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I HAD NEVER BEEN, AND NEVER WOULD BE, AN optimistic man.
By now, I recognized that the Sage of Truth (similar in name to my home, the Peak of Truth, but with the exact opposite level of hospitality as it), my counterpart (I refused to call the scholar my ‘other half’ like the Sage did to me), was only so cruel, and had truly, genuinely wanted me to be happy when he’d started physically dragging me off of the Peak to interact with the Cookies in the town below it.
Sure, he didn’t at all go about it in the correct way. The Sage, evidently, had zero experience with interacting with Cookies of a similar intellect to him—most of the mortal Cookies in the town just went along with whatever he said and did to them—but he was smart, and he’d quickly changed his ways, instead gently coaxing me out of my tower with promises that it would just be the two of us. (He’d uncovered my secret enjoyment of his presence much, much faster than I would have preferred, and he’d been having the time of his life abusing the fact to get me to spend more time in the village.)
I knew that the Sage, what with his constant, unfaltering truth and cheer, couldn’t stand to let me rot on my mountain alone. I knew that the scholar most likely saw me as somewhat of a project—even if he did find me interesting, Blueberry Milk Cookie was not the kind of man to develop such an attraction that I had for my “other half.” And yet…
“My dear Recluse!” a fondly exasperated voice cried, and I blinked a few times, focusing back in on the Sage’s familiar cheerful tone. “Do stop zoning out when we’re walking, you’ll fall over!”
I looked lazily over at the Sage, the eyes of my staff closed, but its magic benefitting my vision enough that I could get my fill of staring at my counterpart before the Sage got suspicious. Before this happened, I looked away, back at the path, and muttered, “My apologies. What were you saying?”
“Nothing, but I can start doing so,” the Sage chuckled. “Goodness, were you that far away?”
“Witches forbid a Cookie gets bored of monotonous walking,” I grumbled. “Can’t you just portal us down there?”
The Sage visibly saddened at this comment: his swirling waves of liquidy icing that I still wasn’t sure counted as icing dulled and shifted into a grayish-blue river, his ever-present smile fell—even that stupid hat he wore drooped. “I don’t want to! I like to spend time with you, dear Recluse, you know this!”
“Deceit,” I claimed, half-heartedly pointing my staff at him.
“Whatever you say,” he cried, sniffling dramatically. “My Recluse has rejected me! I shall exist only in a haze of grief for the rest of my life!!”
I rolled my eyes and kept walking.
I had never been an optimistic man.
But I couldn’t help but hope.
We were in a flower field.
Why were we in a flower field?????
As soon as we’d made it onto terrain that wasn’t the steep cliffs of the Peak of Truth, the Sage had grabbed my hand and began tugging me away from the town. “This way, Recluse!!” he cried, hand cool against my own.
“I’m in more danger now than on the way down the Peak,” I grumbled, rolling my eyes and trying to slow him down by digging my heels into the ground.
This failed miserably, as he just fell into step with me and pulled me against his side, smiling. “Ah—you’re right!! We should appreciate the scenery! Look how beautiful the mountains are against the sky!!!”
I was loathe to admit it, but the sky really was beautiful that day. The sun was barely peering over the edge of the mountains, and I could see the Sage’s Spire of All-Knowledge piercing through the few clouds above it a couple miles over.
The Sage’s arm was warm around my middle, his body pressed up against mine as he hummed a cheerful tune, and despite the image of whacking him in the stomach with my staff being so extraordinarily tempting in the forefront of my mind, I found myself relaxing into his half-embrace, just focusing on making my way across the grass without tripping.
And that was how we’d ended up in the grassy field a ways away from the town, the Sage hovering excitedly over a patch of wildflowers and I sitting silently next to him, staring off into space as he rambled on about the flowers.
“I figure you might, since you like flowers so much,” the Sage was saying, “but do you know what a dandelion represents?”
