Chapter Text
Sprawled panting on the floor of the bathroom, blood dripping down his face from the bird’s pecking and visions of falling down into the sea of stars playing out dizzily behind his eyes, he decided that perhaps he was not, after all, particularly the sort of person who might find adventures. It was a shame, but at least he had managed to satisfy his raging curiosity before deciding this so that he wasn’t tormented by the tantalising glimpse of the gold thing forever out of reach below.
Still, he thought, taking the scarlet cloth upstairs with him and the golden thing, it had been quite exciting.
()
How he felt after he had inadvertently removed the enchantments binding him only reinforced that initial impression that he was not at all suited for adventures, no matter how exciting he found them or how curious he was.
If only, he thought, he could follow along behind someone else and watch them go on exciting adventures.
()
He read his books, looking for comfort, trying out the names, speaking them in his mind, mouthing them to see how they felt in his mouth, trying to set them to song.
He read of Olor’s fury, and gave name to the fire that burned in his own breast - the righteous indignation, the anger, the fury, the rage, the wrath.
He could not remain in the tower. Not as he was, and not as he had been.
But he had also noticed, as he read his beloved poems, that the heroes rarely spent their time so alone as he was - they all had friends and allies and mentors.
Olor and Daphnis, Tzu-tzên and Hu Liang, Aurelius Magnus and Ilona the Seafarer King.
He did not want to go on an adventure himself. He did not want to - as his books so clearly indicated that he should - avenge himself and die in a blaze of glory and justice. The gull pecking at him had hurt, and he was sore from the effort of climbing back into the tower after fetching the gold key.
Still, he needed to leave. He began his preparations.
He tried to name myself.
Aurora, Fin-hêlad, Brazenose the Pure, Tenebra, Peter, the Kor, Wellamotte, Zurifne. These were not his names, but he wrote them down in a blank journal he had found.
And then -
And then! Fitzroy. Fitzroy Fitzroy Fitzroy, the revolutionary poet, the bard, author of Aurora, which started like so: In the Land of Blue Meadows, Tenebra waited for the grockles to come.
Yes. Fitzroy. That was his name.
He read through the Commonplace Book of Harbut Zalarin as he worked to enchant a bag to hold whatever he might think to put in it.
He found one section that discussed the rituals of a peoples that Harbut Zalarin met in his travels. They performed a kind of shamanism, which was a fascinating term he had never heard before. They were a small, highly magical group who lived beneath the seas of Colhélhé near a thermal vent after having been driven off the land but both their enemies and some curse. Their home was a precarious work of magical art which required constant, painstaking attention, and they simply could not afford to loose the knowledge of how it was created and maintained. To ensure that no knowledge was lost, they summoned the spirits of their ancestors who had built their home to possess them for a period of apprenticeship while they learned their trade.
He thought that was a wonderful idea, and if he had a real adventurer possessing him, then they could go on adventures and he could write about it! And perhaps if he knew more about being an adventurer then he wouldn’t get pecked at by birds!
And so, in between working out the enchantments on his bag, he studied Harbut Zalarin’s account of the ritual, and he set it up. He had to go out of his tower to pull up long strands of sea grass from the sand dunes outside his door, and he had to soak them in the bathtub to make them pliable enough that they didn’t break, and then he had to weave them as sketched out in the book. He had to weave time and time and time again to get anything even vaguely decently respectable, and even then, he felt that he should have been able to do better. He eventually got a feel for how to do it, for when a stalk of grass was too short, for when he needed to blend in new stalks.
The ritual was noticeably different from the spell for transferring or removing enchantments that Harbut Zalarin had created.
There were a number of components, but there was also very much an emphasis on him making the components himself - on him being involved in the process from start to finish. It would have been better if he had the time to walk and find the grass seeds, and to cultivate the grass before he soaked and wove it, but the book said that the wild grass should be fine, and he wasn’t planning to stay long enough to cultivate grass from seed anyway.
He performed the ritual, offering up the woven shape he had made, offering up his time and his thoughts. He went over the words again and again in his head, his lips moving in silent memory, and the words of the ritual were nothing like the psalms of the Empire that he had memorised and sung for the years he had spent in this tower. He carefully tied the last knot, and blew out the candle, and closed his eyes, trying to open his mind as the book had instructed.
