to put down parts of herself?
The rain drums deafeningly on the cobblestones. Hassan clears his throat.
“I know you pretty much hate me,” he says, which is a great start.
“I don’t hate you,” says Nasima, so quietly that the rain almost swallows it. “I just think you’re too nice.”
“You keep saying that—I’m trying to be kind!”
“To people who don’t deserve it.” Even through the storm, Hassan can hear the bitterness in Nasima’s voice, the surety. “Jaq and Jasmine are just kids, Hassan, and Boran has his faith. You’re—you. So I have to see the world like it is, to keep us safe.” Beneath it: no one else will.
Thunder booms above them, rolling over the spires of the city and the distant green of the mountains. Far away, encircled in silver mist, is his old home—and beyond that all the lush forests of the Wilds, the deserts where sand glitters like a vast, foaming sea. A sudden pang stabs at Hassan’s heart, and he suddenly wants to reach for Nasima, to touch her hand, to show her— “And the world like it is is so terrible?”
“Yes,” says Nasima, with an old kind of pain. “The people in it. Too often.”
(Here’s a thing: Nasima and Boran were the first people to carve out their corner in the Spiralfare Market. Boran with his family gone to the Raven Queen, Nasima who looked at Boran as a father as much as anything. When Hassan had stumbled into Jrusar with his loaves of bread and his pot of coffee beans, it had been Boran who welcomed him; his eyes shared the sorrow of a homeland left behind. But Nasima had cleared the space for him, marking out the tent stakes in the dirt, quiet and sharp and generous.
Hassan had never forgotten that—that gesture that had been more than a gesture, because he had been so young and so lost and so alone. What would Nasima call it, the kindness she had done for him?)
Hassan pulls the cart to a stop and looks back: Nasima’s shining, dark eyes, her braid flying apart in the wind. The rain coats her face and sticks hair to her cheeks, scraped raw with cold. She looks thunderous; she looks so painfully bright.
What can Hassan say to someone like that except the truth?
“I know. People can be terrible. But I have to believe in some of them.” He smiles at her ruefully, as much as he can. “Otherwise I never would have found you guys.”
—
The storm clears, and the flow of days starts again: the customers grumbling, the sun warming the cobblestones, and the Essil siblings raving about a dead lady.
“I mean, they obviously went on a honeymoon,” says Jaq. “Probably to Nicodranas.”
“You’re just saying that because you looove The Ruby of the Sea so much.”
“'The Ruby of the Sea' is an iconic folk song—”
“Uh-huh.”
Jaq makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat, the tips of his ears red with indignation. Unfazed, Jasmine flicks his nose with a spare crocus. “It’s not even original, there are hundreds of shanties about having sex with a beautiful woman.”
“She’s just trying to rile you up,” Nasima sighs.
“Well, it’s working!”
Jasmine laughs, a bright shout of victory, and Jaq throws up his hands, storming off into the afternoon crowd. “Where are you going, Jaq?” she calls after him. “Nicodranas, to see your lady love?”
“Fuck you, I’m taking my lunch break!”
“The Ruby of the Sea is indeed very beautiful,” says Boran, not looking up from his carving, and Jasmine turns to him, a wicked light in her eyes. Dwarves do have long lives, Hassan thinks, and then Boran is pretty handsome, and then his brain breaks a little at the implications; he decides to squash that line of thought where it is and focus on the bread. The cinnamon raisin buns have been popular lately, as people reach for sweet things where they can find them; maybe he can ask Nasima for some extra cloves. It feels—strange between them now. Nice. Like the earth after rain, soft and shifting, ready to resolidify into better ground.
Cinnamon raisin buns are Jaq’s favorites, too; he never stays angry with his sister for long, but something to ease the sting—
And time bends—
And the sky splits—
Stars race across the sky; shadows lengthen like a grasping hand. Light and color splinter the firmament, a webbing of cracks in the glass opening wider and wider, and in the distance, something bloody—
—the red moon—
—people are screaming —
—lashes around like a chain of flesh, and the moon pulses, and all the light dies into the dull red glow of Ruidus, bleeding into the streets—
“Hassan!” The voice grounds him, rough and sharp, and Hassan blinks back into the chaos of reality—Nasima’s hands on his shoulders, the desperate tightness of her mouth. His hands are sticky with dough. Jaq is somewhere in the thick of the crowd, which is churning like terrified cattle. They cry out like they’re being butchered: confusion, terror, some of them are glowing—
The greatest lie ever told is that we need them, a silken voice rings in Hassan’s head, and he squeezes his eyes shut, clutching his ears. But the voice sounds everywhere, relentless, inescapable. Where his head is bent in prayer, Boran stiffens; is this the Allhammer? Hassan wonders numbly. Why would he say something that cruel—of course Hassan needs his friends, he needs them all—
Behind Nasima, Jasmine’s hands slash the air. Her face trembles, white with terror. “Jaq, where are you?” she Sends. “Are you hurt? Try to get back to us!”
