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Caleb knows the house that should be here, on this little hill, between the brook and the old twisted oak. He remembers- of course he remembers- standing at the place where a dirt path leaves the road, looking up at the modest farmhouse, forcing himself to take note of the way the house had been rebuilt with a new second room, a separate bedroom perhaps; of the higher quality thatching on the roof. Of course it had been rebuilt. The soil was still good. Land was everything, in Blumenthal.
Forcing himself to hear the sound of barking dogs and distant children’s laughter, coming from that distant little house.
That is not the house that is here now. The house that is here now is the right house, the way it is in all of Caleb’s dreams. The old thatching with its green stain. The mended gate that squeaks in just that particular way.
The morning is just breaking over the rolling hills and distant forests, but it will be a bright day, a sunny, crisp day, and a breeze is rustling the leaves of the oak. It will be a day for kite-flying, for fish-catching, for getting the hay in before the rain.
There is a line of drying linen tied from the house to that one little tree, and Caleb catches himself staring at it for several seconds. Long trousers. Long skirt. A little boy’s tunic.
He does not stop himself from walking up to the flapping line, and touching the wet cloth, washed so often it is almost transparent with thinness. It feels real.
Caleb was last here almost four years ago. Maybe, in that time, those laughing children have grown up, and gone away to school. Maybe no one was home, when Trent Ikithon arrived last night to set his trap.
Maybe.
The ring is warm on his finger, and it takes only a moment’s will to use it. Hello, old teacher. I am here.
The voice that responds is, as always, so terribly familiar. A bit later than expected, but I’m so glad you could join us for a proper family reunion. Come in for breakfast, Bren. Your parents miss you so. They’ve just been telling me how proud of you they are.
He is not sure if he is surprised or not. Difficult to distinguish the flavors of horror. If the depths of Trent’s depravity come as a shock, it is only because he has not been allowing himself to consider what they might encounter here. It changes nothing, of course. It only strengthens his resolve, to face whatever is inside, whether he walks out again or no.
A hand on Beauregard’s arm. A reminder. This place is the home of a child. There is a man here now, and he has a living family. He has a sister. Her voice, caustic, gives him the strength he was looking for.
He opens the door.
Outside- the darkness of dawn, rich with the promise of an autumn day. Inside- light spills, warm, golden. A full summer morning.
He looked about and discovered he had been asleep in the wood and the sun now dappled his face through the trees…
He smells bread. Eggs. He can see the boot shelf by the door, with- gods- his father’s big, old farm boots. There is the bookshelf, with the Almanac, the spell primer, and Der Katzenprince. Every small detail he’s kept locked safely away, all these years, in the Tower. In the sanctity of his own mind.
But that sanctuary was violated so very thoroughly, so very long ago.
Trent Ikithon never came here, to dine with humble farmers. He never saw these things with this own eyes. Only with Caleb’s.
Ikithon needs to die. Nothing else matters now. Caleb steps through the door, and hears Jester follow behind him.
“Wait,” Fjord says suddenly, somewhere, but it’s too late. The farmhouse has only two small rooms, with no door between them. Caleb has stepped through the threshold, and can see the kitchen table, and the people sitting there.
“Ah, Bren,” Trent Ikithon says, from the head of the table. He does not look as he did the last time Caleb saw him, and that, perhaps, is a little stabilizing. The collar is still around his neck. “We were just talking about you. We’re all so very proud.”
At his right sit Leofric and Una Ermendrud, exactly as he saw them last. They are looking at him, and smiling.
At his left sits-
There is a limit, to what the mind can take. Caleb discovered this once, at age seventeen. He is learning it again today. He hears Jester’s gasp, her cry of denial, but if Caleb starts to scream he will not stop. He pulls out the chair at the end of the table, and sits down. His hands are folded around each other in his lap. Jester doesn’t sit, not yet. “Essek,” she says, “is that really you? Blink twice if you’re being mind controlled.”
“Oh, Jester, I’m so glad you’re here,” someone- something- says, and the voice is perfect, the softness, the way Essek’s accent twists around Jester’s name, and Caleb has heard only a few sounds, in all his life, more hateful to his ears. “Caleb’s parents deserve to meet all his closest friends.”
