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The Tower hums, sometimes — low and patient, like a throat clearing itself in the dark. It rearranges when it wants, and it holds still when it is listening. Tonight, it holds still, and that stillness feels like the weight of a gaze you can’t meet.
Lilliandra sets the kettle down anyway. It’s an ordinary thing, by the standards of her ordinary — a dented little metal pot she had stolen from Nirn and bullied into surviving this one. It looks out of place on black-veined stone, surrounded by ink-stained counters and the faint, cold smell of wet parchment. She warms it with the magic hotplate — no flare, no drama, nothing that would make the Tower pay attention in the wrong way.
Then she reaches for the cups.
Two.
Her fingers hesitate on the second cup as if ceramic can accuse. It can’t. It’s a cup. It’s habit. That is what she tells herself, even as her mind — the traitor that it is — hands her the sentence again in the exact tone she used against him.
As if you have anywhere else to go.
She doesn’t say it aloud. She does not even mouth the shape of it. She remembers the way it lands instead: how his face goes cold and still; how his eyes sharpen and then… withdraw, as if he has learned the cost of reacting to her. The sentence had landed and she had watched it land, watched it hit something in him that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with a chain.
Lilliandra could apologize; she is not incapable. She has done it before. She has even meant it before.
The problem is that apologies are a kind of surrender. They require standing in front of someone and saying you matter enough that I regret what I did to you, and that is an intimacy she has never worn gracefully. She can bare skin more easily than she can bare contrition, and she hates to bear skin.
And besides — she thinks and hates herself for thinking it — Miraak is ancient. He should be able to survive her mouth. The thought is cowardice in a prettier dress. She knows it the moment it forms.
So, she does what she always does when she cannot offer words: she translates them into action and pretends it is not translation at all.
It’s time for evening meal.
Not because she is hungry — she rarely is, not in any honest, bodily way. Not because he needs it — he doesn’t, not here. Apocrypha does not demand food of him the way most people are demanded it, and he can go days without even remembering the concept if nothing prompts it.
But they have built this anyway.
Tea, at roughly the same time, more nights than not. A few things from Nirn — bread, dried fruit, salt, honey if she has it — arranged on the small table the Tower has permitted in this space. A quiet hour where she talks about her research and he listens like it matters, and he answers like she isn’t rambling into a void.
He will never call it companionship. He will never say he comes because he wants to sit with her. He simply appears when the kettle begins to sing, as if summoned by routine itself.
That knowledge makes her chest feel too tight. She hates that too.
She lays out what she has with hands that would rather be drawing chalk circles on the floor for the next spell. Bread wrapped in cloth. Hard cheese. Dried fruit and fresh fruit she still has on hand. Honey — yes, honey — because she knows he will take the bitterness of tea without complaint, but he has started, quietly, to accept sweetness when it is offered.
She tells herself it’s practical. Calories. Warmth.
She tells herself a lot of things.
The tea tin is last.
Black tea, strong enough to bite back. She adds the leaves, pauses, then adds more — too many, as if strength on the tongue can make the rest of her less exposed.
Water goes into the kettle. The heat thread tightens. The first faint curl of steam rises like a sigh.
She sits before the kettle can fully boil. Her notes are stacked to one side of the table, the way they always are. She didn’t move them away after the argument. She should have. She told herself she would. But the pages sit there anyway — ward lattices and resonance diagrams, a tonal spiral she has been refining for days, annotations in a hand that gets sharper the longer she goes without rest.
They had been working on this before she cut him.
That is the cruel part, really: that her mouth found the exact wound beneath their newest collaboration and pressed.
The Tower remains still.
The kettle begins to hiss softly.
Footsteps arrive in the doorway like the inevitable end of a spell.
Miraak steps into the archway. His hair is damp as if he has just washed it, dark strands pushed back carelessly — careless in a way that still looks deliberate on him, because everything does.
Lilliandra’s stomach clenches in a way she refuses to name.
His gaze moves over the table. The kettle. The two cups. It stops on her for a heartbeat too long. She does not give him the satisfaction of flinching.
