Chapter Text
“Where will you go from here, friend?” Caleb asks on their final night in Eiselcross together.
They have made it out of the winding labyrinth of the Aeorian ruins and have set up camp just outside one of the cavern entrances. Essek’s companion still has ash in his hair and dark circles of worry blooming under his eyes from the destruction of the T-dock. There is a tell-tale streak of iron power across his cheek, a remnant of that decisive disintegration spell.
They are, both of them, drained — settled cross-legged and slumped under Caleb’s dome. Essek himself is chewing listlessly on a dried strip of jerky, waiting for the pot of water over the central fire to boil for tea.
The question catches him completely off guard. It seems altogether too heavy for this moment, when so much weighs them down already.
“I, well, I cannot say,” he replies.
Not back to the outpost, certainly, where his pursuers will be expecting him. Not back to Rosohna, once home and now the heart of enemy territory. Not to anywhere that feels comforting or familiar.
“I suppose,” Essek manages at last. “I suppose I shall have to live on the run for a while. I do not think the Bright Queen will be quick to either forget or forgive my treachery.”
“Ja,” Caleb replies, nodding his bowed head slowly. “I feared as much.”
“And you?” Essek says, eager to turn the discussion away from himself. “You will go back to Rexxentrum?”
“For a while,” Caleb says. “To teach. But I will spend some time in Nicodranas as well. To make a start on Luc’s magical education.”
Essek cannot help but smile at that. He has seen Caleb with the young halfling only a handful of times, but his interactions with the child are always endearing — the seriousness with which he addresses the boy, always speaking to him as an equal.
“What will you start him on?” he asks, softly, thinking he already knows the answer.
A grimace that Essek has learned represents a smile spreads across Caleb’s face, as much of it as Essek can see with him still looking down and folded in on himself.
“Message, I think,” he says.
It is a surprise. Essek was sure he would choose fire bolt. The flames come to him so easily.
“It is sentimental, you see,” Caleb explains. “It was the first spell I taught his mother. After we broke out of jail. You remember I told you about my time as a petty thief.”
He has. There have been many nights to fill while they explored the ruins together. Nights spent by the fireside in the library of Caleb’s tower, sharing drinks and trading stories —Essek got a full accounting of the many ill-advised cons Caleb and Veth pulled in their early days together and repaid his companion with anecdotes of his most embarrassing spell failures when just learning the basics of dunamancy.
He laughed particularly hard at the story of Essek accidentally increasing his own personal gravity field when perfecting his float cantrip. He had had to crawl his way up the stairs to his lab for a dispelling stone to deal with the problem, legs too weak to deal with the extra weight.
The pot on the fire starts to boil, and Essek busies himself making tea. He pulls two earthenware mugs from his pack, adds a pinch of the tea leaves Caduceus gifted him and pours in the water. One mug he places at Caleb’s knee and the other he cradles in his own frozen fingers, soaking in the warmth.
He feels, in this moment, as though he will never be properly warm again. Maybe it’s the weeks spent in the frigid north, or maybe it's the prospect ahead of him now — facing the world homeless and anchorless. It does seem like a very cold existence.
Across the fire, Caleb is fiddling with something around his neck, buried beneath the layers of scarf and sweater and shirt. Essek carefully averts his eyes from the sight lest he focus too much on the sliver of skin his action reveals, a hint of chest hair glinting gold in the firelight.
He feels his face flush and buries his nose in his mug to camouflage the warmth that creeps along his cheekbones and up to the tips of his ears, or at least give himself plausible deniability. The twinge of longing that curls through his body, even as exhausted as he is, twines together with shame.
It’s a useless emotion — utterly pointless and likely unwelcome — but he lets himself feel it anyway. Lets it wash over him and settle somewhere amorphous between his heart and gut, pulsing dully. Essek knows by now how he can get when he cuts himself too far off from such things, from emotion and care for others in whatever form it takes. He knows how easy it can be to float through the world and never let it touch you, and never see how your actions cause harm.
He can’t go down that path again. So he has to find a balance — to take the feelings as they come, but be strong enough not to project them back to others or shape them into demands. Essek doesn’t have the right to demand anymore.
“Before we part ways for a while,” Caleb’s words pop Essex’s bubble of thought, and his eyes flick up to his companion once more. “I have something I wanted to give you.”
He’s still fidgeting nervously with something, but as Essek watches he ducks his head and pulls a chain from around his neck. This is transferred to a cupped palm and weighed for a second before the palm is proffered out to Essek.
“I … Did not know we were exchanging gifts.”
Essek leans forward to inspect, but does not yet reach out for the item in Caleb’s hand. It is a coiled chain attached to what looks like a heavy, weathered brass key, its teeth intricately traced with runes.
“We are not,” Caleb says, one corner of his mouth tilting upward. “This I have made for you. I intended to have it ready sooner, but it proved more, uh, challenging than I anticipated.”
