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“You certainly took your time.” The words don’t actually come out hostile, the longer he’d spent here waiting doing the mouse’s job in his stead—keeping watch over the Spiral door—the more it had felt like a welcome change. A moment to breathe.
The wizard had needed a friend.
Duncan had needed an escape.
“Thank you,” he adds, almost worried despite his tone that he’d be misunderstood. “I hope it was worth it.”
“I should be thanking you, Spellbinder. I doubt they would have come looking for company otherwise, and you were right, they were very much in need of it.” Dyvim Whitehart is excruciatingly difficult not to like, Duncan was realizing. There was an easy warmth to him, something in every word that spoke to his own character. It feels like he’s offering up trust that hasn’t really been earned.
Maybe it has, even by association.
Or maybe Duncan just isn’t used to people smiling at him anymore.
“You can call me Duncan, I have a name.” Unlike them. Let them have something. Something that isn’t… Something that hadn’t been spit at them in anger at least…
Probably.
~*~
“I have to say I’m thoroughly impressed, the fact that you were able to not only channel but control and direct Shadow without any training is quite the feat.” Velma Von Venkman makes him feel like a bug in a jar—but she’s also one of the only people in the Spiral who seems to look at Shadow magic like a legitimate field of study instead of something to be feared. “I take it based on the scarring you’ve sustained that you’ve experienced an overload similar to the wizard?”
The—
—shit.
Duncan Grimwater is not used to people noticing the faint tear tract scars on his face. They aren’t anywhere near as deep or as discolored as the wizard’s, but he can still remember the frigid cold of liquid shadow drying on his face, the sensation of drowning, the tears that seemed to cut him open as they ran.
“Y-yes? Sort of.” It hadn’t really been an overload, “It was the first time I tried to use Shadow magic, I drew a spell circle I’d seen the wizard make and activated a treasure card outside of battle.”
Venkman looks positively ecstatic.
It’s nice.
It’s certainly helping some of the lingering bitterness to be treated like a prodigy. And maybe he was? The wizard too had seemed genuinely surprised by his grasp of Shadow. He didn’t know how they’d learned, how long it had taken them, what it had cost.
He doesn’t see the wizard for weeks after they leave to return the eye of history. He doesn’t go looking, he sent them Dyvim in the beginning, he’s not—they’re not friends—he’s not going to check in. He’s going to focus on what they got him dragged into and learn everything he can from the scholars. Qismah sends him into the desert wastelands on the outskirts of Mirage in search of ancient bones for new spells, Venkman tells stories about growing up on Darkmoor and teaches him how to wield Shadow without the rage he’d come to view as necessary.
The strange little librarian tails him around when he wanders.
Like he isn’t trusted.
Duncan can’t blame him.
Ione Virga doesn’t interact with him much, save for once about a month after his arrival, when she calls him into her office to—begrudgingly—inform him that Qismah has decided he is ready to undertake the Trial of the Understudy.
The Void Elemental feels as though it is hungry.
But it falls to the knowledge he’s gained here.
And he is starting to feel like this place is more than just a temporary safe haven. The first threads of what he’ll do are forming. But there isn’t news to push him to the decision, it isn’t time yet.
~*~
“Understudy Grimwater,” Duncan has learned not to jump at the sound of Ione’s voice. But the sudden sharpness of it has yet to wear off, it still makes him feel like he’s supposed to snap to attention. “Preparations are being made for travel to Empyrea, find and alert the Wizard of this—they will need to make contact with a captain who has experience traversing the Aethyr storm.”
“Right.” Is what he says. Because he doesn’t think questioning the Storm scholar is a particularly wise idea. Even if what he wants to say is more along the lines of why me and can’t you send a contact sphere?
He’s back in his apartment rooms when he realizes. Halfway through digging out the reagents he needs to bypass the wizard’s damned teleport blocking. Shining scales and a golden pearl and…Nightshade, always nightshade, he’d tried other botanical reagents before but nothing else ever worked. He’s got a fistful of the dark purple flowers and he freezes as it dawns on him.
This wasn’t just some nonsense task.
It wasn’t that Ione couldn’t contact the wizard another way.
Because why would you send someone you suspect of being a spy for the other side. For the schism, for the bad guys. Unless you don’t suspect them anymore? Unless it was a show of trust?
…or a test.
~*~
The wizard is in in the solarium outside their Celestial Observatory, pressing hot metal into the forge there in an attempt to get it bent back into shape. If there was one thing they had to hand to the ancient Celestians—it was their innovation in crafting. A forge that heated reagents and not flesh was a spectacular aid, the starlight that poured off it making a barrier between the hot steel and their hands.
Like in the Myth tower, they feel the incoming teleport before it goes off. It shouldn’t go off, they’ve had the blocking ward tucked back in their pocket for months now, since Mirage. But that hadn’t stopped it with Dyvim and they doubt it will stop now, so they step back away from the forge, tapping the Astral sigil on the side as they do so that it begins to cool.
Just in time for Duncan to appear in a flash of Storm-tinged Death.
“How do you keep doing that?” They’d worked out almost immediately that he’d been the one to send Dyvim to them. None of the other Necromancers carried the ever present ozone tang of Storm magic in their spellwork. Maybe Triton Avenue had rubbed off on him, or maybe his friendship with the Gryphonbane siblings had once given him an interest in Divination. Regardless it stuck to everything he did. A calling card that made him known. “Nobody should be able to break my teleportation ward.”
“No time for that, the scholars have made a breakthrough.”
Their stomach drops, not in fear but in shock. Mellori, they have a lead on Mellori, they have a way to fix this. “Right—” and they push past him out of the solarium, headed for the main observatory with no mind paid to the fact that he follows. “—right okay.”
Preparation is a haze, they genuinely forget Duncan is there until they come back to the main floor of the tower and find him staring at the Shadow Point where it sits on the wall. They ought to bring it. Just in case. Better to have options on hand to tip things in their favor. Options that don’t leave them further scarred anyways…
“You can go back, let them know I’m on my way.” The sword is cold as they pull it from the wall, always colder than they feel it should be, always faintly thrumming. A pulse of Shadow reminiscent of the quiet hrum they’d associated with Spider and its creation.
“I’m coming with you.”
The wizard’s gaze snaps back to Duncan, taking him in properly for the first time since he’d arrived. He’s already set to go. “You…what changed your mind?”
“Nothing.” He replies, “I knew I would be doing this eventually—I—can you just say thank you and we can get moving? We don’t need to do this.”
He’s right.
They don’t.
“Thank you. Lets go.”