Archive of Our Own

Midday, Conthsen

It is not a rare occurrence for Caleb to fall asleep on the sofa, now that his forties have come and passed. Still, he is a man of principle; a creature of habit. His afternoon naps are not the result of sudden drowsing over the local paper, but rather a scheduled and permitted indulgence, much like his whiskey cocoa on Folsen evenings in winter. So he does not wonder, at first, when his pillow-wrinkled cheeks stretch wide in a yawn, and his body readjusts itself within the limited dimensions of the sofa. It is only when his usual mental checklist snags on the wrongness of the hour that he pauses, some deeply rooted instinct causing his body to grow still. It’s midday—it should be midday, quite precisely. Why would he sleep at such a time?

He blinks his eyes open, brows furrowing. The blurred ceiling of his living room greets him—as he was expecting. Good. But the sun does not streak diagonally across the wooden panes, the way it tends to do on lazy afternoons. Nor does the sun bathe the room in light, the way one would assume it does at midday.

The room is dark.

“Caleb,” whispers a voice beside him. “Oh, Caleb.”

***

Essek helps him sit up on the sofa, despite Caleb’s uncertain insistence that he is quite all right. Nothing stabs, nothing aches—all things considered, he feels rather well-rested. His fingers drift lightly across his own neck, arms, chest. He can find no bandages. No tender skin to tell the tale of his injury. Outside, the winter moon is rising.

Essek will not stop staring at him.

“Our exploratory mission failed, I take it?” Caleb asks mildly. He holds the nauseating alarm of having lost time at arm’s length. “My memory is—not quite up to par.”

Finally, Essek seems to blink away his stupor. The pale light paints his cheekbone in sharp relief, hollowing him out in carven shadow. No lanterns have been lit. The fireplace is dead and silent.

“Yes,” Essek says, hushed, shifting forward on the kitchen stool he sits on. He still wears his cloak and boots, as well as a scorch mark across his temple. “Yes, I’d imagine. What do you recall?”

“We arrived at the excavation a little before ten in the morning,” Caleb recounts, mentally retracing their steps through the cave system where spelunkers had found collapsed catacombs, believed to date back to the Age of Arcanum. Catnip for wizards, as Beauregard had put it when she shared the initial rumors.

“Your contact … did not show,” he continues, “so we had to make our way in without the forged documentation that was supposed to allow us passage with the research team.”

“Yes.” Two wrinkles—imperceptible if one hadn’t been spending the better part of a decade in Essek Thelyss’ breathing space—frame the flare of his nostrils. “It was not my fault she lacked the restraint to not attempt to double-cross me.”

That statement tells Caleb it is what happened next that Essek feels guilty about. He can envision it easily enough: the way they had urged each other on, both of them too hopeful of the other’s ability to check the worst impulses in themselves, the way two people who trust each other can walk and walk through a city until they grow lost, together.

It is not so unexpected. When faced with the bare-faced truth of the other, Caleb once offered lenience, and Essek once offered aid. These days they offer tea and to talk things through. They have both learned to reign in their own greed, but it has always helped, seeing a glimmer of it reflected in one another.

“We ventured too far, considering our unexpectedly low number.” Essek turns his face against the light, as if to let it cleanse some unwanted quality from his expression. Instead, he looks carved in bone, immortalized in frowning marble. “There were … traps. Perfectly clever ones. Still functioning.”

Of course.

Essek feels guilt over consequences, not intentions, because consequences are there to hold in the palm of your hand, close and physical. Consequences mean unforeseen repercussions; mean a lack of satisfactory planning; mean failure.

Essek Thelyss is familiar with failure the way one is familiar with one’s night terrors. They haunt him the way ghosts follow you home. Caleb knows this, for he has heard their creaks in the night, seen the silhouette of his partner sitting rim-rod straight up from sleep, as if a nightmare is something one greets with cold professionalism and courtly manners.

How badly had Caleb been hurt for Essek to come home with another mistake around his shoulders? For his own mind to blot the latter half of the day out entirely?

“What time is it?” he asks suddenly. The tick-tick of his heart still swears it’s midday.

“Oh, I—it’s evening.” Essek rarely carries his pocket watch, having grown accustomed to Caleb’s immaculate sense of the passing hours.

Whatever expression he sees on Caleb’s face causes him to quickly rise and walk across the room, rooting around in cabinet drawers until he finds it.

“Eight,” Essek says, after clicking the delicate lid open. “It’s eight in the evening. You’ve slept for some time.”

Caleb slowly exhales. The sense of wrongness is placated in the way placing a duvet over a dead body would set the world to rights. His sense of time is usually not disrupted by sleep.

“What happened?” he asks, hands on his own unsteady knees. “Why do I not remember any battle? What was the nature of my injury?”

“The kind that requires you rest,” Essek says softly, sending Caleb a forlorn sort of gaze across the darkened room. “Do not ask me to recount it, with your blood so fresh on my mind. You are safe. We are home. That is what matters.”

What did you sacrifice to make it so? Caleb can’t help but think. Or is it who?

“I will not ask it, then. Not tonight.”

He reaches a hand out, palm open and inviting. Essek shuffles over with sad, exhausted steps. There is a limpness to him, though he seems to strain to hold himself upright and at attention, like a half-shriveled spring onion. Pulling him down beside him on the sofa, Caleb envelops his chronically cool hands with his own.

“Essek. Lovely Essek.”

Essek wilts at last, bending towards him until he thumps against his shoulder. He shivers when Caleb runs fingernails through the shorn hair at the back of his head.

“I thought I would lose you,” Essek exhales. The words hold such genuine emotion that a suspicion strikes Caleb.

He thinks of the shadow of grief on Essek’s face, the foreign feel of his consciousness. He lowers his lips to speak against unstyled curls.

“Did I die, then?”

“No,” Essek says savagely, jerking out of his embrace. “No, I would not have let you die. I did everything—”

Shuddering, he gathers himself.

“It’s not as if there were any clerics around,” he continues after a moment, “nor diamonds lying strewn about. So you could not die.”

I could have, Caleb thinks, but only once.

Essek’s lips press together tightly. He is the one to reach out to comfort Caleb, this time; fingers squeezing hard around one broad hand.

“Let us stay here tonight, rather than the Tower. I will make you real cocoa. Even if it is only Conthsen. It will all be all right.”

Caleb nods slowly.

“Without the alcohol, please. My head is already spinning.”

“Of course.”

“I’m fine, Essek.”

“Yes. You are all right,” Essek says, looking through him into the depths of a dreadful memory.

And then again, softer, with a cadence almost like pride: “You are all right.”

***

A sense of normalcy returns once the set pieces of domesticity are in place: the fire crackling, his hands folded around a warm mug. Essek fusses with him—offering snacks and counting his pulse, even bringing over a hairbrush to untangle his sleep-mussed braid.

It takes some coaxing, but Essek eventually sheds his coat and shoes to curl up on the sofa beside him. He lays there, shelled and soft-limbed at last, a glassy sheen to his eyes. Caleb side-eyes him, squeezing one of the woolen-socked feet next to his lap.

“Read for me?”

“Hm?” Essek says, blinking slowly.

“Will you read for me, the next tale in Zemnian Knights? My head is full of cotton, but I would like to listen to a tale of happy endings.”

“Your head hurts?” Essek scrutinizes him instantly.

“Not so much,” Caleb murmurs with an apologetic grimace, “I was scheming to distract you from your troubles, I fear.”