Caleb hears Jester take another ragged breath, and then she says, very steadily, “It’s okay, Essek. We’ll take care of this, I promise.”
She is one of many things Caleb has never deserved.
“Bren,” Una Ermendrud says. Her voice. Her clean, threadbare blue dress. Her long braids. No. No. “Herr Thelyss is a charming young man. You are lucky to have him.”
“Do you agree with that sentiment, Father?” Caleb asks.
They look just as they did the last time he saw them, but Essek- Essek is wearing simple gray traveling clothes, and Caleb has not seen them before. Essek’s appearance has not been plucked from Caleb’s mind.
His delicate hands are the same as they were twelve days ago. His small, secretive smile, lifting the corners of his mouth. Caleb looks away, back at his- his father. Just as tall and broad and calm as he was when Caleb last sat at this table.
“Ja, natürlich,” Leofric says. “Your master has been very generous in giving us this chance to meet him.”
“I am glad to see that you have broadened your horizons, then,” Caleb says. “Considering that the last time you mentioned drow to me, it was to tell me the Empire needed talented mages like me to kill the cricks before they burned our villages to the ground.”
There is a blank pause, a delay, before Leofric’s head tilts, his brow furrows. On Essek’s face there is no reaction at all, only that slight, soft smile.
There’s a warm hand now on Caleb’s shoulder. “Whatever they are,” Fjord says from above, “they ain’t living. I’m sensing three undead presences.” After a second, “Fuck.”
That answers some questions.
Caleb looks down the table at Trent. “I am not here to play a game with you,” he says. “I am here to kill you.”
“Always in such a rush,” Ikithon says. “Still. Look at you. I’m so very proud of you, Bren.”
“So proud,” three voices whisper, in slightly staggered echo. The deep voice of his father. The warm voice of his mother. The soft voice of his lover.
“Caleb,” Jester says, rushed, terrified, “there’s something I can do, but- it might destroy Essek, Caleb, and then I don’t know if I can bring him back, if there’s nothing- I mean- I don’t know what to do.”
“Do it,” Caleb says.
The night he first attempted casting Wish, Essek asked him, “And when you succeed, Caleb Widogast? When you reach the greatest depth of that ocean of the arcane and discover you can reshape reality as you see fit.. what will you do with that power?”
Caleb looked up at him. He was floating, cross-legged, a little above the seat of the armchair under the stained glass window. Caleb had thought he was trancing, but his eyes were very much alert. Caleb said, “Come here, dear,” and shifted a stack of books and notes off of the couch, so Essek could drift over and come to rest leaning warm against Caleb’s chest, his bony shoulders poking a little into Caleb’s stomach. Caleb put down the book he was annotating, so that he could run his fingers through Essek’s hair as he said, “What will you do, when you achieve it?”
He felt Essek’s chest shake a little with an exhaled half-laugh. “That will not be for quite some time, I think,” Essek said. “I was once considered a prodigy, but I do not have your- speed. I do not know if I can answer for the Essek of next century.”
They both knew it was a matter of months for Caleb. He said, “I still have much work to do. This will help me accomplish it.” He didn’t need to elaborate. Margolin, Da’leth, Iresor. If he could reach their level- it would even the scales. “Beyond that…” His fingers tugged gently at a loose curl of silvery hair. “Wouldn’t it be nice to visit other planes, whenever we wished? There are a great many fascinating sights to see, out there.”
But when he finally succeeded, some nights later- when he stepped outside the tower door and touched the Weave and wished for the clouded sky to clear, when he saw the starry firmament shimmer into view, simply because he had asked for it- what he thought was, I will never be helpless again.
So easy to feel invulnerable, when you can shape reality with only a thought.
“Do it,” Caleb says, and Jester stands, and a green light with the brightness of another, higher plane pours from her eyes and mouth, and Caleb, with his back to her, watches Trent’s smile sour as the three other figures at the table flinch back, shrieking, their faces twisted into rictuses of pain.