I blinked down at the flowers he was hovering over, quickly registering that they were a mix of dandelions and cornflowers. “They’re just weeds, Sage,” I murmured, sighing slightly.
“Oh, but they aren’t!” he exclaimed, smiling wider. “Most Cookies do think of them as such, but just because they like to pop up everywhere doesn’t mean they don’t have a meaning. Actually, the fact that they do pop up everywhere is just as fascinating as them!”
“You cannot possibly be so interested in dandelions.”
“Well, what can I say?! They remind me of you!” he cried. “I can’t help it!”
“Oh, funny, because they’re yellow,” I grumbled, glaring up at him.
The Sage chuckled. “No, silly!” He touched gently down next to me, bumping me on the shoulder and reaching forwards to pluck one of the dandelions out of the ground. “I know you know their meaning.”
“Resilience, healing,” I muttered, “yadda-yadda. What’s that got to do with me?”
Looking over at him was a mistake. His face had that soft, sweet expression I only really saw him take on when he was around a particularly beloved student or friend—or me. His smile wasn’t enthusiastic and excited; instead, it was simply kind.
Ever-so-gently, he reached forwards, cupping my face with one hand and nestling the dandelion right in my hair, near my head-wing. “Everything,” he said in response to my annoyed question, voice as soft as his smile.
“You’re insane,” I said, not moving away.
He laughed ruefully. “I know.” Letting go of my face, he leaned down again and picked a few more of the flowers. “I just wish you saw yourself how I do!”
“I wish you didn’t see me at all,” I lied, tearing some of the longer grasses out of the ground and absentmindedly weaving them together.
“Ah, the constant want to not be perceived. You know, most Cookies have a hard time seeing you in the first place! I was doing some research yesterday, and I found out that all the White Magic collected in your body actually built up into somewhat of a shield! Mortal Cookies have a hard time looking at your face—if they do, it’s always in complete shadow, even at high noon.” The Sage’s excitement was back, his tail tp-tp-tping on the grass behind him. “Actually—especially at high noon! They say your face is actually easier to see at night.”
“...Yes, I know,” I murmured. “It’s a fortunate side effect of not wanting to be seen.”
“Well, it’s too bad, in my opinion!” Blueberry Milk cried, suddenly disheartened. “None of them understand how bea—um, interesting you really are!”
“That’s the whole point, Sage.”
“I know,” the Sage said sadly. “You should at least use some of your mana, though. If you keep too much in your body at once, it could hurt you!”
“Yes, Doctor Blueberry Milk,” I deadpanned.
“Fine! Do what you want!” he joked, flopping dramatically onto the ground behind him. “See if I care!”
I didn’t reply. I just stared at the flowers, and the fields past them, grass rippling like ocean waves until the horizon cut them off.
“You would care, wouldn’t you,” I said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
It was the Sage’s turn to sit in silence. The sun glanced off his monocle. It had gotten jostled when he flopped backwards, so I leaned over and fixed it. Before I could retract my hand, he grabbed it—tightly enough that I couldn’t even lean back to my original position—and then, ever so gently, he laced his fingers into mine.
“Of course I would,” he told me, too softly, too sweetly.
I wrenched my hand away from his grasp and scooted away from him, disregarding the burning in my face in favour of suddenly becoming very interested in a particularly uninteresting cornflower. The Sage just chuckled, not even making the effort to sit up.
After a minute, he spoke again (I don’t know why I was surprised; this was the Sage, after all), voice still soft, but louder than before. “The sun’s going to set soon. Do you think we should go back to town?”
There was one of the other things he’d been doing recently: explicitly asking for my opinion on the things we—or even just he—did. Several months ago, Blueberry Milk would have simply dragged me around wherever he thought was best for us to go at the time, such as random restaurants or stores in town, the many rooms in his Spire, or even some clearing in a little forest I’d never even heard of—but now, he’d ask me what I thought of things, and even if he did still drag me places sometimes, it was a lot less common.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I muttered, which he had taken to mean sure, that sounds great! for whatever reason.
