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Qifrey hated the water. This was a well known fact. Yet still, for some unknown reason, he was forced to live with the weight of a sea suspended over him. It was torture. Thankfully, he’d found some things to make it bearable. There was Master Beldaruit and his (albeit annoying) flamboyant personality. There was magic, which helped him feel in control when things were anything but. There were soft spells of light and drying, and there was the witch that made them. Olruggio. Nothing made living as bearable as Olruggio.
Don’t get him wrong, Olruggio could be annoying too. He was loud and talked a lot and smelled too, but he was also kind. Qifrey was pretty sure he was the kindest person he’d ever met. So, he tolerated him.
Maybe that was why, when Olruggio stumbled into Qifrey’s midnight sulking session in the kitchen, he didn’t flinch like he did when Master Beldaruit found him. Instead, he turned to look at his friend, taking note of his slightly shaking hands and the bags under his eyes, and offered him the seat next to him.
“Want to talk about it?” He asked after a moment.
Olruggio bit his lip. “Nightmare.”
Qifrey hummed in understanding. He got those too, all the time. He was pretty sure at this point he didn’t know what an actual dream felt like. That was part of what had turned these midnight sulking sessions into a regular thing, despite Master Beldaruit’s disapproval. He liked to blame it on the water pressing in against him on all sides, but he knew it probably had more to do with his missing memories and eye.
He remembered the first time Master Beldaruit had woken him up from a nightmare. He’d held him in his arms and whispered soft things in his ears. Qifrey looked Olruggio up and down, he remembered the sprig of pain that had shot up the last time they’d held hands and decided that a hug was off the table. What else did Master Beldaruit do for him? There was the glowing dragon smoke sculpture, but Qifrey still hadn’t managed to figure out how to copy it correctly yet. There was tea, but he knew Olruggio wasn’t a big fan of tea. Oh! Cookies! Sometimes Master Beldaruit would give him cookies when he had a particularly bad nightmare.
Without another word, Qifrey sprang up from his normal sulking spot and went towards the not-so-secret cookie hiding spot in the kitchen. He vaguely registered the padding footsteps following behind him, but he paid them no mind. He was on a mission. He gently, quietly lifted himself up onto the counter and balanced on his tip-toes so that he could reach up over the ledge of the upper cabinet.
“What are you doing?” Olruggio’s whisper sounded more like a scolding.
Qifrey didn’t bother to answer him as his fingers found the lip of the box and grabbed hold of it. Successful in his mission, he sat down on the counter and opened the lid… only to find the container completely empty. He groaned.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” Olruggio asked, peering over the edge of the cookie box into the emptiness below.
“Master Beldaruit usually keeps his cookies in here, but we must’ve run out before he could make more.”
“Oh.”
Qifrey looked down into the empty container, then back up at his friend’s questioning face, then back down into the container and came to a decision.
“We’re gonna make more.”
“What!?” Olruggio backed away from the tin as if even being near the thing was enough evidence for damnation. “Are you allowed to cook in the kitchen without an adult’s supervision?"
Qifrey shrugged. He’d never thought to ask, and no one ever told him otherwise. Besides, he’d recently taken to helping Beldaruit’s cook with preparing food at Beldaruit’s insistence, so if he had a problem with it, that sounded like a him issue. Qifrey explained as much to Olruggio as he searched for the recipe book he knew the cook kept hidden in one of the cupboards.
“If you’re sure… Then let me help you.” Olruggio agreed. He always agreed with Qifrey, knowing this, Qifrey handed him the page he’d found.
“Read off the ingredients to me and I’ll gather them.”
“Why can’t you read the ingredients and I’ll gather them.”
Qifrey turned to glare at his stubborn friend and pointed to his singular eye. “It’s dark. Plus, this is my kitchen, so I know where everything is.”
Olruggio sighed in defeat and began listing out the ingredients.
Qifrey evidently did not know where everything in the kitchen was, though he did have an easier time finding things than Olruggio despite his missing eye. Within 15 minutes, the entirety of the kitchen had been scoured and all the ingredients for the Mountain Apple & Cinnamon Bark Cookies were gathered together.
“Aaand two teaspoons of cinnamon bark!” QIfrey proudly exclaimed as he finished going through their gathered ingredients.
Olruggio laid down flat on the kitchen floor, staring at the ceiling. “You’re telling me we just finished the preparation to make the cookies?”
Qifrey jumped off the counter and reached out a hand to his fallen friend. “Well, yeah. You have to make sure you have the right amount of ingredients in order to follow the recipe.”