“My troubles? I am not the one who …” A heavy swallow, as if the word is painful in the throat. “I’ll read, if you would like to listen.”

“Please. I would.”

With the broad-backed volume planted in the valley of his lap, Essek reads of gallantry and sacrifice.

***

As the hour grows late, Essek’s narration is broken up by slow exhales that Caleb recognizes as suppressed yawns—a skill Essek had perfected early in his youth. He cannot hide the little click of his jaw. Caleb smiles and pinches a socked toe.

“You are tired, friend. Eramira will have to await his rescue another evening.”

Essek sighs, but returns the fond look. “I suppose.”

They hold hands up the stairs for no real reason at all, but Caleb is never not hungry for closeness, and pulls his partner gladly close as they brush their teeth.

Within the shroud of their dim bedroom, Caleb changes quickly, indulging in a fresh sleep shirt, still crisply wrinkled from the wash. He sighs as he falls back against the mattress.

Essek immediately crawls on top of him, settling heavily with his arms around Caleb’s waist and his nose tucked against his neck. Caleb inhales, enjoying the way Essek’s body compresses him.

A kiss on his pulse point pins him in place. The warmth spreads, bleeds him into color as Essek’s mouth suctions onto him.

“Not so weary after all, are we?” Caleb teases, tipping his head back.

Essek finishes his bruise. Nosing along Caleb’s jaw, he rises onto his elbows, staring him down with indecipherable intensity.

“Caleb. Do you remember the lemon tart I made on Da’leysen?”

“Mhm-hm?”

Essek’s lashes are clumped like after a cry, his cupid’s bow proud above his pout. “Good.”

“What?”

“It was good. Was it not?”

“Certainly,” Caleb says breathily, because Essek is kissing his neck again.

“I will make it again, then, tomorrow.” The murmur is halfway lost behind the lobe of an ear.

“You spoil me,” Caleb whispers, sliding a hand down his partner’s back to cup his buttocks, fondly. Essek’s laugh sounds like relief.

The sex they end up having is not magnificent, because they are, it turns out, quite weary. Essek’s noises of encouragement have the rounded edges of sleepy sighs. Caleb feels the strangeness of the day press upon him like a heavy blanket, one that it is tempting to slip beneath. In the morning, things will fall back into their usual rhythm. The only novelty will be a sweet-tasting, experimental habit: Essek in the kitchen, baking.

When they are both pleased with the other’s state of satisfaction, they drift apart into their customary constellation: Caleb curling up with his back towards the wall, Essek in a sprawl beside him.

Caleb is dozing when the teeth sink into his stomach.

That is what it feels like, at least. This is far from the ice-cold whisper of a well-honed blade. The pain is jagged, instantly spiking, in the way that only a tearing of flesh provokes. Gasping, Caleb tries to uncurl himself, fumbling for the weapon that is his hands, freed from the tangle of the duvet.

What—when—who—

In a moment such as this, a thousand precautions and contingencies will run through Caleb’s mind. His attention will focus first on isolating the threat, minimizing the risk of further injury. In this case, he will cast for light, hoping to blind his presumably darkvision-endowed opponent, and fire off a spell intended to shock and distract—buy time. Then, he will make sure Essek is up and alert, out of immediate danger. Then, there is the issue of his own wound, which must be inspected and bound, or dealt with via the potions stocked in their bathroom cabinet.

Caleb does none of these things, because his body refuses him. His arms fight weakly against a suddenly drenched duvet. His legs are—somewhere. Unfelt, unreachable to him. Pain tints his thoughts like arcane emergency lights, blaring in pulses. Does he groan? Does he croak out some unintelligible expression of confused panic?

“No,” Essek says beside him, with such dreadful knowledge in his voice that Caleb stops looking for an intruder. “No, no, no, why are you doing that—”

Are you safe? Caleb wants to ask. What is happening to me?

“Stop it,” Essek is weeping, maybe, and there is something like hands gripping Caleb’s shoulders. The dark room spins and splits. “Stop—oh Light, fuck, hold still—”

Caleb’s mouth fills with the taste of blood and high-level magic.

Nine in the evening, Conthsen

Sleep parts like water above his head. Surfacing with a heavy-limbed sensation, Caleb blinks, the ceiling of the bedroom swimming into slow focus. Oh. Strange. Had he been lulled back to sleep by Essek’s well-paced narration, and been gently floated upstairs, like a dozing child? Eramira had just been rejected, and had stormed up to his room to pen a letter in runny tears and ink. There had been hot cocoa on the table.

He sits up, seeing himself dressed for sleep. Essek is not beside him, but that is no surprise. It’s barely nine in the evening; even Caleb usually does not sleep until half past ten.

Walking downstairs, he finds the living room abandoned. The table has been cleared of their mugs and plates. Lanterns bathe the room in a warm glow, but the fireplace has gone out. He walks over to breathe the logs back to life, but the embers have grown cold, barely stirring.

“Essek?” he calls, circling the room. “Essek!”

“Here,” is his distant reply. The study.

Somehow, he is not surprised. Where else would one find a wizard in distress?

And Essek is distraught, he confirms, as soon as his feet cross the oaken threshold. His partner has a tendency to fall into a singular kind of focus, when a research question demands his attention. Sometimes he wears that focus like a bejeweled robe, glinting in his eyes and gilding his every movement with excitement. Other times it pulls him taut, as if even a single errant breath would break the spell.

He is in such a mood now, Caleb knows. His face is very still, his mouth tense, as if he cups a mouthful of glass in its hollow. Hair falls over his forehead, ignored and unswept by a pondering hand.

Books litter the surface of the desk. Several of Essek’s messier notebooks (“my, ah, noodle-books, as you might say”) have been laid out side by side. Upon hearing Caleb enter, two strange things happen.

Firstly, Essek immediately steps in front of the desk, as if to hide it from view. Secondly, Essek looks at him like he is expecting— what? News from a deathbed? A slap to the face?

“Hello,” Caleb says carefully, cocking his head, “What are you up to?”

“Caleb.” His name is spoken with all the softness of a wary step onto springtime ice. When Caleb does nothing more drastic than blink, Essek continues. “I did not think you would wake again so quickly. Last time …” He shakes his head, distracted. Between his brows, his skin builds a fortress of two raised wrinkles. “I thought I had more time, is all. Forgive the mess. I have been notified of urgent business I must attend to.”

“Can I help?” A step forward, driven by curiosity, is easily disguised as a gesture of warm concern. Probably because it is precisely that, too. “Is it the Soul?”

“I—no.”

“Your family?”

“No, no …” Essek flattens his hands against the desk behind him, slouching in the high-shouldered manner of the tortured genius. Was this how he had once looked, young and ambitious and underestimated, locking himself into his private library to stew in his own misunderstood brilliance? “Go back to bed, Caleb.”

“It is a bit early to call it a night, no?” Caleb says lightly.

“Early?” A sigh. “No matter. You should rest, nonetheless. Your body has been through a lot, today.”

Puffing out air through his nose, Caleb nods. Let Essek wear himself to the bone tonight. He’s been in such moods himself, and knows it to be necessary at times. Come morning, Caleb will wrap his weary bones in a shawl and offer them hot coffee and moral support. And if Essek still does not come back to him, Caleb will tend to more drastic measures.

Perhaps he will pull the I was recently wounded in battle and need you to remind me just how alive I am strategy, though it may be less effective when Caleb still does not know exactly what happened to him. The fact still bothers him, like a sore in his mouth he refuses to poke.

