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The realization comes with the cold clarity of a punch to the gut: Caleb has never met the actual Jester Lavorre. Not properly. Not really. It hits him square in the chest, a horrifying, mildly embarrassing epiphany that doesn’t so much dawn as it does explode, a starburst of panic that shoots down his spine, erasing the slouch from his shoulders and pressing him painfully flat against the nearest wall.
His first instinct, as it always is when danger rears its head or a conspiracy whispers in the dark, is to glance towards Beauregard.
His partner. His friend. His protector, or at least that’s what she insists on calling herself. Beau is currently embroiled in a bout of heroic violence alongside the Eighth’s cavalier (Yasha—his mind helpfully supplies, functioning flawlessly in the face of total chaos and eldritch monstrosities.)
Beauregard is, unsurprisingly, furious. Sweat streams down her face, her breath a series of strained grunts as she swings her staff with the kind of force that would have shattered Caleb into tiny pieces. The thick, wet sound of the impacts echo through the room as each strike is absorbed, repelled by the writhing, oily mass that surrounds Avantika. The woman—if she could still be called a woman—lurches in the center of a dark cloud of ink, her eyes radiating sickly yellow light like cancerous twin suns.
“Give. Him. Back,” Beauregard snarls, each word punctuated by another vicious whack.
Caleb looks to the body of Fjord the Third. Caduceus is cradling it to his chest, his sobs muffled by the corpse’s undercut. His hands are still pressed to the gaping wound in Fjord’s back, blood slicking his fingers as he rocks back and forth.
Caleb, for a moment, feels like an intruder. An overwhelming sense of pity wells up inside of his chest, forcing him to look away. Back towards the fight.
Fjord and Caduceus had been close. But Fjord and Beauregard had been close, too. And the fury in Beau’s eyes is much easier for him to endure.
Avantika laughs, a sound that rumbles up from her chest like a tide breaking against jagged rocks—too deep, too large for her body to contain, like something that should have stayed buried beneath the ocean.
Beauregard leaps at her, her staff raised.
She doesn’t even get halfway there before a dark tendril snaps out from behind her, slamming her into the ground with an ugly, bone-cracking thud.
“Beau!” Yasha yells, rushing to help her up.
Avantika shakes her head, the motion slow and almost affectionate.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, like she’s scolding a child who failed to tidy their room. “I can’t give him back. We’ve ascended. Look at what he’s helped me become.”
She raises her hand, and Fjord’s rapier gleams in the dim light, held with his exact grip, his exact stance. The same protective tilt to the left side of her body, just as he used to compensate for his scarred eye.
Caleb watches, and for a moment, he doesn’t see Avantika at all. He sees Fjord—Fjord, trapped in that body, forced to fight through her muscles, a ghost with too much power to be at peace. He thinks of doing the same to Beauregard, and the thought makes his stomach twist.
Avantika has ascended, become a god, or something like it. Caleb knows that, even with everyone here, they don’t stand a chance.
Not against her.
Not against this.
She’s not interested in killing them. Not yet. But she’s more than happy to let them feel the weight of her power pressing down on them like a boot to the neck.
With a final, lingering glance at Beauregard, Caleb turns and flees.
He dashes down the hall, the growing dread in his chest tightening with each step. He should’ve known. The moment they’d met, he should’ve been paying attention. He should’ve watched her, studied the angles of her smile, the glint in her eyes. He should’ve seen it. He should’ve done something. But instead, he’d been too eager to avert his gaze. Too eager to let her slip away.
Caleb stands at the door separating him from the thing pretending to be Jester Lavorre, his hand trembling as he reaches for the handle. He tries to convince himself that it’s not too late to help. That maybe—just maybe—he has the power to end this tragedy.
Beauregard catches up to him faster than he expected. It brings a small, genuine smile to his lips. That’s his Beau, always one step ahead. Clever.
He’s proud of her.
But pride won’t stop him from doing what he has to do.
With a deep, resigned breath, Caleb takes advantage of their shared history, the years of trust between them, and weaves a spell in the air—a sharp, searing snare that locks Beauregard in place. Her eyes flash with shock before her body freezes, suspended in time and space, leaving her, for the moment, unhurt.
He squeezes her hand, the gesture hopefully affectionate, before he steps inside Jester’s room and closes the door behind him with a soft click.
~
Caleb Widogast is eleven years old when he sends his first letter to a dying girl. Her story is whispered quietly, piteously, even in the halls of the lonely libraries of the Sixth, where gossip tended to echo blankly before shriveling up into nothing. The princess of the Seventh, the heir to an entire planet, has poison laced throughout her blood.
“It’s hereditary,” a researcher remarks, idly setting a pile of loose notes onto a table. Caleb is sitting in the corner of the room, planted on the ground just far enough below eyeline that nobody really bothers to notice him.