He thought of the world beyond the tower - the sparse grass on the sand dunes, the whirling wind sprites, the red house in the high mountains. He thought of the marvelous worlds he had read about but never seen - lush jungles, sprawling savanas, dry deserts.
I thought about the perfect person to watch explore them: someone who loved adventures, someone who had already been on adventures and knew what to do, someone loud and solid and competent -
Someone who would like him.
His thoughts on this person didn’t really matter though. The ritual was intended to call a specific person, but the only person close to a dead legendary adventurer that he could think of was Aurelius Magnus, and he doubted that the spell would be able to call away a soul from the grasp of the Sun and Moon. So, he had fiddled with the ritual so that he could put out a more general call. He was sure it would be fine.
For a while, he wasn’t certain he’d performed the ritual correctly.
After a while of sitting still, thinking hard on the world outside the tower, and the kind of person he would like to summon, the stillness of his body began to feel almost painful.
But then he noticed the whispering sound, and he promptly forgot that feeling.
He imagined darkness and stillness.
He imagined he was sailing on some broad ocean, feeling the salt spray and the creak of the wood of the boat he was on, and there were people gathered around him, weighing him and his desires.
He imagined he was being dreamily led through the rough and twisting turns and corners of a cave, two gold coins cool against his eyes lids keeping them shut, a warm hand in his own until they came out into some great cavern, the rush of flowing water and the murmuring of a host of voices echoing endlessly.
He imagined that he was stood on marshy ground, the smell of green things and rot heavy in the air, the smell of bread baking, the distant sound of some animal groaning and water flowing and someone speaking, a hand on his shoulder.
He imagined he was hand in hand with someone, moving through a humid jungle, a small, warm body clutched in his arms, precious things tucked away in a bag at his side, ready as offerings to appease the gods, knowing there was danger yet, knowing that he could trust the one leading him, knowing that he could still make it to grandmother’s house, and the gods were watching him hungrily, weighing his offerings.
He imagined smelling incense and marigolds jumbled together, he dreamed of food that he savored the essence of and didn’t eat, but that he still tasted, that still made him feel full and appreciative and generous, he imagined the smoothness of flower petals under his bare feet as he was led away.
He imagined the sound of screaming and the smell of hot oil and frying meat and almost tripping as he tried to keep up with the person tugging at his hand, urging him to move faster.
He imagined of ice and cold and wet and someone warm wrapping an arm around his shoulders and then another arm coming up under his knees to sweep him off his feet.
He imagined a thousand smells and sounds and sensations and -
He breathed in.
He could smell the ritual incense of the tower, even though it had been almost a month since he had burned it, and he now knew intimately that they had changed the preferred blend of incense used by the Imperial family.
Angursell opened his eyes.
()
Well. Not his eyes. The eyes of the body he had been called to possess, which was at the moment at least partially his by right.
That silly lucky boy.
He knew, the facts presenting themselves to him as he considered the matter, that he had been far too confident in the narrative power of his own life.
Not, he thought, that he had been wrong, considering who he had managed to draw in.
An experienced adventurer who cared about him! Exactly what he had wanted!
He sighed. Well. That was wild magic for you.
He thought about leaving, but . . . Fitzroy would just summon him again. Or if he refused, then Fitzroy would put out an open call again. And Angursell hadn’t led and carried him through some uncountable number of afterlives just to abandon him to the next spirit willing to take him up on his offer.
Putting out an open call like that was stupid, he thought pointedly.
Still. He sighed again. “Alright, kid,” Angursell said. “I’ll stay. For a while at least.”
He glanced around the room. Angursell had been to the tower of Harbut Zalarin in his own time, and he was amazed at how little it had changed in the three thousand years (three thousand, but yes, he knew it had been four thousand years since the time of Yr and Damar. It had only been a thousand years since their time when he died). He recognized some of the books, even, and he was surprised they had lasted so long and in such good condition.
It was dark now though, and his magic was guttering low with the cost of summoning and binding, and so he decided that it was bedtime.