The part of him where trust grows is always tender.

“I will leave you to your business, then,” Caleb relents. He swallows any unbecoming disappointment at no longer being Essek’s object of obsessive attention tonight. That is okay.

“Do you remember the lemon tart?” Essek says suddenly, when Caleb is almost at the door.

He turns, caught off guard by the change of subject. Still, it reassures him to have Essek speak of topics that do not involve national secrets or agents on his trail.

“The one you made last Da’leysen? What of it?”

Essek’s metaphorical foot cracks through the ice; his voice grows wet and resigned.

“I just wanted to let you know … I will bake it for you. Again.”

“Essek.”

“Please. Forgive me. I must do this work.”

“Tomorrow,” Caleb says quietly, “you will explain.”

He leaves his partner to the private crisis he is entertaining tonight, walking down the hallway to busy himself with other matters. Behind him, he hears the pocket watch close with a click.

***

The air outside is crisp and reassures him that he is a warm, breathing body. He enjoys winter for that simple fact. The cold traces his outline in burning skin. Soon, his nose and cheeks will be a mottled red.

He doubts Essek will stray from the study, but if he does, he will find a note on the kitchen table. Since Essek will likely not read it, he has added the subscript, You are cute, but not so cute that you are allowed to forgo trancing. At least for a little bit, dear.

Consciously, his only desire is to stretch his legs and fill his lungs with fresh air, but his well-stretched legs eventually take him down Yasha and Beauregard’s street, carried by old habits. The unshoveled snow in their yard crunches beneath his steps until it becomes too deep for safe moccasin-clad perusal. He briefly considers clearing it with a spell—ach, he does not have Pulse Wave prepared this evening, and Gravity Fissure feels like overkill. Instead, he scans the facade for curtains silver-lined by arcane reading light. He sees none.

Made brave by friendship, bracing himself for an ear-splitting curse, he raises his trusty copper wire to his lips.

“Hallo, Beauregard. Are you awake?”

A long moment passes. Her voice is pillow-soft, sleep-grumbled.

What the hell? It’s so late. Who’s dead?

“Ah, no one, as far as I know.”

Then—what? What’s up, man? I didn’t even know you two were back yet.

“Essek has been acting strange. Have the two of you been in touch tonight?”

Why would he have talked to me? Before Caleb can raise the wire to reply, she rambles on. Seriously. That man has reached out for help once in his life, and that was to commit fucking treason. I don’t think he does it lightly, you know?

“I am aware. I thought perhaps you had passed him some new information.”

Well, I haven’t. Did you walk all the way here to ask me that? We’ve got the— (She yawns) stones.

“I meant to ask you about taking a walk. But if you are in bed—”

Of course I’m in bed, you dolt. Unless anyone’s dead.

A tender kind of embarrassment strikes him; they are no longer young and overworked and easily overtaken by the need for evening walks. Only one of the factors still remains, and it demands all the nightly rest one can get.

“Goodnight, Beauregard.”

***

It must be close to midnight, he thinks, as he walks into the kitchen to find the note on the floor, as if swept down by some whirlwind in stress-clammy lilac. Concern flickers through him again. Through their years together, there are topics they have learned to leave alone and topics they have learned to press. He mulls over this as he sets water to boil.

He hears Essek call his name just as he’s placing the last cookies on the tray, carefully overlapping them along the side of the plate. It is a gesture of care he has picked up from Jester and Caduceus, because Essek does not always want to be talked to, and he does not always want to be touched. Well, not that Jester’s snack deliveries are ever silent, but there is not a single law of the universe that Jester’s love will not break.

Essek sweeps into the doorway, tousled and stern. He is out of breath and line as he snaps: “Damn it. Where were you?”

“Just taking a walk,” Caleb says, adding the next cookie to the plate a little more pointedly. See: There are nicer ways to say ‘I love you’.

Essek is not looking at the cookies, nor at the cozy curling of steam from the kettle.

“You should not have been out in your condition,” he insists, and Caleb‘s concern slowly folds itself inside out.

“Am I not healed?”

Essek’s lips twist; he staggers forward a step. Exhaustion looms tall and dark in him. How has he spent the day, to look like that? What magic has he spilled like arterial blood today? For whom?

“You are not wounded,” Essek agrees, with the hoarse, truth-heavy spill of a fortune teller, ”and yet you are not healed. Not exactly. The wound awaits you, your body remembers even if you do not, and—“

“Essek,” Caleb says. A warning, perhaps a plea. The cups and platters in his hands clatter delicately. His knuckles grow white around the edges of the tray, clinging onto the normalcy. He wants a kiss and a good night's sleep. He wants to talk about this in the morning.

“I thought I was so close. But the calculation will not hold.” A vulnerable fracture in Essek’s voice at last, failure failure failure. “It will not hold you.”

He sets the tray on the edge of the kitchen table, bowing over it with a dipped-in-cold sensation.

“Explain, please.”

“There is no time, but I will make more. I can recast at least once more. Please do not be scared.”

His partner is speaking faster now, trying to outrun his own judgement, but he is fraying at the edges of his calm, baring obscene glimpses of panic in the pink rims of his eyes and in his trembling, half-open mouth.

Caleb’s fingers curl into half-formed, helpless somatics beside the tea tray, his fingers uncertain what they want to be. Defensive. Violent. Accusatory. He can feel his face locking up, slamming the shutters and tensing his jaw.

“I do not want to watch this again,” Essek whispers, and takes a step closer.

“Watch what?”

He had learned in Vergessen that one can never tense up hard enough for those with the right keys and the wrong spells. Where is the strike coming from?

Caleb is muttering the first syllables of Intellect Fortress when pain spears him through. A Word of Power? Inhaling, he presses a hand to feel the skin above the terrible cramp, needing to assure himself of his own unbroken belly.

The fabric of his shirt is wet and warm.

Blood is bright on his open hand when he pulls it away, tracing every wrinkle like a morbid palm reading. His mouth wants to ask something terrible—Why are you letting this happen to me?—but it is too busy drowning in its own spring lake.

Caleb staggers, hits the kitchen table, coughs—my rib will bruise in the morning, he thinks nonsensically—as the tea tray crashes to the floor in a brutal shatter. The porcelain seems to bloom with red—a drip-drip-splat that spreads throughout the puddle of tea.

Why? How? Even dying, he wants more than anything to understand.

“It’s okay,” says a voice, sounding stuffy-nosed. “Please, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Looking down, he does not see the monster eating him alive. He yanks at his soaked shirt with numb movements, and there—his belly is a mouth with split lips, rows of ribs like nubs of teeth, long slick tongues unfurling.

He falls apart.

He falls to pieces.

He falls, but there are arms catching him, Essek; knees slamming right down in green tea and broken porcelain and pink, curving—things—

His partner presses some kind of fervent promise to his temple, his words popping like bubbles against the surface of water, and then Caleb is a bubble too, and he bursts.

Half past ten in the evening, Conthsen

Caleb wakes with a headache—or perhaps the headache wakes him. His exhales strike back at him, warm, close.

He is on the floor. Why is he on the floor?

His hands are not shackled.

Memories return to him, and he sorts them into orderly fashion, underlining the place where everything stops.

He had been about to leave for a walk. Yes, that was it. He had been heading into the kitchen to write a quick note to Essek, explaining his absence. Had he fallen? Slipped on the slick floor—it slides wetly beneath his fumbling fingers—and struck his head on the edge of the table?