“Then so shall it be!” he grinned, hopping up into a float and tugging me to my feet without meeting much resistance on my part. “Won’t you come back to my Spire with me, my Recluse?”
“Wouldn’t you like that.”
“I would!”
“I was joking, Sage.”
“Oh—oh! Yes! Sorry.”
“Well.” I pretended to consider it. “It’s a million miles away… the sun’s nearly gone already… yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea, Sage.”
“Okay, fine… Hey, is that an invitation to your tower?!” he cried, eyes sparkling.
“It’s what it is,” I said vaguely.
The Sage let out some kind of joyous squeak, and sped up his floating to hurry back to town. I rolled my eyes, hefted my staff, and followed.
By the time we made it back to my tower, the entire town probably knew that the Sage was coming with me.
As soon as he’d pranced into town, saying hello to all the Cookies passing by, he’d began adding the unnecessary news that he was accompanying me back up to the Peak of Truth. Once the Cookies began asking him to tell them what was up there, he stopped doing so, but the damage was done, and I was suddenly the talk of the town.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t already—being the guardian of the Peak that loomed over the village wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous job, no matter how much I would have liked it to be—but this time, instead of scared whispers and slammed doors, there was an underlay of excited murmuring in town as we made our way through it.
The strangest thing was—the Sage never left me alone, not once. A lot of the time, especially in the bustling markets that made up the centre of Blueberry Yoghurt Town, he’d get distracted, and I would be left standing cluelessly in a massive crowd of Cookies, hardly able to see three feet in front of my face because of the sheer business. It often became too much for me, and by the time the Sage remembered and went back for me, I’d already be long gone.
This time, however, he’d slipped his hand into the crook of my elbow, and hadn’t moved it from there once, even when vendors and shop owners and children greeted him and called for him and asked him every question they could think to ask, about me or otherwise. His tail occasionally curled itself around my leg, and he always did his best to move us away from any conversation before I got too overwhelmed.
“I will never understand how you survive these crowds every day,” I muttered, gripping my staff as he pushed the door to a shop just off the square open and led me inside.
“Charisma, the people’s reverence, and a lot of luck,” the Sage chuckled, “landing” on the floor (he actually placed a small cushion of magic around his legs so pressure wasn’t put on them). “The Cookies don’t want to taint my so-called ‘divine knowledge.’ I have a lot of practice, too. I’m sorry I keep dragging you through crowds… it’s the only real way to get through the village, though.”
“I know. It’s not your fault,” I said. “I just wish you’d let us walk the quieter paths.”
“It takes hooouuuurs to go around that way, though,” he complained, walking further into the shop. It was lit brightly, even as the sun dipped behind the mountains and the golden glow of the streetlights outside spilled into the windows, and even without my staff, I would have been able to tell it contained a ridiculous amount of jellies.
The counter came into sight past some displays of differently flavoured jellies, and the Cookie sitting behind it sat up from where they were laying languidly behind the counter. “Oh, Sage, hello!” they cried, pushing their glasses further up their face and flashing a jubilant smile. “And—... the Truthless Recluse…?”
“That is what they call me,” I said impassively.
“My Recluse, meet Cherry Cordial Cookie!” the Sage cried, putting his arm around me again. “Cherry Cordial, this is my dear friend, the Recluse!”
“Ah, he’s the one you told me about!” Cherry Cordial replied with as much enthusiasm. “Good to meet you, Truthless Recluse! I’m the town’s best showman, guaranteed.”
“Besides me,” the Sage joked, then shook his head. “I’m kidding! Cherry Cordial has a gift for performing. Anyways—I’m here for the usual jellies!”
My protest of we’re immortal was quickly silenced as Blueberry Milk was handed a small box of what I presumed were the jellies he wanted (how the Cookie just… had them on hand, I didn’t want to know). Cherry Cordial wished us a good night, the Sage bid them goodbye, and I was led towards the exit of the shop.