“Tea,” she says, because if she says anything else her throat will do something humiliating.
His eyes flicker — something small, unreadable — and he nods once. He does not speak. Not yet. He crosses the room and sits where he always sits, because that too is part of the routine: his chair, angled slightly so he can see the doorway and the notes and her all at once, as if habit has taught him what he needs to feel… not safe, exactly, but untrapped.
The chair makes a soft sound — an actual creak, shocking in this place — and Lilliandra’s mouth twitches with the urge to laugh, a relief so sharp it almost hurts.
She stands before the silence can swallow her. The kettle whistles, thin and insistent. She pours the tea. First into her cup — because she refuses to perform anything that looks like deference — and then into his, because she is not brave enough to set out two cups and pretend she only meant one. Steam rises. The smell is bitter and hot and real. She slides his cup across the table without looking at him.
He wraps his fingers around it immediately, as if the warmth is something he has learned to anticipate. He lifts it, tests the heat with a sip, and his mouth tightens a fraction. Too strong.
She did that.
She takes her own cup and drinks anyway. The tea burns her tongue, and she is grateful for the pain.
For several heartbeats, they are only two people sitting at a table while Apocrypha holds its breath around them.
Then Lilliandra points at her notes with the hand holding her cup.
“I adjusted the third anchor,” she says, brisk, too brisk. “The lattice collapses if the resonance drifts by more than a quarter interval, but if I stagger the runes— here—” She taps the margin. Ink stains her fingertip. “—it holds.” The words spill out like water from a cracked seal. Research is safer than remorse. Theory is safer than the truth she cannot bring herself to bare.
Miraak’s gaze follows her finger. His eyes narrow slightly, focusing. “You staggered it by symmetry,” he says.
“Yes.”
“That is why it holds,” he says calmly. “Not because of the runes. Because you respected the pattern.”
Lilliandra’s grip tightens on her cup. She keeps her face smooth. “Are you saying my runes are sloppy?”
“I am saying your runes assume the world will behave politely,” he replies, mild as ever, which is his most infuriating tone. “This realm does not.”
“Everything here is a pattern,” she snaps, then softens it immediately, as if she can rewind her own mouth. “It’s a library.”
“It is a trap shaped like a library,” Miraak says, and there is a quiet edge there that he doesn’t sharpen further.
Lilliandra swallows. She looks at her tea. She forces herself to take another sip instead of looking at his face and seeing what her words did there.
She flips a page to avoid the feeling that the room is looking at her.
“Fine,” she says, focusing on the lattice. “Assume the realm is being rude. The question is whether the Tower is bypassing the wards deliberately or if the wards are irrelevant because the structure itself is… will.”
Miraak’s gaze stays on the page, but she sees the flicker of recognition: yes. That. That’s what we were working on.
He reaches across the table without asking and pulls the top sheet closer. The movement is unhurried. Casual. It is intimate anyway. He studies it for a moment, then uses the tip of his finger — bare skin, not gloved — to trace the line of her resonance curve. “This curve is too steep,” he says quietly.
“It isn’t,” she says automatically.
His mouth twitches — barely. Not quite a smile, but something like it. “It is,” he says. “You are forcing it.”
“I’m not forcing it,” she lies, because she has been forcing everything lately: the pattern, her patience, her own ability to sit across from him without saying the ugly word of sorry.
Miraak leans back slightly, looking at her over the page. “You were forcing it before,” he says. “When you snapped.” The word snapped is gentle. A gift, almost. A way to name what happened without dragging her into the blood of it.
Lilliandra’s throat tightens. She stares at the table. She reaches for the honey jar as a distraction. “Tea,” she says again, stupidly, as if offering the jar makes the moment less sharp. “If you’re going to pretend you like it bitter, at least—”
“At least offset it,” Miraak finishes, and something in his tone loosens, a thread of their usual rhythm returning.
Lilliandra slides the honey toward him without looking at his face.
He takes it. Dips a spoon into the gold with careful precision. Adds a thin line to his tea, then takes a sip. Her chest aches with the stupid, quiet relief of seeing him accept something from her and not throw it back.