“But the condition rarely develops this early in life. She has… ten years left to live, maybe. Fifteen if there’s a miracle.”
The sharp edge of his mouth, along with the ironic twinge to his words, make it clear that he doesn’t believe in miracles.
“Poor thing,” his companion says dolefully, “so young. And apparently already the spitting image of her mother– she would have grown up to be real pretty, too”
Caleb knows how the Seventh treats things that are beautiful and dying. He’s read about it. And while his sources may be mostly fictional and technically borrowed from sections of the library he’s not yet officially allowed to access, there are grains of truth in every story.
He doesn’t want Jester–for that’s her name, it’s a matter of public record and using it makes her seem much closer to Caleb than her title of Princess– to languish in a lavish room, considered too delicate for any real conversation. Trapped like a dried flower pressed between the pages of a book or a rare specimen of butterfly pinned to an unyielding sheet of glass. Suffocated and alone.
And so, the letter.
Beauregard reads it first. Her brows draw together, a thoughtful furrow of disapproval.
“Caleb,” she begins, in that voice she uses when she’s trying to be tactful but can’t quite keep the edge out, “this is boring.”
Caleb blinks. “But… it’s all true? I wouldn’t lie to a princess.”
“She's going to think we’re nerds,” Beauregard groans, tossing the letter back into his hands.
“Beauregard,” Caleb says, voice flat, “in case you’ve forgotten, I am a nerd.”
Beauregard pauses, clearly considering the implications of this. Her eyes gleam with some mischievous thought.
“I’ll send one too, then,” she decides. “That way, she can hear about the time I knocked that idiot out with my staff, or when I broke into the librarian’s records and watched them scramble, or maybe the time you tried to light a candle with magic and set your hair on fire—oh, and all of that is still true, too.”
“Maybe not that last one?” Caleb suggests.
“No,” Beauregard says, smugly, “that one’s too good to waste.”
Six days pass before they receive a response. It arrives sealed in a pink envelope, delicate and oddly scented—floral, though not in any way identifiable. The ink is a deep red, almost too rich, with faint glitter flecks that scatter across the page like stars caught in some distant net.
The message reads:
“Dear Caleb and Beau,
It is so nice to meet you! You are right that I don’t get very many visitors in here, but I love my home. I have my mom, who is wonderful, and the Traveler, who comes to play with me sometimes. He is also magic, but not quite like you I don’t think.
When I am by myself I practice drawing and read about heroes and look through the peephole to watch people pass through my hallway. It sometimes gets a little bit boring, but that is okay because when I am feeling bored I am not feeling sick.
Caleb– you seem really smart. Like super smart! I had to ask my mom what some of the words you used meant and then she had to go and look one of them up. I think you are going to be very good at magic someday even though you burned off all your hair.
Beau– I bet you have giant awesome muscles! And are super strong! You are absolutely going to beat up your entire class and then also all of the annoying librarians. And you are going to do it all while being the best at protecting Caleb and also being cool.
The two of you will definitely have lots of fun adventures.
You should tell me all about them! And also we should be friends!
Love, Jester”
Scribbled in the margins and between the lines are various doodles—a figure with a green cloak, a woman in red, hearts (too many hearts), and a scattering of whimsical designs that should not have been able to fit in the spaces but did anyway. Caleb and Beauregard read it together, their eyes scanning the page in silence. When they finish, they turn to each other.
“She’s perfect,” Beauregard declares, grinning.
Caleb, with all the gravity of someone who has already begun to care too much, nods.
And so the three of them become penpals.
For the first time in years it isn’t Caleb and Beauregard, tangled together in the same shadow, the same breath. (Always in that order. The adept and then the bodyguard, their names spat out like commands, a constant reminder of who, exactly, mattered more.)
Now, it’s Jester and Caleb and Beau. Or Jester and Beau and Caleb. It doesn't matter, not really. Sometimes it’s difficult for Caleb to tell where he ends and Beauregard begins, but he thinks—no, he knows—that they were both just lonely. They’d searched the uncaring face of the universe for something bright enough to make their lives feel less like a grim inevitability. And Jester—Jester—she's a sunrise in a field of ashes.
Caleb’s magic shifts, subtle but irrevocable. The fire still calls to him, a brutal, hungry thing, promising power in every lick of flame, every crackle of destruction. But fire doesn’t heal, not really. It just burns until there’s nothing left.
So he starts to study transmutation. The art of change. Lead to gold. Buttons to feathers. And—maybe—cancerous blood to something healthier. Something whole. Something alive.
He spends the rest of his spare hours devouring theories of time and space, convinced that just because no one has managed to manipulate them yet doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Jester’s confined to her chair, the weight of it pressing her down like a curse, like a tombstone in the making.