“How rude, when you are a guest in this house,” Trent Ikithon says, over the screeching, and then Caleb becomes aware of a distant yet rapidly approaching high pitched whine, and then-
He throws himself under the table. It helps a little, perhaps, as the house explodes in flame and pain and choking ash. His skin hurts, his lungs hurt with every breath, but giving in to the desire to freeze will mean death, so he stands up, the charred remains of the table crumbling around him. The house is gone, but so is the sun, the air filled with smoke. Ikithon is hovering up above- his favorite old trick. And on the ground-
He never saw what the fire did to his parents. He only heard the screams. He has burned other people alive, since then. He has been able to extrapolate, to imagine what it might have looked like inside this house, twenty-four years ago. But he has never seen his parents burning, before now.
Perhaps he still has not. The bodies are anonymized by the way the flesh has partially melted off their long-decayed corpses, by the way their clothes have been charred to ash. These could be the bodies of those unfortunates who thought they could build a life here, in the ruins of tragedy. Una and Leofric might still be resting peacefully in the Blumenthal graveyard.
Caleb wouldn’t bet on it. No. His old master has still managed to teach him another lesson about facing what he has done.
The smaller body is not a desiccated corpse. Through the coating of ash, the bubbling burning flesh and smoldering hair, lavender eyes stare in terror at Jester through a white film of recent death.
“Fuck,” someone shouts, somewhere, and then Trent Ikithon calls a shower of meteors down on their heads.
More fire and agony. Caleb has been blown into the space between what was once the chimney and the kitchen wall. He is fading in and out, black spots growing on his vision, but he sees Beau’s fist go through his father’s chest, he sees the claws of the thing that might once have been his mother raking across Fjord’s face, and then Ikithon casts lightning at them.
There is a confused moment of white hot pain and then nothing, and then he is rolling over on the oven-hot ground, coughing even more, as his body screams with the fire of divine magic rushing through it, rebuilding it. Even in the confusion he understands that he did not die, or at least, that his body was not ruined for long enough for his soul to depart it. He knows what that feels like, too.
He lifts his head. Essek is there. There is a terrible smell of burned hair and baked flesh, as those delicate hands reach out for Caleb, ready to slash at his heart.
Yasha’s blade comes down like the vengeance of the Stormlord itself, and Caleb watches her cleave Essek’s head from his body.
Becoming a dragon, then, is the easiest and most selfish decision possible. He cannot bear to be himself for one moment longer.
One cannot, however, remain polymorphed indefinitely.
The egg is sealed safely away in the demiplane. He wanted to do much more than that, but it will have to wait. He can hear cheering, distantly; it is horrible. His friends are going through their usual post-combat banter. Caleb doesn’t participate. He walks back into the crater that was once his family home.
Most of the fire is smoldering, now. He only burns himself a little, finding the bodies. As many pieces of the bodies as he can locate.
He lays them out on the unburned grass above the crater. Mutter. Vater. Essek. His friends catch up with him just as he’s putting Essek’s head in the right place.
“Oh, my god, that’s Uncle Essek,” he hears Luc say. Gods, why did they bring him? “Is he- is he- is he going to be okay?”
Caleb looks at the boy. He watches as the adrenaline and bravado washes away, and Luc begins to cry, snotty, messy. Caleb watches, because he is done looking away from the consequences of his actions.
Caleb Two shifts, becomes the saber-toothed cat again. Luc hugs it, his small face disappearing into the fur. It herds him down the hill, away from the others. Caleb One says, “Caduceus, I don’t know if these people are who they appear to be.”
“Right,” Caduceus says, as comfortingly unflappable as ever. “Yeah, I can help with that.”
He raises his staff. The clusters of gems and mushrooms glow, and there is a responding green glow, bursting from behind the eyelids and closed lips of the largest corpse. Its back archs, its eyes open, its jaw unhinges.
Caleb’s resolve shatters into dust. He turns, and stumbles over the grass and dirt until he finds an unburned bush, and then he throws up, again and again and again until his throat feels scraped raw by acid. It’s messy, but Prestidigitation removes all the evidence.
When he walks back, someone has placed three sheets over the bodies. Caleb looks at his friends.
“It’s really them,” Jester says. “All of them. We just asked them their names, and we asked Essek how he- how he died. Do you want me to-”
“Please do not tell me,” Caleb says.