“He won’t be able to,” Nasima mutters, “the crowd, it’s too dangerous—”
Teleportation magic cracks like lightning in the streets. Hassan hears children crying—men shouting—the mewling of stray cats too slow to get out of the crush. Bone snaps louder and harsher than thunder, more awful than the voice pounding in his skull.
We are their gardens, their cattle.
“He’s going to get back to us,” Jasmine says. “He has to. He has to, stupid fucking Jaq—”
(When the Essil siblings set their minds to something, the mountains themselves shudder.
But what is that against a power that can shatter the sky?)
We unraveled their weave and killed one of them, became one of them. Then, then they feared us.
He spots a figure stumbling in the mass of people—lanky, familiar—and for a moment his heart stops. Is it the dead woman? Are they back just in time to be trampled in—whatever the fuck this is, all their light and joy crushed under a throng of screaming people? Or had his friends been right—had they caused this—
The blurry shape of the figure resolves in Hassan’s vision, and he gasps, his chest tightening. “Jaq!”
Jaq staggers, bruised and panting from pushing against the crowd. Hassan’s mind goes blank: Help. Help! He moves toward him, reaching out; shoulders shove into him and whirl him off-course. “Jaq!” Elbows stabbing into his gut, and the voice is still going—They should be afraid—“Jaq!”
“Hassan!” he hears, distantly, and then Boran comes roaring past him, barreling into the crowd to grasp Jaq’s arm. He bundles Jaq into his chest, folds himself over to take all the blows—but no godly aura surrounds him. When people strike him, they strike flesh.
Tonight, we unleash the natural predator of the gods. Tonight, the children inherit the world.
But Boran pulls them both through, his eyes as hard as flint, and deposits Jaq in front of his sister.
“Are you all right?” he says. “Are you all right?”
Jaq nods shakily, and Jasmine throws herself around him, clinging; he wraps his bruised body around her, like they’re covering each other. He tucks his head into the skinny curve of her shoulder, an inseparable part of her. “Fuck you,” she whispers in a voice thick with tears, “fuck you, Jaq, don’t do that to me.”
“I’m sorry, I-I’m here—Jas, I’m here—”
The orbs of light illuminating the streets flicker, but they just hold each other tighter; Hassan blinks, too, and realizes he has his own bruising grip on Nasima. “Sorry,” he tries to say, but his chest is empty of air, and Nasima just squeezes his hand. Boran puts his hand on the siblings’ trembling backs, his face grave. Had it been like this, when he fled Wildemount—this panic, this confusion? Hassan’s tongue feels thick with sympathy, and a pathetic sort of relief; maybe Boran would know. Maybe Boran would know how to get through this.
Jasmine raises her head from Jaq’s shoulder, not releasing him. “Should—should we go somewhere?”
“Where would we go?” Nasima asks bleakly.
“I-I don’t know—what the fuck is happening?”
Boran sits down heavily on a crate, fist tight around his holy symbol. “A fool, trying to test the gods.” He sighs. “Nasima is right. We will be safer here.” He bows his head and begins again to pray: Moradin, give me strength; let the foundations I have built remain unbroken; with the force of my hammer and the fire of my heart, let me protect my people.
You couldn’t stop me, the silken voice in Hassan’s head continues, unfazed. You couldn’t—it’s too late!
Jasmine’s face twists in helplessness, but Jaq whispers something in her ear, thin and shaky, and she slowly disentangles herself from him. She sits down. She doesn’t let go of her brother’s hand.
Nasima sits, too, guiding Hassan down; he looks out at the mass of people, still screaming. Some levitate into the air, skin splitting open into ribbons of red light. He thinks of his mother and father—are they safe? Are they screaming? Maybe he’ll never know, because there’s never enough time, never enough money to go back; maybe they’ve already died in the same house they raised him in, and no one ever knew to tell him. Maybe the world will split like a rotten tree, bleeding down the middle, and none of it will matter.
His friends tremble around him, holding to each other. He wonders what they’re thinking about: if Nasima has any regrets about her parents, if Boran is praying for his daughter in the Raven Queen’s realm. Jaq and Jasmine, he knows, only have each other—but maybe they’re praying, too.