“One day,” he writes, more a vow than a letter, “I’ll unchain you from gravity, and I’ll teach you to waltz.”
Her response is as bright as ever: “How romantic, Caleb! I’m looking forward to it.”
He doesn’t show it to Beauregard. Not this time.
By the time he’s nineteen, Caleb is Warden of the Sixth House, and Beauregard? She’s his cavalier. It’s official, now, all the years of study and tests culminated in the weight of new titles, new responsibilities. They collapse into the worn, drab bunk—the one Beau’s had for years, of course, and the thought of having a soft bed when the world is still so hard seems… ridiculous. They’ll get quarters more fitting for their new ranks soon, but for now, the familiarity of the old, the creaky, the tattered, is the most comfortable.
“Well,” Beauregard mutters, wiping the sweat and blood from her forehead, “Congratulations to us, I guess.”
Caleb looks at her, really looks at her: the bruises dark and ugly on her face, the ones she hides under layers of bandage wraps, under the sharp edges of her indifference. He’s sure she’s hiding a dozen more that even she can’t reach.
“We did it,” Caleb says, his voice still soft with disbelief.
“Obviously,” Beauregard scoffs, leaning back against the wall with a grimace. “We’re the best.”
Caleb wants to hug her. He wants to. But instead, he pats her carefully on the shoulder—the one that seems to hurt less. Beauregard winces, but she doesn’t flinch away.
The silence stretches between them, a thick, oppressive thing.
“You know,” Beauregard says, her tone an admirable attempt at casual, “You’re equal rank with her now.”
Caleb doesn’t need to ask who her is.
“You are also—”
“No.” Beauregard’s voice sharpens, cutting through the air like the edge of a broken knife. “I’m a House cavalier, sure. But I’m your cavalier, Caleb. Don’t go getting any ideas. She’d live longer if you’re the one tending to her, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“This is me giving you permission, asshole.”
“Oh.” Caleb’s heart does something strange, like it’s tripping over itself. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking—But I thought you were in love with her. The words hang in the air, unspoken.
Beauregard doesn’t need him to say it. She hears it anyway.
“What’s that have to do with anything?” she says, and it’s not a question. It’s a dismissal.
Nothing, Caleb thinks. Nothing at all.
It takes him three years. Three years to convince himself that this might actually be a good idea. Three years of refining his transmutation, of writing letters to a housebound princess, of pretending like his position couldn’t dissolve into the dusty air of his office like a snowflake hit with a morning ray of light. Three years of his own quiet, pathetic hope.
Eventually, he asks Jester Lavorre for her hand in marriage. The proposal is pragmatic. Caleb outlines the benefits of the arrangement: access to a magical prodigy, someone who could help with new, experimental treatments, closer ties with the Sixth and its wealth of medical research, an excuse to visit him. And the gravity problem—he’s close to cracking it. Jester could help him. She could move more freely. She could.
Jester rejects him.
“I’m sorry Caleb,” she writes, the dismissal that rips his chest into bloody pieces sandwiched between a comment about the plot of the horrible, smutty novel they’re all reading together and a lament that she isn’t healthy enough to take care of a dog, “I can’t marry you. This was a very well thought out, practical plan, but I am not going to get married out of practicality. I would like to visit you one day, though— both you and Beau.”
It’s a joke, really. A paragraph response for something he’s agonized over for years. He’s an idiot. He should have known. Why would someone like her—someone brilliant, someone beautiful—want anything to do with him? Of course she wouldn’t want to spend her tragically short life tethered to someone who can’t help but burn.
Beauregard sees him open the letter. Sees his face change, sees it crumble before he can hide it. Without a word, she claps him on the back. Solid. Unyielding.
“Her loss,” she says, voice flat.
“Yes, well.” Caleb forces a smile, tight as a mask, stretched too thin. His mouth feels like it’s made of plaster. He can’t let her see his distress, not when he’s so sure she’s suffering the same hurt. It wouldn’t be fair. “Maybe it’s for the best. This way, nothing has to change.”
Two months later, Caleb and Beau step onto the metal docks of the First House, summoned to play their part in the creation of immortality. But perhaps more importantly, to face Jester for the first time. She barely looks at them. Just a nod, curt and uninterested, and a polite “Sixth” that barely registers as acknowledgement.
(In the bottom of Caleb’s luggage, buried beneath the weight of more important things, lies a kitschy romance novel. The most ridiculous, lurid trash he could find, meant for the three of them to tear to shreds in bitter, sarcastic fun. The book will stay tucked away, trapped, forgotten. Until it will fall into the ocean with the last remnants of the First House, forever unread.)
~
“What did you do to her?” Caleb’s voice is quiet, but it crackles with the kind of restraint that only those on the edge of ruin possess. His hand tightens at his side, and his whole body shakes, though not from fear. Not yet.