His imagination has been working double time to provide him with scenarios. Trent must have gone to the Academy, and gotten Caleb’s address. Essek must have been at the house, waiting for Caleb to return from Marquet. There are many ways to disable one lone wizard instantly, if you get the drop on them.
He will ask. Later, in person-
Later.
“Okay,” Jester says. She’s crying too. “Caleb, do you want to- I think I have a pretty good amount of magic left in me, and there’s Caduceus too, and Artagan, I can make him do whatever I want- we could try and bring them all ba-”
“Caduceus,” Caleb says. “Could you- I would like my parents to be able to rest. Please.”
Caduceus nods. He kneels down in the grass, a long, strange motion on his long body, so out of place here in Caleb’s childhood village, and yet so natural, as well. He pulls the sheets back gently, and touches what is beneath, and the skin and flesh and bones all crumble and dissolve as grass and flowers and fungi sprout from new earth.
It had been nice, to visit them in the cemetery. It had been what they would have wanted, Caleb knows. But it is more important, now, to make sure no one can disturb their bones again.
“Thank you,” he says. “Can we- can we go to your home, Caduceus? For the next bit?”
“I think that’s a good idea,” he says.
Essek’s body has been thoroughly wrapped in the off-white sheet, and there is a bit of green ribbon wrapped many times around the neck, and tied with a bow. It’s horrific. It’s utterly Jester. Essek would like it, Caleb thinks. Yasha kneels, and picks up Essek’s body, and holds it, very carefully.
It is still a beautiful autumn morning in Blumenthal. Caleb thinks, I will never come here again.
He grabs the weave of reality, and twists it, and then they are all in the Blooming Grove.
The Clays take over, with an admirable air of professionalism. Caleb finds himself sitting on a stone bench, in a sun-dappled corner of the Grove, a mug of tea in his hands. It is a beautiful late morning, here, the air warm, and he can hear birds singing, and he hates himself for noticing these things when Essek’s sheet-covered body is laid out on a large stone slab in front of him. Someone has placed flowers and lavender around the body, and placed an incongruous glittering diamond on the body’s chest. Beauregard is sitting next to Caleb. Caleb isn’t sure when that happened.
“How are you holding up, man?” she’s saying. Her arm is around his shoulders. “This is fucked, I know it’s all been fucked. But it’ll be okay. We’ll get him back, and then we’ll all get, like, so fucking drunk. Probably have some great post-trauma sex, you know?”
“Maybe the ceremony should wait until tomorrow,” Constance Clay says, putting a plate of cookies in front of them. “None of you are at your best at the moment.”
“None of us will be okay until Essek is back,” Jester says, because oh, she is here too. “So let’s do it already.”
“Ja,” Caleb says.
“You will be asking the spirit to return,” Constance says. “Are you prepared? Do you know what you will say?”
“Of course,” Jester says, with no hesitation. “We will just tell him that we love him and we’re really sad without him so he should come back right away. And if he doesn’t I’m going to be so so mad at him.”
“Well,” Caduceus’s mother says, smiling. “That would convince me, all right. Okay.”
Beauregard squeezes Caleb’s hand. “You ready for this?”
Caleb nods. He isn’t, of course. He does not know if he will be ready to talk to Essek ever again. But this is not about him. Except of course it’s all about him, it always is.
“The boy,” he says.
“Clarabelle’s made friends with him,” Constance tells him. “They’ll be all right.”
They remove the sheet. Caleb sees Jester and Beau make faces and look away. He does not look away. Ikithon has taught him that, finally.
Caduceus sits at the head of the stone slab, legs crossed, and gently places his hands on either side of Essek’s ruined face. He closes his eyes. “Wildmother, help us,” he says. A soft light begins to glow, and vines push up from the ground to twine across the slab, across the body, covering it with green. Flowers bloom in a multitude of colors. The diamond shatters.
The vines retreat. Essek lies on the slab, whole, unblemished. Very still. Caduceus opens his eyes. “Something’s wrong,” he says. “Very wrong.”