“This is the place I go to get those jellies you like!” the Sage explained as we left the shop and quickly turned away from the town square. “Cherry Cordial only works there sometimes, but he’s excellent at making them.”
“You told me you just had those lying around when you first got them,” I pointed out, narrowing my eyes.
“Oh, well… I sort of did,” he said, laughing slightly nervously. “Well, I wanted to get you something you’d like, and you refuse to accept gifts!!”
“You don’t have to get me jellies.” I looked away. “I take no pleasure in occupying your busy day.”
“But I want to!” he insisted. “We can share them once we get back to your tower, if you’d like!”
So now I was stuck heading back to my tower with the Sage of Truth of all Cookies, with plans for him to stay an unspecified amount of time, and a box of jellies for us to share. I hated when Cookies came up the Peak. I hated dealing with the Sage in my tower. I hated eating. But most of all, I hated that I was actively looking forward to getting home.
This damned Sage!!!
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I replied, voice slightly wobbly.
Blueberry Milk’s face broke into a grin. “Hooray!!”
We climbed the Peak of Truth together, Blueberry Milk still “walking” next to me. I had to stop him from tripping multiple times—no matter what nimble prowess he had in the air, he was an easily distracted man, and would often go on some tangent or another while completely ignoring where he was placing his feet. I ended up picking him up and nudging him gently into the air while he was talking excitedly about some festival or another coming up, and without missing a beat, his floating spell activated and he kept moving.
“...so I followed them, and all of a sudden I heard one of them talking about me! So I stopped to listen, still hiding, mind you…” the Sage was saying. It was some tale about an encounter with a dodgy businesscookie he’d had a while ago, and though I was half-listening, it was simply comforting to hear him talk. I’d once thought his voice irritating. That seemed hilarious now.
“Recluse!! Are you even listening?” he cried suddenly, turning towards me and waving a hand in front of my face. I whacked it away with my staff, and he shook it out, hissing slightly. “Ouch!”
“That could not have hurt,” I scoffed. “I am listening. Just not very closely.”
He looked dejected—though not as much as he had been on our way down the Peak earlier, his hair still slowed in its constant rapid swirling. “I should have known you wouldn’t give a thought to it! I’m sorry for talking your ear off… but won’t you tell me if you want me to stop next time?” he pleaded. “I don’t wish to drive you away!!”
“I’d tell you if I wanted you to stop, promise,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’re acting strange today, what’s going on?”
We were about two-thirds of the way up the Peak of Truth now, and I’d stopped walking, hoping he would as well and we could talk. He just grabbed me by the arm and tugged me on, chuckling slightly. “I always act strange, silly! You promise you’d tell me if you wanted me to stop talking?”
“Sage, if I wanted you quiet, you’d be halfway down the mountain right now,” I pointed out.
“Right,” he mumbled, laughing again, this time nervously as he looked down the steep side of the Peak.
We walked the rest of the way up the Peak, and by the time we did, the half-cloudy sky arcing over us was full of oranges and pinks, the death of the sun painting its residence with all of its colours. I watched the sunset for shorter a time than I might have were the Sage not there, abandoning my usual routine in favour of following him inside my tower and listening to him talk more.
“Recluse, my dear,” he was asking, “what do you think of having a little fruit today, as well? It could be good with the jellies! I could just portal down to town, so you don’t have to—”
“—N-no,” I interrupted, grabbing his wrist without thinking. “It takes too much mana to portal down. You’ll hurt yourself.”
Blueberry Milk stared at me, eyes wide, for a long minute, and just when I thought he was going to roll his eyes and portal out of there anyways, not listening to me like usual, a brilliant grin spread across his face, and the stars in his hair flashed brighter as he cried, “Oh, Recluse!! You care about me!!!”
I scoffed, batting him away from me with my staff, but he’d turned his wrist up and clutched the hand I’d grabbed him with like a dying man. “Sage, let go—” I tried.
“I won’t go, don’t worry,” he interrupted, much too soothingly and much too kindly. “We can have fruit some other time.”