The thing that wears Jester Lavorre’s skin smiles. Too sweet. Too much like how Caleb imagined the real thing, which makes it worse. Much worse. “I don’t know what you mean. Is something wrong?” it says, its voice drenched in concern.
“We were friends,” Caleb says, and the words feel hollow, like they’re coming from someone else. “We sent letters. I thought—no, I hoped—she’d simply moved on. Outgrown me, and my... my particular brand of dreaming.”
The thing looks at him like he’s speaking in riddles. It tilts its head, the expression a mimicry of confusion. For a moment, Caleb sees it—just a flash, so brief it might’ve been a trick of the light—forest green, like the deepest shadows of the wilds. A color that doesn’t belong in Jester’s eyes. It’s enough to make his stomach twist.
“She never spoke of you,” it says, “That would have made things... easier. For both of us.”
Caleb’s hands tremble at his sides, clenched into fists so tight they hurt. “Please,” he stammers, every syllable a struggle. He wants to demand it, but the words won’t come.
“Just—tell me what happened.”
Another pause, thick with something almost tender. Pity, perhaps. “She’s gone,” the thing whispers. “I’m here now. She was here, and now she is not.”
Tears rise in Caleb’s throat, but he swallows them down. Later. He can't break yet. Not now. He reaches deep inside, searching for the fire in his bones. The power that courses through him—dark, tight, and screaming to be set free.
Just a little longer. Keep it talking.
“How?” The word tastes like ash in his mouth. “Why?”
It grins, slow and satisfied. “Because I needed to run. Because she promised.”
“Who even are you?” Caleb spits the words like venom, but his breath hitches. He fears he already knows the answer.
The thing leans in, its hair falling into its face, the motion deliberate, nearly playful.
“I’m not from here. I’m a traveller.”
The air in Caleb’s lungs goes thin. He remembers a drawing—a figure in green, a friend from the margins of Jester’s stories, always just there in the edges of her letters. Always there. A tutor. A playmate. Company for Jester in her solitude, someone to hold her hand during the long hours waiting for procedures, in the spaces where she was too sick to sleep. Always present when she needed.
“You weren’t real,” he says, and it comes out cracked. He almost doesn't believe it himself.
The Traveller shrugs, indifferent. “Perhaps you weren’t as good of a friend as you thought.”
The words are a dagger, and Caleb feels the truth of them sink deep. He burns, and he can’t decide if it’s from the sorrow of his failure or the magic—magic that thrums beneath his skin, threatening to break free. A storm, just beneath the surface.
“You killed her.”
The Traveller doesn’t flinch. It almost looks amused. “She promised. Anything I needed. She said it when she was young, yes, but the words were enough. Forever binding.”
Caleb’s broken heart pounds in his chest.
“She couldn’t have known—”
“She promised,” the Traveller repeats, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. As if Caleb is the one being unreasonable.
“She would want you to know,” it continues, the sweetness back in its voice, “that it didn’t hurt. She was always in so much pain. She isn’t anymore.”
The words hit Caleb like a physical blow. He feels the bile rise in his throat, but he doesn’t gag. He doesn’t break.
“I’m going to miss her, I think,” the Traveller muses aloud, tilting its head, as if contemplating something unpleasant. “She was a fine acolyte. Couldn’t have asked for a better one.”
Caleb’s blood goes cold. “Then give her back,” he says, and the plea is there, raw and desperate.
The Traveller laughs, low and cruel. “That is not how this works.”
Silence again. The air is thick with the weight of it, the taste of something ending. Caleb’s chest rises and falls, his breath a shallow thing. “So what happens now?” His voice is barely a rasp.
The Traveller straightens. It hovers, just above the ground, its form radiant with otherworldly power. And in its hand, a jagged blade crackles, green energy spiraling around it like a wound in the fabric of reality. “The Third House has twisted everything,” it says, its voice darkening with the gravity of a warning. “They’ve strung their souls together. Tied them like wire. It could... attract attention. From things like me. And I’ve been avoiding those things for a long time.”
Caleb’s heart races. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with that information. All he knows is that something is about to splinter, and he needs to make sure it’s not him.
“I’m sorry,” the Traveller says, voice flat, as it raises the blade. “But for her sake... I cannot let that happen.”
“Don’t be.” Caleb’s words are a snarl.
The Traveller looks at him, its eyes widening as it notices the magic boiling in Caleb’s chest, coiling and snapping like a storm. It doesn’t seem surprised. Just resigned.
“What have you—”
It’s too late.
Caleb lets go. The magic is all fire now—raging, all-consuming. He throws it at the Traveller, his body burning up with the power he can no longer control. The flames reach up, and in the last moments of his life, he wonders—faintly, desperately—if there’s any chance, any flicker of hope that, wherever he ends up, it will be with the real Jester Lavorre.