Jester sends Artagan, to look for Essek’s soul. He reports back, after twenty minutes. “So sorry,” he says. “Seems like the Raven Queen’s just fucked off, or something. I don’t know where all your souls are going, if not to her bunch.” He looks at them, and shrugs. “I really am sorry,” he says. “I quite liked your lavender friend.”
“Oh, I hate Ludinus so much,” Jester says.
“We’ll make him pay,” Fjord says. “For all of it.”
They will. Caleb is sure of it. But it is exhausting to contemplate.
He wants to go home.
Home is a smoldering crater. Home is an unmoving body.
This is, once more, eerily familiar. He remembers this, from Vergessen. The childish crying for something you yourself destroyed. A place to be safe. A person you don’t need to be strong for.
“We’ll find Ludinus,” Beau says. “Figure out what he’s done to the moon and the leylines and all this shit. Undo it. Then get Essek back.”
Caduceus’s magic can protect a body from decay, or worse things. Essek, still on the stone slab, under a colorful patchwork quilt, looks like he is sleeping, except that he rarely sleeps, and except for the stillness. A slight breeze lifts the fine fluorescent white strands of his hair and sets them dancing in the golden light. For the first time, Caleb finds himself thinking that without the animating spirit, acerbic, experienced- Essek looks very young. Of course, he is the same as he was when they first met the Shadowhand of the Bright Queen. Caleb will never see him change.
Jester has put cupcakes out around him. “In case he wakes up on his own and is really hungry,” she explains. “I’m always hungry when I come back from the dead.”
“Don’t make it sound like it happens every week,” Fjord says, alarmed.
They all sound like themselves, his dear friends. The jubilation from their victory is gone, and there’s an exhausted hollowness in all of them, but they are- themselves, and it makes Caleb ashamed, and angry, that he alone is broken.
That they are accepting this.
But he accepted it too, didn’t he, when he failed to bring back Mollymauk? It has always been Essek who has refused to go along with fate. Who has been there to tell him, There must be a way.
“We should probably get some sleep,” Beauregard says.
“It’s only four p.m.,” Fjord points out.
“Yeah, and I’m knackered. Are you saying you’re not?”
Caleb ignores them. He is busy reaching deep into himself. Deep into the weave. He spent everything in the fight, he has no reserves, but if he wants something this badly, surely, surely-
There is nothing. He is empty.
All right. Sleep first, then.
“Caleb,” someone is saying. Yasha. Her voice is very small, and choked with held-back tears. “I’m so sorry.”
He should reassure her, but there’s nothing inside but silence. She reaches out a hand, as though to touch him, and then it drops.
They walk back into the house, leaving the body behind in the sunshine and flowers.
In the living room, Caduceus is looking at him. Caleb stares back. Caduceus looks down first. He walks over to Caleb and says, softly, “I can help you sleep, if you’d like.”
Caleb nods. “Hit me with the hardest stuff you’ve got,” he says, and Caduceus, bless him, brings him a cup of astringent-smelling tea without another word. Caleb drinks it fast and burns his mouth. It’s less than five minutes after that that sleep comes. Not so quickly that he does not have time to be afraid of what he might dream.
He wakes thirteen hours later. No point in cursing himself for it. Doubtless a combination of the tea and the great effort spent in the previous day’s battle knocked him out for the count. His goal might be getting further away with every passing breath, but there is no use in impractical self-admonition.
The moon has set, and the inside of the rebuilt house is almost perfectly dark. Fortunately, he appears to be alone in the living room. The two guest rooms must be occupied by Beau and Yasha, and Fjord and Jester. Perhaps Luc is sharing with Clarabelle. He can guess that none of them wanted to be alone.
Personally he is grateful for the solitude, as he quietly lets himself out of the house, and walks through the dark cemetery. A pinch of dried carrot and a muttered incantation allow him to see the rocks and tree roots underfoot.
Essek’s hand, when Caleb takes it, is cold.
To cast a spell of the ninth level requires an in depth understanding of every school of magic, but Caleb has always found, ever since that first time, that completing such workings feels more like dunamancy than anything else. It is like standing inside a beacon, like floating with Essek inside the ninth level of their tower, looking at all the infinite possibilities of the universe, and then concentrating one’s will on plucking out one single strand and forcing it to become reality.