Nasima’s hand bites into his. Hassan tries to hold onto—the memory of sunlight, the memory of Jaq and Jasmine young and bickering. The love blooming on the dead woman’s face, bright and tender, bringing her to life.
But the feeling flickers in the red shadows. Memories are thin, fading. Fear devours them like a storm, and then he can feel only Nasima’s hand, terrified and bruising and real, and the shivering of his friends, as lost as he is under the broken sky.
—
The sky lightens, but the moon looms like bloody flesh left on the plate.
Hassan sells bread.
Soldiers pour into the city: hooded figures, religious zealots in shining armor.
Hassan sells coffee.
He can still hear the screaming—the children who were too slow, the old, lame animals. He can still hear that silken voice.
Hassan sells bread.
—
A man blackened with burn scars stumbles into the market one day, shouting about a bitch with lightning powers, a gaggle of strange adventurers, a falling skyship. “We were trying to save you!” he spits. “You ungrateful sheep!”
“Is he talking about the dead lady and her wife?” Jasmine whispers, her voice quivering. “Did they do this?”
Hassan turns his head, but the protest ossifies in his chest. Maybe they did do this. Maybe they did all of it. What does Hassan know?
—
Rise up, the crystalline images say, a handsome elven man spreading his hands. The gods have done nothing for you. Rise up and take your power.
Boran presses his lips together, touching his holy symbol. Jaq looks at him, face unreadable.
“What does your god do for you?” he asks. “You don’t even get magic, do you?”
“It’s not about that,” Boran grunts. “Not for me. It’s a way of life.”
“You want your life to be tied down to some god?”
Boran’s eyes flash in anger, and Nasima lays a hand on his shoulder. He touches his holy symbol again, rubs the sharp angles of the hammer, the flat piece of the handle. It’s a long time before he speaks again.
When he does, his voice comes rough and thick. Like wading through a body full of memories. "You tie your life to your sister.”
Jaq flushes. “That’s different.”
“It is. But I do not know how else to explain it. The Allhammer is a part of me—he is how I carry my family with me.”
Jaq turns away, his shoulders falling. In the red light, his jaw cuts like a knife, sharp and stubborn. “But he couldn’t save them.”
“No,” says Boran tiredly, “I couldn’t. And the Allhammer led me to a new path.” He releases his holy symbol and runs his fingers across the wood of the crate. Then he looks up at Jaq, his expression unfathomably old. “That is what he did for me.”
—
Hassan tries to think of the dead woman and her wife, sometimes, when the red moon catches his eye and freezes him in place. They had loved each other so much, he assures himself. The dead woman had cupped her cheeks so gently, and her wife had pressed herself to her side; they had argued over whether the oranges were ripe and which tea tasted better with their landlady’s biscuits, their irritation falling away to laughter. There had been a love like theirs in the world.
Except maybe they did this, the small rotten part of his heart murmurs. Except maybe Nasima was right. Except maybe the world like it is is terrible, and you’re too nice.
In his memory, the dead woman’s smile turns to a mouthful of teeth.
—
And then one day, when the sun is flush with the red moon in the sky, Nasima touches his hand. “Come with me,” she murmurs.
Hassan’s feet trip forward before his mind catches up, following her through Spiralfare. She leads him toward the vegetable stand, where a crowd gathers around a crystal ready to burst. Soon the elven man will come, whispering lies about gods and power, and Hassan will feel the stir of it ripple through the people—one step closer to another night of pain.
“Alright,” he sighs. He’s made a hard sort of peace with his naivete—a dull, aching stone of a peace—but Nasima doesn’t have to rub it in. Out of all of them, it stings most when she does it; Hassan has elected not to examine why that is. “People suck. You’ve made your point.”
“Quiet,” Nasima says, and points. “Look.”
And there, staring at each other, carrying a basket of cauliflower—
“It is weird, Laudna,” the purple-haired woman is saying, her voice low and hesitant. She sounds like someone from the Highlands; her accent wraps around her words like grain and farmland. She brushes the circlet hidden in her hair. “...I can’t hear your thoughts.”
“Even now?” the dead woman—Laudna—asks. The words are miserable and hopeful all at once, and Hassan flushes, turning to Nasima: why has she brought him here? To prove to him that they’re criminals? To embarrass him? He knows already, he wants to say, she can stop trying to—to make him see the world how it is. These people are probably soldiers or spies or whatever, and he was wrong, and apparently they can read minds?
But Nasima doesn’t look at him at all, her eyes fixed on the conversation unfolding before them.