The air does not smell of spilled cocoa.

A pinkish-white corner at his periphery catches his notice, and he reaches for it. His fingers close around a soggy piece of paper, penned in his own hand.

Essek— quick walk. Do not wait up.

P.S. You are cute, but not so cute that you are allowed to forgo trancing. At least for a little bit, dear.

Nausea rocks through him. His memories. His mind. Who has dared touch his mind?

With an icy calm he knows to be a little to the left of panic, he pushes himself into a sitting position, expecting agony and finding only a slight muscular stiffness. He sits there, leaning on his hands with his legs spread-eagled, staring at the pool of blood around him.

His blood?

It can’t be. Though it soaks him to the skin—sticky on his home-knit woolen vest, smeared in finger-streaks across his trousers—no fabric has been torn open. His chest rises and falls rapidly, and it is the sight more than the sensation that informs him he is feeling lightheaded.

Essek’s blood?

No. There is no trail leading out of the room. If Essek is still in the house, that is.

A suggestion flashes through him: Kryn agents caught up to Essek at last, murdering him right in Caleb’s arms and Teleporting away with the body.

But his memory.

His memory.

First the lost hours in the excavation camp. Then the blacking out on the sofa, awakening sleep-clad in his bed. And now this?

No one touches— no one has the right to—

His mind helpfully provides him with facts he would rather ignore. Like the way Essek had jumped and hid his desk full of papers. Or the way Essek wore the puffy-eyed look of someone who’s wrung more high-level spells from their body than it can take. Or the click of Essek’s pocket watch, snipping sharply through his every memory of the evening.

Caleb curls in on himself with a sudden, heart-stopping ache that has nothing to do with his physical condition.

No. A breath. Another.

Gather data. Eliminate the unlikely possibilities.

Get up. Careful with the wet floor. Don’t step on the porcelain shards with woolen socks.

Caleb pauses by the hallway mirror, seeing the pale shock of himself framed in tarnished silver. Crimson fingerprints paint his throat beneath both ears. His clothes are ruined. He does not even know the cantrip to cleanse them.

Essek does. Is that what he had done earlier tonight, a rapid flicking of his fingers, while Caleb slept on, unsuspecting of—what?

Caleb steps into the doorway to the study: a dripping ghost, a furious haunt.

Essek’s head snaps up from his papers—he is bent over them like a weeping willow—and his face is absolutely blank in a way that seems discordant against his blood-smeared sleeves and bruised, tired eyes. Not pausing to process the husbandly concern that threatens to swallow him whole, Caleb crosses the study in three quick steps.

Wizards do not have access to the kind of magic that can steal the lies from people’s lips, but he and Essek know far too well that there is always a way around such a problem. His teeth crush the sliver of honeycomb with a soft crunch.

“I Suggest you tell me the truth, dear.”

Forcing himself onto Essek’s unresisting will is not an experience he wishes to ever repeat. Essek goes slack in his arms, pupils expanding, a prey animal giving in—or playing dead.

“Have you modified my memories?”

“No, I— No.” Essek’s snapped denial becomes a knocked-out breath as his back hits the wall. Caleb leans in closer, their foreheads almost touching. His broad hands encircle Essek’s wrists easily, as they have done many times before, in different circumstances.

The Volstrucker that was once whittled out of his bloody flesh knows that this precaution is not up to protocol; the caster can still speak, can still form simple somatics. The person he has grown to be, all ragged tissue on top of that once clean-cut shape, replies that it is irrelevant.

Essek has every capability of harming him; Caleb knows him well enough to know his motives are foolish in some twisted, damning way.

Yet there is one line he will draw even with loved ones. There is a skill that terrifies him, even wrapped up in Jester’s sparkly bow of mischief, or silvered in his partner’s cool intellect.

“You have not?” he presses, the spell guiding his insistence.

“I have never prioritized Modify Memory for my spellbook,” Essek says, frowning through the clarification. “I have only cast—an experimental spell. My own creation.”

Caleb raises a brow, unable to keep the jagged edge of disbelief from his voice.

“You are experimenting on me?”

“Today I am,” Essek snaps, suddenly all teeth and fury. He squirms against Caleb’s hold. “Damn you, Caleb, let me go. There is not much time.”

“You will make the time to explain.”

A hissing noise escapes Essek’s mouth. Will he start kicking and biting next? Caleb presses closer, body to body, waiting for the taste of dunamis that Essek’s taut spine and curled fingers promise. They have not fought like this for a very long time.

“Your injury,” Essek insists. “You are not well.”

“No? There are hour-long gaps sliced out of my day, and I keep finding you fretting like a headless hen.”

The pressure against his eardrums thrums. It feels like being underwater, threatening and familiar. Essek shakes his head.

“An unfortunate side effect.”

“Side effect?” Caleb echoes. “Not symptom.”

Essek stiffens in Caleb’s grip, suddenly an awkward weight. Perhaps he finally realizes the depth of what he’s done. “A side effect of my spell, yes.”

Caleb lets go.

He paces the room, once, twice. Listens to the voice telling him to breathe, please; feels colors grow rich again when he does; turns back to the fugitive he once fell for and asks, simply, ”Why?”

“You would have died.” Essek remains with his back pressed to the bookshelves. Wets his lips. Curls and uncurls his red-sticky fingers. Competence shines in his far-away gaze. “Few options remained to me. Without the cleric of the research party—”

“We were well stocked on potions,” Caleb points out. Essek laughs, just one sob-like hah. The noise does not appear to expel any horror, instead it draws Essek into himself, compacting him into something that would easily burn.

“Potions … were insufficient for the extent of damage done.”

Cruelly, perhaps, Caleb makes an inquiring noise. Somehow, it is important that he learns just how he was damaged; where the fault lines lie in him. It is not morbid curiosity, not exactly. More a hunger for truth, a white-knuckled need to know that his body and his mind and the world is aligned in exactly the way it needs to be.

When he was a child, and his mother would read him fairytales, there were times where she would pause before some particularly horrid scene. Her eyes would scan the page quickly, lips pausing in a soft, thoughtful hum—he learned early to recognize it. If she tried to skip the scene, he would plead and plead until she read it to him, and he would cling wide-eyed to his pillow and listen to tales of eyeless princesses and blood on seafoam.

He only had nightmares about the scenes she kindly kept from him. A paradoxical child, he was.

“It tore you in half,” Essek says, flat-voiced, “at the waist. I had to do something. So I—”

A slow exhale, and then lecturing builds structure into him again.

“As you are well aware, healing magic can be approached from a variety of schools, commonly evocative in nature, if not necromantic or abjuring.”

Caleb nods—unable not too.

“However, there is a branch of chronurgy that also falls under this umbrella. A—theoretical branch. Unproven. Well … I am skilled at chronurgy.”

Even like this, pride sticks in Essek’s bird-throat like rocks. It grinds his problems into easily swallowed bites.

“You sent me back in time?”

“Not precisely. Only… only your matter. Your tissues. Body and—mind.”

“Tell me how it works,” Caleb breathes, knowing the words will hit Essek’s mind as suggestively as any spell.

“Time reversal is commonly imagined as standing still as the world rewinds around you. This is largely infeasible—the amount of arcane power it would demand is incredible.”

“Your spell … did the opposite,” Caleb suggests.

“Yes. The world did not rewind. You did.” Honeyed honesty pulls the pain to the surface, like poison. “To before you were hurt. To when you were all right. The wound rewound, so to speak. I thought … foolishly, I thought it would save you.”

