Work Text:
When Caleb returns to the Lavish Chateau, Essek greets him with a kiss.
“Good evening,” he murmurs, still smiling against Caleb’s lips. “My light.”
Glancing up from her sketchbook, Jester coos. She grew up with Nicodranas’s sunlit shores, whose mirror-bright waves she now sketches from memory.
“‘My light?’” She beams at them both. “Essek, that is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Do you want a little more?” Without waiting for agreement, Caleb refills Essek’s bowl with soup.
They have spent weeks developing a new chronurgy spell nicknamed reality break, a title that proved to be more appropriate than originally thought. Though Caleb aborted the first casting in seconds, Essek’s body was already encased in ice, blasted from the dark void of some neighboring moment in time, looming strangely close. He has since been transported to the Blooming Grove, fully healed, and pressed to exchange the night’s experiments for a leisurely dinner, where Caleb has plied him with more broth and tea than any mortal could reasonably consume. The stinging chill is now gone from his limbs. Easily forgotten.
Essek stares at a steaming bowl of stew: his third for the evening, neatly filled to the brim. Even for him, this is too much. “Thank you, my darling light.”
Caleb throws him a look.
“Your darling light.” Caduceus misses or else strategically chooses to ignore the sarcasm. “That’s nice.”
“Accurate too,” Essek matches his tone for pleasantness, “in that he is giving me a headache.”
Caleb smiles at him, sweet but for the glint in his eyes. “Some more broth will solve that, ja?”
“You were superb, Light. The Cobalt Soul could not have asked for a better speaker.” In disguise at the reception’s edge, Essek runs his fingers through Caleb’s hair. His curls, lightened by summertime, blaze an especially glorious bronze.
“Hm.” Caleb furrows his brow, as if his lecture did not rewrite the minds of every monk in attendance. “I still think I can explain it more clearly, the connections between Aeorian glyphs and the modern transmuter’s stone …”
For a few minutes they circle this old topic of discussion, volleying half-sentences back and forth, the patterns now well-practiced. Then Caleb steps away.
Beau moves into his place. She watches Essek for several excruciating moments before downing her glass and announcing, “I’m onto you, by the way.”
Essek tips his head, questioning.
“I’ve been working on my casual Undercommon. Less textbooks, more novels. Plays. Self-published erotica.”
“Ah.”
“Which is how I know what a drow calling someone ‘Light’ means.”
“Oh?”
“It means you’re an exhibitionist with a blasphemy kink.”
“Hm.” Holding her stare, Essek raises his glass and takes a prim sip of his drink.
She cranes her neck towards Caleb. “So the million-platinum question is, does he know what you mean?””
A waiter passes by with a glass clearly marked for someone else. In one fluid maneuver, she swipes it, drains it, and drops the empty cup back in its spot unnoticed, eyes remaining locked on Caleb throughout. Essek can almost see as the Expositor draws her conclusions, facts and their consequences whisking into place.
“Okay. Caleb’s a smart guy. He’s definitely in on it.” She shudders, as if shaking off an ooze. “Figures, a wizard gets off on being a ‘higher power.’”
Essek observes as she spontaneously disintegrates without his saying a word. Lip quirked ever-so-slightly, he pats her arm. “Lovely chatting with you, as always.”
Ignoring a string of grammatically impeccable Undercommon curses, he floats away.
Ears twitching in the wailing Eiselcross wind, Essek glides into the cave, opening marked by a coal-red glow. Inside Caleb has already lit a small campfire and pulled out his spellbook, curling close around the heat as he conjures their shelter for the night. Essek sets his things down behind him and curls around Caleb, wrapping arms around his chest and burrowing his head into the curve of his neck.
Their newly obtained emerald flickers at the center of the flames, which efficiently lick away the last clinging traces of necrotized fluids.
“I cannot believe you talked me into coming back for this,” Caleb says, shaking his head.
“You truly wanted it,” Essek retorts, hiding his smile against red locks- no, half-silver. He can almost forget, sometimes. “That is reason enough.”
Essek shucks his gloves, dropping them into Caleb’s lap, and then stretches his bare hands towards the fire. Caleb stills, eyes no doubt tracking wayward sparks, but he does not flinch.
He has learned that there is no danger here, in the light of his own fire. It only glows, and warms, and cleanses.
“Thank you, Liechtli,” Essek whispers, and Caleb melts in his arms.
“Where are you going?” Essek asks his husband.
“I have been reviewing my components, and am in need of rosemary,” he replies, tossing on his scarf and hat. “There is time to walk. The market should be open for an hour more.”
When Essek speaks, several seconds later, his voice is soft. “I’m afraid the stalls are closed for the night. The sun has already set.”
Caleb pauses, scarf mid-wind. Opens the door and peeks outside, brow clouding momentarily at the sight. “Ah. So it has.”
Caleb sets the scarf back on its hook, humming to himself, and drifts back to his calculations.
He later remembers to pull off his hat, uncovering gleaming hair that now matches Essek’s.
Tomorrow will mark a holy day in Rosonha. The darkness will be pulled back to reveal sunlight, and Essek can imagine the elves marching out to meet it. They will falter at the first step and then straighten back up, stumbling coltish into the street.
“There was a book in Undercommon,” Caleb tells him over dinner, “displayed openly in a shop window last week. A history of the Marrow War, but from a Kryn perspective.”
Essek tilts his head. “Who was the author?”
“Ahlul, of Den Olios.”
Essek nods. He has met them, a soft-spoken scholar by the name of Eilul.
With the approach of sunset in the south, the marching will surely turn to dancing, drow whirling half-blind and defenseless under the last rays of purifying sun. The ecstatic bloodletting at the altars of Lolth, neatened for a modern age.
Caleb keeps the pages for clone in his spellbook, for reference purposes. He keeps them, and does not use them. He has found no reason to.
Essek keeps a handkerchief imbued daily with three charges of silence, to cover his mouth when screaming.
It is a thin line, between purification and immolation. At first a mild sting, easily forgotten, the sunshine will cut deep with time, searing their bodies, warping their sight. They will climb the rooftops to get closer. The glow devours them whole and they shall let it, though its radiance was never meant to be theirs.
“Sleep well,” Essek says, settling under the covers, pressing a kiss good-night to Caleb’s temple, “my light.”