“Y-yeah, it’s—”
“Because you—your circlet.” A pause, then, half-convincingly: “That’s great!”
The purple-haired woman worries her hands, her eyes darting down to the ring on Laudna’s finger as though reminding herself that this is her wife. “It’s great, but it’s also—um—strange. Very strange.”
“Does it make crowded environments—”
“—so much easier.”
Laudna’s face softens. “That’s wonderful,” she says, and Hassan can see: she looks almost as haggard as he feels. Her clothes are shredded and covered in blood. Maybe they had killed someone, or—he looks again at Nasima, remembering the way she had gripped his hand under the shattered sky that night—maybe they had been as lost as they were. Besides, Laudna’s wife barely registers the blood and dirt for how tenderly she memorizes her face, as though they haven’t seen each other for years.
“You don’t have to—listen in, to get my thoughts,” Laudna continues, earnest. “I’ll always share them willingly. You can just ask.”
A long, long pause permeates the air, full of an aching that Hassan can’t quite read; Laudna's wife trembles with the weight of it. She swallows once, then again, and then with the force of a sky splitting itself open, or maybe crashing back together, she blurts: “Can I kiss you?”
Laudna blinks, stunned; Hassan’s heart jumps into his throat.
“I can’t tell if it’s alright or not anymore,” Laudna’s wife rushes to say, the nervousness thickening the accent in her voice.
They still could have killed someone, hisses the small rotten part of his heart, they could have broken the whole world—but the light in his chest flares, that old overpowering joy that feels like sunlight and family and the promise of something good. Beside him, Nasima lets out a whisper of a breath, like she feels it, too.
And then—“Alright,” says Laudna, bewildered, and her wife comes to her in a breath that’s almost a sob, cupping her face like she’s everything in the world—like she’s the sun, and the sweetness of oranges, and the tea in the morning, like touching her could erase all the blood in the sky and make it clean again. She holds her with such gentleness that Hassan can’t believe they might be soldiers—can’t believe that they’re anything but two people in love.
“Alright,” her wife says back, laughing, pressing her forehead to Laudna's. “I will.”
And they do. And they do.
Hassan clamps his hands over his mouth to contain the squeak, looks toward Nasima. A quiet pride has fallen over her face, too, but when she catches him looking, her brow quirks. His cheeks burn in embarrassment. It’s not—it’s not anything strange, watching them, he wants to explain; it’s only that they’re so happy, and they hold each other so carefully, and as their lips brush Hassan can see—in a sea of terrible shit—two people on their way to making something better. A hardness like a stone, bound in rope and chains, unravels in his chest.
A passing half-elf grunts when he sees the two women holding up the flow of traffic. “Oi—” he starts to say, and Hassan tugs on his sleeve to get him to shut up.
“Be quiet,” he hisses, “and I’ll give you free coffee for a week.”
The half-elf eyes Hassan warily, but finally shrugs. “I’ll hold you to that,” he says. He walks off without a second glance, and Nasima mutters something like shithead.
Not even a shithead can dim the sweet feeling bubbling in him, though, and Hassan watches Laudna and her wife a moment longer: lost to the world, lost in each other. Then he turns to Nasima.
“You can say it,” he says, though he can barely form the words through his smile. “I’m too nice.”
Smiling back, Nasima takes his hand. It's gentler than that night, but she's saying the same thing. I’m here. I’m here. Her face, as the city swells around them in life and color, shines exactly the way it did in the storm—a bright, thunderous truth. She says: “You’re very kind.”
—
“Is something on fire again?” Jasmine asks when they return.
The flowers in her bucket are blooming: crocus, lilies, chrysanthemums. Next to her, sitting on the crates, Jaq is weaving a crown for Boran. He places it on Boran’s head, yellow and scarlet against his hair, and Hassan can just barely hear the low murmurs of prayer: Allhammer, I give thanks for the home that I have made. I give thanks for the people who fill it.
Nasima squeezes his hand.
You won’t believe what I saw, Hassan will tell them later. Our dead lady walking around in the marketplace!
He thinks of Laudna and her wife, pressed together in a tender kiss: the dead lady and the woman who can read minds. Magic pours off of them like light; they’re the kinds of people chosen by gods and fate. Not the ragtag vendors who sell spices and flowers and coffee, who sit on stolen crates and make crowns out of chrysanthemums.
But—Nasima is holding his hand, and Jaq is coaxing Boran into a round of "The Ruby of the Sea,” and Jasmine is objecting furiously, even though she will join the loudest in a moment—Hassan’s family, they’ve built something pretty good, too.