“How far back did you send me?”

“Six hours. Then three. Then an hour and a half. I am running out of high level magic, but I have to recast, because when those hours run out, you …”

Caleb remembers the bloodbath in the kitchen.

“You catch up to the point of impact,” Essek finishes meekly.

“How long?” Caleb asks, and it is a testament to their years of partnership, both personal and professional, how Essek immediately understands. The pocket watch clicks mercilessly, an ax to the chopping block.

“An hour and four minutes remain. I can recast, but …”

The rest is needless to speak out loud. Their time is running out—Caleb’s time had run out many hours ago, and only Essek white-knuckled arcana is keeping him still breathing. For all of Essek’s endurance, he cannot hold out forever.

“Then, let us get to work, ja?”

Essek looks taken aback for all but a second, as if he still expects Caleb to stick him full of accusations; to be bled of his guilt until empty. Then the second passes, and they fall back into an intimately familiar rush, both of them reaching for Essek’s notes to put them into a semblance of order.

“I am far from the first to hypothesize on this field,” Essek mutters as he picks up some of the papers that fluttered to the floor when Caleb strode into the room. “The idea is that it puts less of a strain on the tissues, compared to traditional arcane healing, which forces tissues to knit together rapidly. By reversing the damage instead, one could reduce the risk of wrongly fused bone or muscle healed too tautly.”

“Fascinating,” Caleb mutters, eyes scanning across his partner’s scrawled notes. Essek makes the choked noise again.

A chamber in Caleb’s heart aches hollowly, knowing this to be something Essek must have been meaning to show him; had been looking forward to brilliantly laying out on a snowed-in Da’leysen, without the promise of his partner being gored in the near future hovering over them both.

Gods. Essek had seen it happen thrice already.

“There was a series of experiments in the 730s, on the effects of Time Stop on bodily tissues,” Essek continues, “considered highly unethical today, of course. Controversies aside, they laid the groundwork for the spell theory I have been building on. Here,” he hands Caleb a drafted spell proposal, still with scribbles and question marks in the margins. “Perhaps you will see something I have not, because I know each spot of ink by heart, and those lines have become the bars of my prison today.”

Caleb forgives him the dramatics; the man is red-eyed with lack of rest.

“I will look,” he promises, taking the papers with the awe they deserve, as anxiety gnaws away someplace behind his navel.

***

A time later, he is all informed but none the wiser. Essek’s brilliance gleams like starlight on the page, but it is a cold and distant theory, not graspable by his hand. It cannot save him. It never was brilliance alone that saved them.

“So, no form of healing would currently help,” Caleb summarizes, squeezing Essek’s shoulder distractedly. They are bent over the papers together.

“Not while there is no wound to heal. It is a … latent injury, if you will.”

“Canceling the spell is not an option, I take it?”

Essek shakes his head slowly. “I cannot. It is cast. Like a wind-up toy—or a clock, I suppose—it must be left to tick through the rest of its routine.”

The decreasing pace of a cymbal-crashing monkey ricochets through his skull, uncomfortably. With the phantom pain lodged in his belly, it is all too easy to picture the key in his back, being lovingly twisted.

“Could a cleric not heal the wound, if present when it— ah, re-emerges? Between all the healers we know, someone surely has Heal or an equivalent high level prepared.”

“Healing an actively reopening wound would be equivalent to mopping up the rising sea,” Essek huffs, “nor would the chronurgy working through you allow for other schools of magic to interfere. Look, this glyph series—”

He shakes the paper at Caleb, crumpling it slightly.

“No. We must create a split in the timeline. Minor, of course,” he hurries to add before Caleb’s brows rise too high. “A casting of Convergent Future.”

“That is what you call minor?”

“I must shift your tissues into a possible future where injury did not occur. Only …” His brow furrows beautifully. “Should it be performed now, or at the very last moment? Ah, it has to be the latter. I will recast my—this unnamed, horrible spell of mine, and then use Convergent Future to handpick the correct future for your past self to proceed towards …” Essek sways subtly.

“Sit, dear,” Caleb suggests, smoothing a hand down Essek’s back, which supports a hunched neck and a heavy head, above two legs that remain knee-locked before the silent, waiting desk chair. “It must be close to midnight … or, no, it wouldn’t be.”

“It’s past four in the morning,” Essek sighs, rubbing his eyes. Caleb, reassessing, sends a silent apology to Beauregard for having woken her at two in the morning for an evening stroll. “I—fuck, Caleb, I must figure this out.”

He yields to the pressure of Caleb’s hand, crumpling into the chair with a punched-out noise. Caleb keeps his palm resting on the warm curve of Essek’s nape, feeling the life in him flutter like a stressed butterfly.

It beats in him, intimately, that Essek holds his very life in his competent hands. Hands that have touched him in many ways, dug their claws into his heart and stuck their inquisitive fingers into his many pies, now drawing out the span of his days between two elegant fingertips, like a platinum cord.

There is a snag to the thread, and Caleb thinks he knows how to mend it.

“Your theory is that healing magic will be ineffective as the chronurgy spell unravels,” he says softly.

“Yes.”

“Then, after the unraveling has completed, healing would once again be possible?”

“Yes, but that— It would kill you.” Essek speaks into a hollow cave formed by the shelter of his own two hands. He speaks dazedly, as if his eyes are closed, or unfocused. Unwilling to see what Caleb is hinting at.

“Just for a moment.”

“No.” The word falls from Essek’s mouth like a stone, dropping to the table with a dull noise.

“I would return, as I have before.”

“What if you do not?”

Caleb hums, rubbing circles into Essek’s neck. It is a neurotic gesture of his own as much as it expresses a desperate wish to soothe.

I do not want to die, he thinks. Not like this. Not bloodily in the home we have built.

“I am not sated with life just yet,” is what he settles for, voice drying up in his mouth, words grating. They hit, of course, too close to conversations they have sipped at like bittersweet tea on too-short autumn evenings.

Sometimes it is Essek that airs unsubtle commentary on Reincarnate or Transmogrification. Not so much these days, though. Essek’s stubbornness is liquid metal, it takes on new shapes with the years. Other times it is Caleb whose humor touches too close to the realities of his aging body, and Essek who sits up straighter in his chair, a silent challenge to any self-deprecating designs Caleb may propose. The common denominator, he supposes, is Essek’s arms tightening around him.

“You will call, and I will come,” he promises.

Essek springs right up from the chair again, palms slamming onto the table.

“That is no guarantee,” he hisses. “Divinity is fickle. This is wizardry. This is my magic. It is my—” Breathing heavily, ragged-edged, he makes an enemy of the table again. His flesh-and-bone knuckles bruise in ways the cruel, unwieldy fabric of the world will not. “I will not let you into the hands of gods for even a second.”

Caleb watches him with a dry, stinging ache behind his eyes. The question of just how far Essek will try to bend the universe is quickly followed by the question of just how far Caleb would let him.

Caleb is no stranger to obsessively productive grief. Standing on the other side of it makes him feel all the more a phantom. He looks down at his blood-crusted woolen vest and knows he will haunt Essek’s nights to come. How desperately he wants to be there beside him when those terrors take hold.

“It may be the only way,” he says carefully, a gentle killing blow.

Essek dodges it with a sniff of disdain. “Then we will exhaust every other option first.”

Exhaust is quite the phrase. Caleb sighs, weariness breathing between them as though their bodies were tethered.