She takes another sip of her own tea. It is still too strong. She refuses to fix it. She deserves the bitterness.
Miraak sets his cup down, the sound small and human. He taps the page once, a decisive motion. “Here,” he says. “If you shift this rune and mirror it across the third anchor, the resonance will not drift. The curve will not need force.”
Lilliandra leans forward, unwilling, drawn. She studies where he points.
He is right. He is always right about patterns. She hates him for it. She loves him for it. She hates herself for the way those feelings are beginning to blur.
“You’ve been thinking about this without me,” she accuses, because accusation is safer than gratitude.
Miraak’s gaze slides to her face. “I think,” he says, “whether you are present or not.”
“And yet you only bother to share when I’m here,” she shoots back. There. A small test. A small reach, disguised as a jab.
Miraak’s eyes hold hers for a moment too long. Then he looks back down at the page and says, like it is nothing: “You are the one who brought the problem to my attention.”
Lilliandra almost laughs, sharp and ugly. And you are the one who has nowhere else to go. The sentence rises like poison. She bites it back. Instead, she says, quieter, “Anyway, if the Tower is will, then the wards don’t matter unless the will respects them. So maybe I should be warding the… concept, not the structure.”
Miraak’s posture eases by a fraction, as if he is grateful to let her retreat into theory. “Warding a concept,” he murmurs. “That is… ambitious.”
“Don’t,” Lilliandra says automatically.
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t call it ambitious like it’s a warning.”
Miraak’s gaze stays on the page, but she can see the way his mouth shifts — amusement, perhaps, or something gentler he refuses to show too openly. “You prefer,” he says, “when I call it foolish.”
“I prefer honesty.”
“You do not,” he replies, and there it is: their banter, dry and sharp, familiar enough to feel like a blanket you pretend you don’t need.
Lilliandra huffs. “I do.”
Miraak takes another sip of tea. “You prefer control.”
Lilliandra’s eyes narrow. “That’s not the same thing.”
“It is,” he says, unbothered.
She wants to throw something at him. She wants to laugh. She wants to apologize. She does none of those things. Instead, she reaches for a piece of bread, breaks it, and eats, because chewing gives her an excuse to keep her mouth busy with something other than regret.
Miraak’s gaze flicks to the bread, then back to her notes, as if he is relieved she is eating too — relieved enough to make him a little careless. His fingers pick up the edge of her paper and straighten it, smoothing a wrinkle. The gesture is small. Familiar. Domestic in a way she refuses to call domestic.
They talk, because talking about wards is easier than talking about wounds.
They fall back into the work as if the argument is a door they both pass without opening. Lilliandra outlines her newest theory: that sound itself can be a ward, that resonance can be shaped like a lock. Miraak counters with the way the Tower reacts to attention, to intention, to the subtle difference between command and request.
Their words braid. Their voices settle. The silence between sentences turns from threat into pause.
Every so often, a tiny thing happens that is not theory at all: Lilliandra refills his cup without thinking, then realizes too late and pretends it was for efficiency. Miraak slides the honey back toward her side, as if he has decided she will take it too. When she reaches for a page, his fingers brush hers, and neither of them pulls away quickly enough to pretend it was nothing.
The Tower stays still. No doors open. No pages turn in sudden gusts. No theatrical meddling. It feels, absurdly, like privacy.
At some point Lilliandra catches herself leaning forward too close, her attention caught on the lines he’s drawn in the margin — small corrections, neat as a blade. She realizes she is breathing easier.
They drink. They talk. They keep circling the same theories like moths around a safe flame. Her foot moves under the table, slow and almost unconscious, until it rests lightly against his.
Not pressing. Not pleading.
Just contact. Casual. The kind of gesture she can survive because it can be framed as accidental if anyone ever forces her to name it.
Miraak stills for a heartbeat.
Then his boot shifts a fraction closer, answering without comment.
Neither of them looks down. Neither of them speaks. Because speaking would break the spell, and this is the closest thing Lilliandra has to an apology: warmth held out in the shape of tea, silence filled with theory, and the quiet, stubborn fact of him staying at the table anyway.