“I wish,” Caleb says, “for you to return to me.”
When he has done this before, it has been- not easy, but not difficult, either. It feels like solving a crossword puzzle. It is just a matter of looking for the easiest solution, and pulling it out of the weave.
This is different. Instead of possible solutions he sees only failure, failure, failure. Reality does not want to conform. Fate does not naturally wish to alter its course. He is asking for too much. The gods cannot do this thing. He is a mortal. It is not going to work.
Trent Ikithon has burned his past twice over now. Caleb will not let him burn his future.
Caleb is only a man. He does not have the power of a god.
But there is additional power, here and now. The rainbow leylines, drifting overhead. One snakes right through the center of the Grove.
Caleb reaches out with his mind, and forces it to flow through him.
He knows from the moment it touches him that it’s far too much. It burns him out from the inside as he desperately struggles to channel it, to direct a raging torrent of the world’s heartblood. He cannot do this and survive it, he can’t, he’s going to be a smear of charred shit on the Clays’ walls-
And then it’s over.
He is lying on the soft grass. Every particle in his body aches, his mind most of all. He keeps his eyes closed. He just lies there and breathes, in and out, and lets time slip away from him, until he feels the hand in his twitch.
Then he rolls over, his eyes still closed, and curls against the body next to his, his cheek pressed against warm skin. A foreign heartbeat thudding in his ear.
“Caleb.” A hoarse whisper no louder than a breath. “Ikithon-”
Caleb’s own throat feels like he’s been swallowing glass, and he’s surprised to find himself capable of speech. “He is gone,” he says. “For good.”
It’s quiet for a little while, and then Essek whispers, “Okay. Good.” And his fingers twine with Caleb’s. They lie there, in the grass and flowers.
Caleb doesn’t know how much later it is when they are found, and he isn’t sure who finds them, only that at some point there is a rush of action and excitement, and he finds himself in a familiar position in an Aasimar’s arms for a minute before being deposited in a large rocking chair on the porch of the house. The sun must have risen at some point. Everything is covered with golden light. It shines in little flecks in Essek’s clear pale eyes, as he looks at Caleb, and keeps looking, from his position in another rocking chair across the porch. He has been bundled up in blankets, and given a bowl of soup. There is a hysterical Jester talking to him about painting him a new set of clothing.
“You all right, Mr. Caleb?” Caduceus is asking him. His hands pat Caleb’s shoulders gently, and there is a soothing feeling of divine magic sinking into his veins, but it does not alleviate the omnipresent ache. It will take more than magic to fix what has been burned inside of him. Perhaps time will do it.
At some point he falls asleep.
When he wakes again, the flow of time has resumed in its normal perfect order. He knows where north is, and can mentally recite the first forty prime numbers, and the first five precepts of Evocation. He knows he is lying down on a bed in the green-painted guest bedroom in the Blooming Grove. It’s dark. He doesn’t know where Essek is.
He tries to summon a dancing light into the air in front of him, and instead of producing illumination, produces a gush of blood from his nose all down his nightshirt.
“Caleb?” he hears Essek say, and then a muttered word in Undercommon, and then the room is filled with a soft glow, and he can see Essek floating before him, peering at him with concern. Wearing pajamas that are comically large on him. Caleb lets out a breath. Essek’s hand touches his cheek, and he recognizes the cool feeling of prestidigitation as the sticky blood dries and dissipates away.
“What were you trying to do?” Essek asks.
“A cantrip,” Caleb says. “Scheisse.”
“I would advise getting more rest before attempting to cast again,” Essek says. “This looks like arcane burnout. You should recover with time, but if I were you, I would wait a long time indeed before casting at the ninth level again.”
“I don’t think I will be repeating- that particular trick,” Caleb says. There’s an emptiness in his mind, like the gap left by a lost tooth. “I think- I suspect I may have lost that capability for good.”
Something in Essek’s face changes. “A high price to pay,” he says.
“Incorrect, Herr Theyless,” Caleb says. “I could have cut myself from the arcane forever, and it would have been an incredible bargain.”