What right has this man to affect me so much?!?
“Okay,” I muttered, staring at the uneven wooden planks of my tower’s floor. “Thanks.”
The Sage smiled wider.
My tower’s basement was, as always, dusty and inhospitable, nearly a cave, considering how much the actual wood had worn out under many footsteps. Windows lined the back of the room, the remaining sunrays making up for the lack of light, and almost every step between the hundreds of boxes piled around the barely-navigable walkway sent clouds of dust into the air.
The Sage was hacking and coughing by the time I’d tugged him away from the boxes, tears in his eyes from all the dust. “Wha—” he tried, then dissolved into another coughing fit, doubling over and leaning hard against the glass of one of the back windows.
I winced, taking his arm and trying to send some healing magic through him. It seemed to do the trick, and he straightened up soon after, wiping the tears out of his eyes and glaring slightly at me. “What are you doing?! It’s Dust City down here!!”
“I know, I know,” I muttered. “I’m sorry. No more dust after this. Follow me.”
He glared more, but didn’t question it, taking my arm like he’d done in town as I led him along the windows, locating the dingy old door right in between them and the corner of the basement and quietly unlocking it.
Dusk’s breeze flicked my hair across my face as I stepped outside, the Sage following with an increasing amount of quiet surprise, and I squinted against the sunset’s light. The mossy dirt ground underneath my feet felt a little squishy—probably a result of the recent rain—but I didn’t falter, just leading the Sage to the edge of the little cave carved into the side of the Peak.
“I never knew this was here,” the Sage murmured softly, eyes wide. “Did you build it?”
“Partly,” I responded. “The cave was already here. I just made the pathway between it and the basement.”
“And these?” He indicated the row of pots pushed haphazardly against the back wall of the little cave—each wind- and rain-battered, their neatly-painted surfaces long blurred into a mess of colours, and some cracked or broken entirely. Even the broken ones, however, were full of dirt, and out of each one grew some kind of flower.
“...They are from… long ago.” I turned away from the pots and stared out at the mountains. “I keep them out of pity.”
“You don’t keep me out of pity, do you?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
The Sage went silent at this. I rested my hands on the leaves of my staff with some sense of finality in my chest.
“Thank you for taking me out here,” he murmured after a moment.
“Anything for my least favourite guest,” I told him.
“Ah, but I’m your only guest, so I must also be your favourite!” he cried, floating down and sitting on the edge of the cave, so his feet dangled over the edge and over the sharply-dropping slope of the Peak.
I joined him, sighing unimpressedly. “Ah, yes, how intelligent, Sage. Next, you’re going to be saying that the last Cookie awake at night is simultaneously the first awake in the morning.”
“I bet I could actually get Cookies to believe that,” he defended, pointing an accusing finger at me.
“That’s gaslighting, Sage. Aren’t you all about Truth?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he huffed. “Do you want some of these?”
I looked over at him—he was holding the box he’d gotten from Cherry Cordial’s shop. I shrugged.
“I have a feeling you were about to say it doesn’t matter to me again,” the Sage guessed.
“I refuse to say something tactless like I don’t care as a replacement,” I retorted, “so I said nothing.”
“Fair,” he hummed, opening the box. “Here, at least have a few.”
I had more than a few. The jellies were, if heavy in my stomach as I ate them, good, and the Sage looked a little happier every time I reached for one, so it was worth the uncomfortable feeling—and in addition to the conversation we were having, it was actually pleasant.
Pleasant. To sit with the Sage in my tower. To eat with the Sage in my tower. The Truthless Recluse from a year ago would have laughed in my face.
“...but when I asked if they’d seen any trace of the new guy, they said no! The hypocrites!” the Sage was exclaiming now, continuing his anecdote from earlier. I had, like before, only been half-listening, so I’d only caught parts of the story, but it seemed to be enough for Blueberry Milk this time. “I do wish I’d been able to find the new one… new immortals are always so interesting…”
“They’re very unpredictable,” I said. “I’d advise staying away from them.”