Olruggio begrudgingly took the other boy’s hand, “But I’m already tired and we haven’t even started yet!
Qifrey’s eye got a mischievous glint to it. “Perfect.”
“You planned this.” Olruggio narrowed his eyes skeptically as he accused.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Qifrey lied. “I just wanted cookies.”
“Mhm.” Olruggio agreed skeptically, but accepted the hand held out to him anyway.
“Now, you take these and cut them up into tiny pieces.” Qifrey continued, handing Olruggio a couple of apples and a knife and pointing him towards a cutting board.
“If I cut one of my fingers off, I’m blaming you!” He grumbled as he followed his friend's instructions.
One hour, two broken spoons, and a batter-drenched kitchen later, the timer for the cookies finally ended. Both boys peered into the oven, staring in anticipation at the lightly browned circular shapes that sat just beyond the glass.
“Are they really done?”
Qifrey looked back at the timer. “It says they should be.
“But what if we were wrong? They still look kinda soft. Maybe we should keep them in for longer…”
But before Olruggio had more time to catastrophize, Qifrey had already pulled on the oven mitts and made to open the door. “Only one way to find out!” He grinned.
The smell was heavenly. Warm and crisp and distinctly sweet. It was as if fall itself had been distilled and placed into lightly browned circles. Olruggio reached a hand out to grab one, only for Qifrey to smack it away.
“They have to cool first!” He scolded.
Olruggio groaned.
Finally, after fifteen whole minutes of waiting, the cookies were warm enough to eat. The boys grabbed the still-warm cookies off of the cooling tray and each tasted their hard work. Olruggio’s eyes immediately lit up in wonderment at the taste and texture.
“I think this is the best cookie I’ve ever had.” He said, mouth still full of the gooey goodness.
Qifrey frowned. “They’re softer than I remember and I think we added too much cinnamon.”
Olruggio shoved him in the shoulder. “You’re being too hard on yourself. These are fantastic!”
Qifrey took in his friend’s face, so different from how it had been earlier that night when he first came into the room. He thought about how he’d been able to bring light and warmth to what would’ve otherwise been just another cold and lonely night of trying to stave off nightmares for them both. He felt his mouth curl up in a smile and that weird twisting feeling in his gut.
“If you say so.” He admitted, grabbing another cookie for himself and handing another to Olruggio, who gladly swallowed it, almost whole.
“Say, when we’re older,” his friend began, speaking around the crumbs that coated his mouth, “If I pay you, will you bake me cookies like this everyday?”
The warm fuzzies increased to the point of pain, but before Qifrey had a chance to respond, the boys were interrupted by the sound of hooves on stone. They only had enough time to turn to look at each other with wide eyes before the door opened, revealing Master Beldaruit standing in the entrance to the kitchen, slowly becoming more and more distressed at the scene in front of him.
After a moment of silence, Qifrey spoke up. “Hello master.”
It was like that one sentence broke a dam in Beldaruit’s mind. “Qifrey, you- I- what?” The words came out, but didn’t make much sense.
Qifrey stepped forward with the cooling rack full of cookies as an offering and/or an explanation. “Olly and I made cookies!”
Master Beldaruit looked down at the cookies, then back up at his apprentice. “Qifrey, my dear boy, you’re not supposed to cook without an adult present. It’s dangerous.”
Olruggio nudged Qifrey and whispered “I told you” in his ear.
Qifrey paid him no mind, preferring to stare up at his master with all of the faux-innocence he could muster. “But no one ever told me. Plus, Olruggio was having a hard time sleeping, and you didn’t have any cookies left, so what was I supposed to do? Try to go back to bed without anything to fix it?”
Master Beldaruit had his sealchair sit so he could be face-to-face with Qifrey, “You’re supposed to find an adult and ask for help.”
Qifrey and Olruggio both attempted to look thoroughly scolded at that, so Master Beldaruit took pity on them. “May I try one?” He asked, motioning towards the cookies. Qifrey held the platter out towards him in response. He took one and it instantly melted in his mouth, “This is delicious Qifrey. What recipe did you use?”
He pointed back to the piece of paper stuck to the counter behind him.
Master Beldaruit took in the state of the kitchen once more and sighed. “Alright, you boys need sleep, but you also can’t leave the kitchen a mess like this. So, we’re going to use a little bit of a cheat here and you both are going to clean this up in the morning.”
With that, Master Beldaruit sent the boys off to bed after a brief lesson in counter-clock spells. Hopefully these midnight snacks of theirs wouldn’t become a habit.