“You will kill yourself casting like this. Convergent Future is no smoke puff of a cantrip.”

His concern only serves to make Essek draw up tighter. “I can do it. I will only send you back 45 minutes this time, if the calculations hold.” Intent flashes in Essek’s eyes, sharp and broken-edged. “Then, I will find a good future for you. And I will make it mine.”

The innate part of Caleb that feels time tick by informs him that by their previous calculations, only ten minutes remain. It is staggeringly little, all of a sudden. Breathing becomes a conscious activity.

“All right. Let us try.” Exhaling, he pulls gently at Essek’s arm, towards the book-strewn two seater in the corner. “Come, sit with me.”

“How much—”

“There is still time. And we have a plan now, hm?”

Affecting a calm he does not feel, Caleb takes down a series of short form notes on the back of an old school report, jotting down their decisions from the last hour or so. They will not have time for another discussion later. Essek tucks his legs up on the sofa beside him. His fingers work through opening sigils, wrist bones popping.

“I have cursed you,” he says, in somber acknowledgment, a nauseous smile playing at the corners of his lips. Caleb shakes his head, pencil slowing.

“You have blessed me. With something far more hard-earned than divine favor.”

He reaches out, stroking a knuckle gently up the skin below Essek’s chin, still stubbornly high, despite it all.

“You have not begged the gods once in your life. You have blood on your hands because you do not stop clawing until you reach the core of your ambitions. Some of that blood is your very own, Essek.”

“Yes, well…” Essek looks wry, wrung out of hope. “I thought I could save you.”

Caleb can still taste spell-sweetness. A Suggestion of truth. His fingers tighten around his partner’s chin.

“You can. You bought me time.”

“Time I stole from you in the very same breath.”

“Yes. And you are walking a fine line, dear.”

He huffs a bittersweet breath, rubs their noses together. Pauses. He is, perhaps, slightly less of a person for having lost those ten and a half hours. They spilled from him like so much blood, lost to carpets and bed coverings and Essek’s fine shirt.

There are worse things than memories taken, he knows. But a part of him wants to ask if Essek enjoyed it: the chance to wipe a mistake cleanly from existence.

“You are the only one I would allow to get away with such a thing,” Caleb says, barely loud enough to be heard.

Essek’s eyes gleam; every instinct of self-restraint alight with a glimmer. His fingers curl into the fabric of Caleb’s shirt, so tightly it pinches at skin. He trembles. Caleb kisses the corner of his mouth. Twenty seconds remain.

“You cannot die,” Essek insists, savagely, childishly.

If he survives, will it be like this in fifty years? Out of the two of them, Essek is the one who actually executed his master plan, many years ago—and succeeded at it.

“You will not let me,” Caleb says quietly, “remember? Now come here.”

He hides the violent shaking of his hands by tangling them over Essek’s—who tears free, flexing his fingers in tense preparation.

“I—how much time—“

“Not much.”

“Caleb.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“No, no, I can’t. Not again.”

“It’s okay,” Caleb insists, counting six-five-four, “you know how to do this. We will be all right.”

Essek nods and allows Caleb to pull him close, and Caleb, terror fluttering through him, reminds himself that he will not remember what comes next.

It doesn't help much.

A quarter past eleven in the evening, Conthsen

Rising. Falling.

A gentle swell, an undercurrent.

Heartbeats against his ear.

Caleb unsticks his heavy eyelids and finds silken fabric and equally silken skin against his cheek, much like many mornings before.

He knows immediately that it is not morning. He knows, four seconds later, that it might as well be—he cannot trust his current sense of time.

Looking up, he sees the curved line of Essek’s throat, the mountain top of his chin from beneath.

“Essek?” he manages. His mouth is dry, his clothes wet again. Warmth sticks them together as he rises onto his elbows, weak as a fawn.

Essek’s head dangles back over the armrest.

Repeating his name, Caleb grabs at him, raising his head into a better position. It lolls in his hands, heavy in half-consciousness. White lashes flutter erratically. A groan vibrates against his palms.

“We are two wizards in a mess, hm?” Caleb says softly, waiting for Essek to blink himself back to wakefulness. The rebound has carved deep lines into his unfiltered expressions.

Essek sighs, squinting in a way that speaks of a migraine. Upon seeing Caleb, he sobs, just once—then, in a terrifying act of self-restraint, sucks in air through his nose and quiets.

They both know he will not be able to recast.

“Oh,” Essek exhales, swallowing. “So I failed.”

“I am still here.”

“For a little while,” he says to the ceiling. “Damn it all. It slipped from me. The gossamer thread of the right future … snapped like spider’s silk.”

He trails off. Caleb hums a note of confusion.

“Ah. You took notes.” Essek speaks as if the notes murdered his wife.

Caleb sits up, patting his pockets. In his lap, there’s a soaked-through page. Most of the scrawled words are still readable.

you have lost ¾ of an hour = as much time left

if Essek is upset, Con. future failed. not his fault

go to grove, ask Caduceus a favor

bring diamond (or two. we owe him)

essek is opposed. but will understand

you are not upset with him

“What does it say? ‘Tell Essek that sometimes it is okay to ask for help?’” Essek asks in a distant voice. Caleb glances up at him, folding the paper into neat, soggy squares.

“It is, you know.”

Two perfect tears spill down Essek’s cheeks. The set of his mouth tells Caleb he will lose any fingers that try to wipe them.

“You have to come back,” Essek rasps.

“I will do my utmost,” Caleb promises carefully. His hand finds Essek’s elbow. “Can you stand?”

“Can I—” What was likely an attempt at sitting up ends up resembling an ab crunch Beauregard would snort at in disgust. Essek scrunches his nose. “Ah, probably.”

“I will Teleport us,” Caleb says, helping him on his next attempt. He feels fine, himself, which is all the more jarring. Someone died on this sofa—almost died—and it shows.

Briefly, he considers the possibility of repurposing the cell-rewinding spell for perpetual production of donor blood. A shadow stretching out behind that thought figure is the ways in which it could be used for torture.

He sighs, sharply. “Come, let us pack. Lean on me. You have done well, hm?”

“You know my opinion on that,” Essek mutters, the rebound having, apparently, poured lead and misery into his every bone. “But I—I have tried. I really have.”

A moment later, he continues, sullenly quiet. “Well. I suppose I could have cast a few Sendings.”

***

They freshen up. Caleb has learned, painstakingly over the years, that such care is never wasted. He hangs his shirt to dry, washes quickly with a rag, and dons fresh clothes. He combs through his hair. He presses fingers against his numb face.

After all these years, this slow walk to the metaphorical gallows should feel more profound. Is it hope that muzzles his panic? Ah. In the end, it is quite simple. He does not wish to die. He trusts both Essek’s and Caduceus’ skilled hands, as he is passed from one pair to the other, and he trusts himself. That is no small achievement.

Down in the entryway, Essek is fussing with a stack of their notes. Diamonds clatter delicately in his cross-body bag.

“I Sent to Caduceus,” Essek states hoarsely, upon noticing him. “He is at the Grove, so it should be— It should be fine. It will be just the three of us, but we will do well.”

“Mhm. That is good.”

They look at one another in silence. Essek’s neutral brows slowly relent to the frown that draws them in. He sighs, raising trembling fingers to his mouth. Caleb watches him, quietly remorseful that he never took Sending, quietly proud of Essek’s acquiescence.