“Well, this one, maybe,” he agreed. “Hey, speaking of immortals—do you know if any of the other fallen-Virtues have come through here recently?”
I shook my head. “No sign of them, nor your siblings.”
Blueberry Milk’s face dimmed slightly, but he didn’t seem too fazed, and simply sighed. “I’m going to send a letter to the Sanctuary of Abundance soon… see if they know anything about Black Pepper’s whereabouts…”
“Last I heard, he was wandering the Parmesan Desert again.”
“Really? I didn’t know that!” The Sage’s tail thumped against the dirt behind him, his stars flashing. “How did you…?”
“I spoke with a passersby recently. A lesser-known scholar, I believe—she showed records of his passing through the Sanctuary about a month ago…” I spoke more quietly, taking a bite of the jelly I held so as not to have to say anything else for a moment. “...I could ask around again, if it would please you.”
If it would please you seemed to hit Blueberry Milk like a punch—he straightened up, staring at me with wide eyes and nearly dropping the jelly box off the cliff. “I-if it would—?” he stammered, a smile spreading across his face. “You’d—you’d help me do that? Really?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I mumbled, the vague words coming out of my mouth in an instant in a quick defense.
What I didn’t expect was for the Sage to drop the box carelessly onto the dirt next to him, leap at me, and tackle me to the ground in a hug, laughing gleefully. “Oh, Recluse—thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!! You don’t know how much this means to me!”
I opened my mouth to tell him to get off of me. “It’s not that big of a deal,” was what came out instead, the rest of my body locking up in his embrace.
“Well, I know it is for you,” he said, giggling and wrapping his tail around my leg.
“That’s—that’s got nothing to do with it,” I tried, regaining control of my muscles and trying to whack him off of me. “Sage—we’re going to fall off the cliff if you don’t let go of me!”
He scooted the both of us away from the edge of the cave, determined as anything. “There! No falling! And it does have something to do with it—you’re offering to do something you don’t want to do! Which I still don’t understand, by the way!”
“Well—it would—...” It would make you happy.
…
..
.
“It would… what?” the Sage repeated, lifting himself up on one elbow and gazing worriedly into my eyes. “Recluse?”
“Oh, nothing,” I muttered, taking the opportunity to nudge him gently off of me and standing back up. “Thank you for the jellies, Sage. I advise that you get back to the Spire before it gets dark.”
I didn’t look back, but in my mind’s eye, I could see all too well what would be there if I did: the Sage, half-laying on the ground, staring up at me with forlorn betrayal in his mismatched eyes and his limbs splayed dramatically across the dirt like I’d struck the final blow to his heart. It took him a good few seconds to respond, and at that point I’d made it back to the door and was messing with the finicky handle to get it to open.
“J—just like that?!” was what he cried, and I heard him kick off the dirt and into the air. “You—you can’t kick me out now!! I’m sorry I tackled you—!”
“I don’t know,” I exclaimed, whirling around, brow furrowed and heart a stone in my chest. “I just—you—...”
“I what?!” he shouted, desperation in his eyes. He hurried forwards, grabbing the front of my robes, refusing to let me leave. “I—Recluse, I don’t want to go, I—I want to stay! Here! With you!”
“Sage, you’re—”
“Don’t tell me I’m crazy! I’m crazy when I say I’m crazy!! This isn’t crazy, this is—”
He cut himself off, fingers-now-claws curling tight as a vice around my robes. I stood there, silent, angry, and most of all, afraid.
There was a long, terrifying minute of silence.
He looked up at me, met my eyes, and I saw the same fear that constantly had its talons in my chest reflected in his face.
“...I’ll go,” he whispered, small and quiet.
I opened my mouth to say something, to question him, or blame him, or stop him, but nothing came out except a small, pathetic noise.
The Sage portaled away, and again, I was left to collect the pieces of my foolishness.