Essek’s lips purse, and he turns away. Caleb lets him. The least he can do is allow that much privacy between them.
After a moment, Essek shifts again, and comes to sit on the bed next to Caleb. The sphere of light hovers smoothly between them. He still isn’t looking at Caleb, though; just down at his hands.
“How are you?” Caleb says.
“I am as well as might be reasonably expected,” Essek says. “Considering that I have been reliably informed that I was dead for two days.”
“Do you.” Caleb swallows. “Do you know where… where you were? The Wildmother herself apparently could not find you. Neither could Jester’s special friend.”
“I don’t know,” Essek says. “It feels like… I want to say that I was an ocean. Not- in an ocean. I was an ocean. Does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know,” Caleb says. “I don’t think- I don’t think I am a good judge of sense or madness, at the moment.”
He closes his eyes, and immediately opens them again, to banish the images that seem to print themselves on the inside of his eyelids at the slightest opportunity. They will never leave him, now. He knows this, as well, from experience.
Essek says, face still hidden from Caleb, “Caleb, I am so sorry. I was unforgivably careless, and it put you all in danger, and now you have been incapacitated as our entire world hangs on a knife’s edge.”
“Our entire world,” Caleb says, “can go fuck itself.”
The soft glow goes out, and Caleb is left blinking in the terrible darkness for a long, quiet moment before it flickers into life again. “I cannot believe that you mean that,” Essek says. “You have dedicated your life to thwarting Ludinus and his ilk.”
I have done what I needed to do in this life, he told Beauregard a day ago. He had been wrong. He has never been to a dance hall with Essek Thelyss. He has not finished reading the book of poetry Essek gave him for his last birthday. He has not harvested the zucchini in the vegetable garden.
“Because of my mistakes, and because I cared for you, you died,” Caleb says. “Because I failed to kill Trent. Because I failed to stop Ludinus Da’leth. I do not want to see what happens next time. I have reached my limit. I am done.”
Essek makes a sound, like a gasp, and then he says, “Caleb Widogast. I told you once your sins were nothing like mine. You said you would take my word for it, but I do not think you did.”
“My sins got you killed,” Caleb begins, and Essek interrupts him. “Mine broke the world.”
Caleb shuts up, and waits.
Essek says, “Nine years ago, Martinet Ludinus Da’leth came to me, and suggested I betray my Queen by stealing two Luxon Beacons for him. I was a fool then, but not a complete fool. I asked him what his particular interest in the beacons was. He had my measure, and he knew I would only be satisfied by a show of trust, of respect. So he told me about his secret plans. He told me he was working on a scheme that would humble the gods themselves and force them to share their secrets with all mortals. Knowing what you know of me, of who I was then, Caleb Widogast, how do you think I reacted to that?”
Several things click into place, in Caleb’s memory. He says nothing. The question is, after all, rhetorical.
“I gave him the beacons,” Essek says. “I installed a leyline geometer on the roof of my tower, and took readings for him. I scoured the restricted sections of the Marble Tomes, and passed to him any information the Dynasty had on leylines, on solstices, on the gods. For a long time I have thought that the worst consequence of my actions was a war that destroyed thousands of lives. It appears that this is in fact not the case. When Trent Ikithon came into our home and caught me in some kind of arcane stun, and then began to cast what I recognized as eighth level necromancy that would kill me and then raise me, what I thought was, this is what I deserve. This is the way I was always going to end.”
“Do you expect me to agree?” Caleb says. “If I died today in an apposite ball of flame, would you continue on happily with your life?”
“No,” Essek says. His hands, still twisting in his lap, slowly still, and he reaches out with one of them, until it rests lightly on Caleb’s arm, though he still does not look up. “I don’t know if you know that you called me. I don’t know where I was, but I know you called to me, the way you have so many times before. I don’t have your courage, Caleb. But I know I will always come, if you call me. If you see a way forward.”
“Then please come here now,” Caleb says, and Essek, finally looking at him, wraps his arms around Caleb’s chest, resting his head on Caleb’s shoulder. Caleb hugs him back. And does not close his eyes.
He can still smell smoke. He wonders if it will ever stop.