What their friends do not know would have hurt them. It still might—will—hurt them, but it is the kind of hurt that will prompt too-tight hugs and fond accusations of foolishness. One can hope, at least.

“Jester,” Essek speaks into the wavering spell thread between his fingers. “Something has happened to Caleb. Teleporting to the Grove for Caduceus’ aid. Will report back in less than an hour. Please alert our friends.”

After having squinted through the reply surely tolling through his mind, Essek looks back at him and bows his head. “Well. They will all be aware of the situation shortly.” He looks just a little paler.

“Thank you,” Caleb says, and means it.

He raises his forearm towards Essek, as if this were a date of some kind. A date like no other. There are eighteen minutes until he dies.

Firm-faced, damp-nosed, and elegant, Essek takes his arm. They disappear. The house remains, half-lit and stained, waiting to have its floors mopped, its pillows straightened, and its candles blown out.

***

Perpetual summer embraces them like an overeager friend. The heat is dulled by the early hour, though the insects make up for it in their incessant song.

They step onto fresh grass, caught in time much like Caleb himself. He had asked Caduceus about it once, why grave clerics would worship in a place without natural decay. Did the Wild Mother only find beauty in growth? Caduceus had looked at him in surprise and said, Well, there’s rot all over the Grove. The bog, the nice compost out back, the snags. Things die even in summer. You just notice it less.

Essek’s fingers dig into his forearm as he drags Caleb towards the cluster of buildings, tucked into the lush bosom of the garden. The only Clay they see is Colton, standing by the cracked-open door, as if waiting for them. His beard has filled out in the past years, making him look more like the older brother that he is, and the protector he clearly wants to be. Caleb likes him all the more for it.

“Hello, Colton. We were hoping to speak to Caduceus?” Caleb finds himself tapping out seconds on his thigh, and stops himself. Colton points in a southeastern direction, towards the woods slowly being drenched in the watercolor tints of dawn.

“He’s out basket weaving. By the wisterias.”

“Basket weaving! He knew we were coming,” Essek grumbles as they march in the aforementioned direction.

“Did you explain our situation?”

“No,” Essek says defensively, “it is a little challenging in twenty-five words.”

***

They find him sitting cross-legged in the speckled light of the wisteria copse, weaving twine with a languid sort of focus so very typical of him. The half-complete basket is tucked into his lap. He hums at their approach, and Essek greets him with a clear note of relief.

“Caduceus. Do you have Revivify available?”

“Who’s dead?”

“Someone will soon be.”

“Is that a threat?”

Caduceus looks up from his weaving, and Essek halts, his brisk efficiency entirely subverted.

“I—is that a jest?”

Caduceus shrugs. “You’re not laughing.”

“I am afraid you’ve caught us at a stressful time,” Caleb smiles apologetically. Beside him, Essek tightens his grip.

“Listen, Caduceus. In—how many minutes?”

Caleb clears his throat. “Eleven.”

“In eleven minutes, Caleb will be grievously injured. This injury will appear seemingly spontaneously. We must let it kill him. Then you must bring him back.”

Caduceus blinks, a slow rise and fall of lashes. “Wow. That’s a lot.”

“It is,” Caleb confirms. “The injury is natural. Was. There is, ah, time fuckery involved. We have worked through the spell theory thoroughly, and come to the conclusion that this is the only way forward.”

“Well, okay. Let me just finish this row.”

“Forgive my discourtesy, but time is somewhat of the essence,” Essek says, discourteously. “Do you not need to prepare for the ritual?”

“I am preparing,” Caduceus says mildly. “You have the diamond? That, and peace of mind, is all I need. And I won’t have peace of mind if I don’t finish this row.”

His gaze finds Essek’s home-knit shawl, tossed on over his nightshirt, then wanders off to Caleb.

“You of all people know that it’s uncomfortable to leave things unfinished. Isn’t that true?”

“It’s true,” Essek says, a beat too late for casualness.

“Well, then, if you don’t mind. You two can get ready.” Caduceus smiles and gets back to work.

Caleb glances to where Essek is standing beside him, back straight as a pin, his breathing strangely even. He notices Caleb looking, and his responding smile is thin.

“Let us get you, ah, comfortable,” he says weakly, directing Caleb to a particularly lush patch of grass. Watching him, unable to express the many-faceted swell of emotion in his chest, Caleb unbuttons his shirt—no need to stain another—and folds it to the side. He lays down with the aid of Essek’s guiding hands, huffing out a breath as he relaxes back into the open arms of the Bone Orchard. Sixty feet aside and six feet down, many others lie in similar rest.

Ach, even morbidity is beautiful in this place.

The cool grass tickles his skin, tracing out memories like a childhood game. It spells out sunburnt ears and freckled backs. The sweet sting of cow dung and flowers in the thick air. Aching shoulders, blistered thumbs, grassy spots on the knees of every pair of trousers. Bright light through closed eyes, like now, burning in pink until a cloud passes by.

A shadow falls over him. Opening his eyes, he sees Essek leaning over him, sharp dawn light spinning his hair into sugar floss, setting his ears aglow.

“Don’t look so peaceful,” his moody cloud grouches.

“Worry not,” Caleb murmurs, reaching up to trace his outline. Rain will not fall until later, he knows. “There is still some unrest in me.”

“I love you,” Essek says, with a sudden rawness, as if he had planned to say something else. Caleb keeps touching his face with a sort of helplessness he rarely feels.

“Kiss me?”

“You are reclining in a flower field with your hair unbound. I am not going to kiss you. This is not a fairy tale.”

If it was, he would have been unable to look away from the pages. Ironically enough, he is unable here too. He wishes the sun would have waited a few more minutes to rise.

“Hm. Too bad.”

Essek frowns, hands shifting in his lap. They hold no waiting sigils this time. There is nothing to do but watch.

“I am too nervous to kiss.”

“Okay. Then I must warn you that I will speak to you. Heartfelt words of mine. Is that all right?”

“I can take it,” Essek murmurs.

Caleb’s hand falls back to his chest, because touching is probably too much on top of everything.

“Lovely Essek,” he sighs, seeing Caduceus beginning to put away his things. “No matter where this goes, separate your guilt and grief like seeds from sand. I know it is hard. I know. But the only thing you could have done differently was to not suffer it alone.”

Essek does him the favor of not protesting, though his lashes flutter quickly, his courtly version of an eye roll.

Caduceus has settled beside them now, crossing his legs once more, tucking their lanky lengths into place with fuzzy-knuckled hands. He does not comment on their display, nor does he avert his gaze, radiating his very own brand of peaceful, benevolent arrogance.

Caleb tosses him a quick smile, and turns back to his stone-faced lover, sculpted by the speckled light into an ivy-clad effigy. The aura of timelessness is an illusion; he is never closer to cracking open than when he gets like this.

“Your magic is terrifying. It is an honor to witness it up close,” Caleb says, intensely, insistently. “To feel it so intimately as I have.” Essek flinches, a scrunch of the nose. “You genius. Beloved hubris-ridden madman. Desperate, arrogant, kindhearted Essek.”

“Don’t say that,” Essek says wetly, “before you know if it will be enough.”

“Diamond?” asks Caduceus mildly, palm out.

“Oh, yes,” Essek exhales, sniffling sharply, “yes, here.” Rummaging within his cross-body bag, Essek fishes out two huge, brilliantly cut diamonds, which still somehow manage to look small within the cradle of Caduceus’ palms. Caduceus rattles them irreverently.