Ah, Essek thinks. Magic, then.
“You might have asked me if you needed assistance,” he says, unable to keep the warmth from his voice. Magical collaboration with Caleb is, after all, one of his favorite things.
“Ja, but that would have ruined the surprise,” the other wizard replies.
The fire, Essek thinks, must finally be doing its job, because Caleb’s cheeks have gone a dusky pink now, a truly entrancing color. He keeps his eyes on the man’s face when he reaches out for the proffered chain, finding the metal warm from being tucked close to the skin. His hand doesn’t tremble. It’s just a trick of the flickering firelight that makes it seem so.
“I, ah, I am surprised,” he says. “And where is the lock for the key?”
“That’s a bit complicated.”
“I flatter myself I comprehend many complicated things.”
Caleb is twisting his fingers together in his lap now, almost as though he is forming the somatics for a spell, but without the usual accompanying ozone crackle of magic.
“It is a key,” he manages at last. “To the tower.”
“To your tower?”
It is almost as though Caleb is speaking in Zemnian instead of Common. Essek’s brain can’t quite catch at the meaning. He has seen Caleb summon the tower many times, has seen the wand and the trinkets he uses to perform the spell. He has never seen a key involved in the process.
“Ja, ja, ja,” Caleb says, at last straightening his spine and spreading his fingers steady across his knees. “The tower.”
“I don’t have that spell,” Essek says, dumbly.
“I will give that to you too,” Caleb says. “If you have want of it. But this is different. It … I made an alteration to the spell. Ach, I told you it was complicated.”
Essek feels his pulse tick up at the idea of a new spell from Caleb.
“Explain.”
“I created a sympathetic bond between this,” and here Caleb pulls the dark wooden wand from a pocket of his coat and flourishes it at Essek. “And your key. So now whenever I summon the tower the key will react. It should be a simple warming of the metal. It may glow a bit. And when it does this, it will allow you access to the tower.”
“But I am going away,” Essek says, still frustratingly muddled. I am going away from you, he wishes to say, but refrains.
“Location is irrelevant,” Caleb says, voice low and fervent. His eyes are glowing with firelight and accomplishment. “So long as we are on the same plane, your key can access the tower regardless of where you are.”
The gears turning in Essek’s brain finally click into configuration. He remembers a distant garden on the edge of the Savalirwood; remembers Caleb kissing him on the cheek and telling him not to be a stranger; remembers the six months he went without a word from the man, only sure he wasn’t dead when he was mentioned in one of Jester’s unpredictable sendings.
He is being handled. Essek can hardly resent this, but it does sting just a little. The magic Caleb is describing is plainly impossible. Well, perhaps not strictly impossible, but certainly rule shattering. The wizard before him is probably capable of such a thing, but not in the few weeks they have been traveling together in Aeor, in between battling monsters and deciphering age-old spells and records.
Essek grips the key so hard he can feel the teeth bite sharp into the meat of his palm.
It is a nice thought to leave him with, he supposes. The ability to turn a key and see his dear friend whenever he wishes. Yes. It is a kindness. He relaxes his grip and smiles at Caleb.
“You are a wonder,” he says.
“I am extraordinarily motivated,” Caleb replies. “May I?”
He nods his head in the direction of Essek’s closed fist, and Essek numbly opens and offers the key and chain back to him. Gingerly, Caleb plucks the chain from his palm. He scoots around the edge of their fire so that they are side by side, knees bumping together, and motions for Essek to lean forward. He complies, bowing his head toward the other man.
He closes his eyes tightly, breathing in Caleb’s familiar scent — wood smoke and incense and ink. The chain settles cold against the back of his neck, pulled taut by the weight of the key. Mirroring the fall of metal, Caleb’s fingers trace from his nape down across the furred lapels of Essek’s winter coat and down to the point where the key hangs at his sternum. He tugs once, and Essek looks up to meet Caleb’s lopsided grin with a wan smile of his own.
“It suits you,” the other wizard says, voice a rough whisper.
The sound of Essek’s pulse rumbles in his ears. There is so little space between them just now, a scant few inches. He can see the faint amber striations in Caleb’s blue eyes, the way his lips are chapped and cracking from the cold of their environment, a spot of ink that has been spilled upon his scarf.
“I thank you,” he says after a too-long pause. “This is a very thoughtful gift.”
More than a little overcome, Essek clears his throat and moves back a few inches.
His movement breaks the tension that had stretched between them without Essek even noticing. He rolls his shoulders and begins digging through his pack for one of the notebooks they uncovered in one of the underground laboratories.
“Now, drink your tea and come and give me your opinion on these equations.”
Caleb obligingly drains his cup, then moves so he can look over Essek’s shoulder at the notebook in question. They forego further discussion of the future and instead bury their noses in ancient arcane equations until it is time to sleep.