They stood together, control of his body held in common, neither pushing for more control, neither acceding entirely to the other. For a moment they stood like that, knowledge pinging back and forth between them, both of them willing to step back and allow the other to move while they observed, and neither particularly wanted to take full control.
Eventually, they took a deep breath and moved together cautiously to the stairs, taking them down to the bathroom. He paused in front of the mirror, one hand coming up to touch their cheek.
“The lion eyes,” Angursell breathed, and Fitzroy knew then that his eyes, which he had never taken particular notice of before beyond the fact that they were a standard part of the iconography of the Emperors of Astandalas, were in fact rare, even in the time when the line of the Sun and Moon still regularly produced great mages capable of being Lords Magi. And he did, he thought, have the power to be a Lord Magus. He was marked for it even, though that had been nipped in the bud such that he couldn’t actually tell which of the worlds was interested.
“Oh,” Fitzroy said, prodding at his own eyes as the knowledge settled.
And then they got ready for bed together.
()
His thoughts spun in the darkness.
The steady in and out of their breathing, the persistent restriction of the blankets, the awareness over and over again that their lips were dry and a little chapped.
Fitzroy watched Angursell closely. He could not help but watch him closely.
Eventually, he summoned up some whisp of a thought, and he began to hum. He could only barely remember the nanny who had raised him in his earliest years, but he remembered the melody.
()
When they woke, he took stock of his preparations. Angursell was by turns reluctantly impressed and exasperated, but with the fantastic bag Fitzroy had enchanted that could hold all that was put in it, he saw no need to remove anything.
There were his books, the twelve sets of silk slippers, seven lengths of cloth, all of the clothes in the tower, a few blankets, a cushion, jerky, dried fruit, oil and preserved fish, spices and other long lasting foods, three pairs of sandals, pen and papers and ink, a small harp, the journal that held the discarded names and the beginnings of Fitzroy’s poem Aurora.
Gold and gold and gold.
Fitzroy had thought of food, but Angursell thought now of water. He coaxed water skins and barrels and canteens out of the obliging pantry.
Angursell was appalled at how Fitzroy treated his hair. When he had lived at the Red House, he had regularly used a depilatory cream on his scalp and his face. When he woke up in the tower, he’d initially continued to apply the depilatory cream, but it wasn’t as if it was necessary, and so he’d forgotten. And forgotten again and again and, then he’d liked the texture of the hair growing on his scalp, but very quickly went back to applying the depilatory cream to his face and neck. No longer applying the depilatory cream did not in any way mean that he knew how to care for his hair. Mostly he tried to regularly comb through it and untangle it with his fingers, and wash it as he washed the rest of himself.
He followed along in amused fascination as he asked the spirit servants for a number of hair products and implements.
First he had to slowly and carefully pick through and carefully comb out a number of what he called mats, places where his hair had gotten so tangled he’d given up hope of ever disentangling it, but he managed! Then he washed it - not with the same soap he used on the rest of his body, but with the creams he had coaxed the pantry and the spirit servants into providing. Some of the creams he left in to moisturize their hair. He spent the next few hours coaxing their hair into what felt like an endless series of braids. They didn’t hurt or pull overly tightly against his scalp, but he knew that they could if the braids pulled too tight or added too much weight.
He ran his hand through the braids, fascinated by the texture of them, by the way they moved. Pulled straighter than he’d ever been able to get it before, his hair was so much longer than he had thought it was, the ends of the braids slithering over his shoulders as he turned his head this way and that.
Surprisingly healthy, despite everything, he thought.
He stocked up on the creams and soaps he had used on his hair, and then he stocked up on the other hygiene items he had forgotten: a wash cloth, soap, tooth sticks, the depilatory cream for his face and neck.
He coaxed the spirit servants into providing bandages and painkillers and fever reducers and insect repellant and a sewing kit with needles and scissors and thread.
He found a broad sheet of sturdy canvas and spent a few days working some sort of soft wax into the cloth, constantly running his hands over it and murmuring cantrips to warm the wax and allow it to penetrate the fibers of the cloth until he could drip water over it, and the water would just bead up and run right off it.
And there were other odds and ends that he coaxed out or made, but finally, finally he declared them ready.
They stepped out of his tower and shut the door. Nothing happened, despite his expectations.
And so they left.