“Mister Essek, you understand it won’t help to—”

“I know. Just … keep the change.” Essek blinks. “I am being rude.”

“You’re scared,” Caduceus observes genially.

“Brilliant observation,” Essek says in a crisp whisper under his breath, and then cringes at himself with a delicate clench of the eyes. His gaze spears Caleb again, his hand finds his: clammy cool fingers squeezing soft crisscrossed skin.

“It is time,” Caleb says, fear rising cold in the back of his throat. “Caduceus, thank you for doing this for me. I hope—“

A sharp sting slithers through his gut. “Well, I hope this works,” he exhales.

Looking down his bare-chested body, he is witness to flesh parting like a red eye opening—and if that isn’t an uncomfortable association. Another wound opens, a row of eyesores, dark blood spilling in rivulets down the sides of his heaving, hairy belly.

Essek squeezes his hand painfully, drawing his attention—or a minor part of it—away from his own evisceration. By his other side, the cleric remains grave, though curiosity gleams in his smallish eyes. Caleb cannot blame him, feeling himself unfolding like an anatomy textbook. Pain buzzes through his thoughts, it becomes difficult to not panic.

Was it like this every other time? Is something going wrong? What a foolish thought; he is dying; he is meant to die.

The sound of his skin tearing is loud. Perhaps it is just the feeling. He clutches at his stomach, curling in, suddenly and fiercely protective of this dear body, his legs slipping on dew-damp grass.

Calm drizzles over him. The magic of a friend is not the worst thing to sink into at a time like this. Still, it is strange to feel clerically pacified in such a clear moment of death. He feels tranquilized, pinned in place by the pinprick rays of the rising sun, an admired butterfly someone forgot to drench in alcohol.

His heart flutters weakly. He is crowded in by brilliant people who will preserve him well when he goes.

His vision goes dark, and he dies.

Six in the morning, Folsen

Essek dreams of glyphs beneath their feet. The dusty crack of a tile giving way, the spill of arcane charge across skin.

He dreams of yelling out, Hurry! Get through! instead of Get back! like he should have done. He had only wanted—wanted, wanted. That is always the issue with him.

He dreams what is not really a dream, but a memory he studies from every angle, until he knows its shape by miserable heart. Every time, he yells the wrong line.

It was only right for him to undo that kind of damage, when the possibility was at his fingertips. It was his right. Was it not?

When Essek’s gaze unblurs from trance, his limbs still feel heavy. It is ironic, surely, that he was the one sent upstairs for mandatory bed rest, while Caleb had awoken from death with a sore neck and morning breath. It was Caleb who had the spell energy to send Caduceus off to find Beauregard, whose Archive circles would take them to Nicodranas, before Caduceus’ Word of Recall would bring them back to the Grove again. This plan was whipped together in the matter of seconds.

By now, most of their friends would be here. A lovely little family gathering. Essek sniffs. He does decidedly not sniffle.

It thrums through him like regret or like love, two feelings that get you willing to do almost anything. He had been clutching Caleb’s injury close, like it was his very own blood that was spilling. Selfishness is a silken thing to slip into, he may never outgrow it.

The stairs creak beneath him as he descends, turning heads in the Clay living space. Beau, Jester, and Kingsley sprawl around the table. He feels a stab of regret at the lack of Fjord’s presence; he’s always understood tough calls better than some. Between them, center of their little gravitational circle, sits Caleb, looking fresh as a daisy.

Jester instantly runs over and wraps her arms around Essek. She hugs him into stiff discomfort, into softening embarrassment and beyond, until he reaches the point where his spine melts and he gives in with a breath she gladly squeezes from his lungs. Only then does Beauregard start throwing verbal daggers across the room.

“‘Have you reached out to Essek, Beauregard?’” she quotes angrily at him—though it's a high-boil, low-heat kind of anger. “No, and he sure as hell hasn’t reached out in return.”

“I did,” Essek carefully does not grumble. Jester’s muffling shoulder does not help his cause. “Eventually.”

“Yeah,” Beauregard says, “and by then it was too late for us to help.”

“It was not too late. I made it so.”

“That’s some crazy, fucked-up magic,” Jester says far too appraisingly, pulling back to hold his shoulders like she’s proud. “Maybe that’s the kind of healing I should get into. Just, You got brutally injured? Boop! No, you didn’t!”

“Ah,” Essek says.

“We will investigate the theory further first, yes?” Caleb’s voice, crackling with enough warmth to be felt even across the room. Essek looks back at him, mournfully.

“Perhaps not. I realize it is not a procedure to be done lightly to someone.”

It is the closest to an apology he can manage, with the consequence of his actions sitting comfortably across the room, scratching at his beard.

He regrets not asking. He regrets not answering.

That is all.

Caleb must know what paths his thoughts are determinedly marching down—what cliff they are marching towards—for he gets up, shimmying past Kingsley with a murmured apology.

“Those eleven hours off his back sure did wonders,” Kingsley observes with an arch of the brow. “Spry young man. Death does wonders to a sore back, you know.”

“Yeah, well, he won’t get out of morning stretches,” Beauregard mutters. Her gaze shifts to Essek, and hardens, though it does not lose its warmth. “And I have serious words for you, next time we spar. I mean that.”

“I will be there,” Essek nods.

He is passed from Jester’s to Caleb’s arms, though their press of bodies remains short and chaste, neither of them too fond of such public displays.

They all know Essek has bent Caleb’s time to glutton himself on more of it. That’s revealing enough.

“Rest well?” Caleb asks him, after a single hard squeeze.

“Yes. And you?”

“Unpeacefully.” A quick twitch of a smile. Another pat to his shoulder. “Come. Let us walk.”

“Walk the plank well, friend,” Kingsley grins at Essek as he follows Caleb to the door. “Remember what I taught you: Don’t fight the water.”

***

In the garden—if it can be called such a thing, unruly as it is—Caleb walks the path with steady steps. Essek follows behind, drinking in the eyeful of his familiar figure.

He is upset with me, Essek thinks distantly, less due to the breach of trust, and more due to the depths of my greed. But I can only work on changing the former.

They pause by a turn in the path, overlooking the wild onions. Essek has to admit the leaves look lush.

“You know,” Caleb says, watching the breeze ripple through grass and weeds, “you scare me sometimes.”

“You scared me today,” Essek counters. He tugs his borrowed shawl tighter around his shoulders. It’s a windier day; unrestful, much like his partner’s short-lived death. Good. There is so much more work to do. He has no desire to make room for grief in his life.

“I am sorry for that.”

“I am sorry you got hurt, too,” Essek says, blatantly apologizing for the wrong thing.

Caleb turns to him with a soft sigh, eyebrow raised in unsurprised disbelief. “You are being a bit of a brat.”

“Yes.” Then: “Only because I love you.”

Caleb makes a doubtful noise. “Not only.”

“I suppose not.”

Stepping closer, Caleb becomes a warm presence next to him. It is difficult not to lean into it, but Essek needs to stay firm. He shivers when Caleb places a hand carefully against his lower back.

“The day will come.” Caleb’s voice is so kind, as if it matters. “Later rather than sooner, ideally. But it will come.”

“You cannot expect me not to try to stop it,” Essek exhales in a rush.

“No. That would make me a hypocrite.” Crow’s feet gild his eyes when he smiles. Essek can’t stop looking. “Just promise me you will not succeed.”

“I will try,” Essek says at last, and this time, Caleb lets him get away with the double meaning.