Chapter Eight:
Uncomfortable Parallels
If y'all wanna yell at me about this or CR my art tumblr is introspectres
…
The next day passed in an autumn haze. The crisp wind burrowed through the cracks of the barge and chilled Caleb's fingers and toes, trapping him below deck while twiddling his thumbs in the crew's quarters to escape the brunt of the cold. When a sleepy Beau informed him needed to take the evening nurse shift, he jumped up a bit too eagerly.
He wove through the well-tread path to the alcove and rounded the corner to find Nott sitting with the tieflings, an array of colorful playing cards spread out between the three. The dredges of last night's candles in their fogged lanterns flickered around the edges of the alcove, casting a warm glow that fought the dropping temperature. Frumpkin reclined in Molly's lap, fat pooling around him as if he was made of liquid, and he blinked lazily at Caleb.
"Jester," Nott said. "Do you have any twos?"
"Go fish!" she said with a cheeky grin that caused a dotting of breakfast crumbs to tumble off her face.
"Morning, Caleb," Molly called over Nott with a grin. He held up his handful of cards then nodded to Jester and Nott, who were down to two and three cards respectively. "I think I'm being swindled."
Nott turned to address Caleb. "He started cheating first."
"I don't doubt it," Caleb said and stepped over Nott's scattered piles of cards as Jester drew another hand from the deck. He settled himself against the wall between Molly and Jester, completing the half-circle they'd already formed.
"Nott, do you have any…aces?" Jester asked, wiggling her eyebrows with an widening grin. Her tail flicked in anticipation.
Nott scowled. "No."
"Are you sureee?" Jester asked.
"Yup," Nott said.
Molly leaned over to see her cards, distracting Nott long enough for Jester to snatch two of Nott's cards out of her hands.
"Hey," Nott said, grabbing for her cards, but Jester held them out of reach and flashed her now full suite of aces for all to see.
To the chagrin of her fellow players, Jester ended the game on her round, taking Nott's final card then methodically, painfully, every one of Molly's.
"That was fun," Jester said as she counted out the stacks around her.
"I think I can conclusively say I'm more of a Three-Dragon Ante person," Molly said and offered his measly stack of cards back to the reforming deck.
Nott hummed in agreement, still frowning at her piles compared to Jester's.
Caleb reached into his component pouch, withdrawing more soot and salt, but this time he sprinkled it on the ground before him. It caught in the worn grooves of the wood but still allowed him to draw a sigil with his index finger.
"That's different than last time," Molly noted.
Caleb nodded. "It takes less energy if I cast it this way. You guys may want to start another game though," he said.
"And let Jester stack the deck again?" Molly asked.
"I'm just really really good at remembering what people ask for," Jester said, batting her eyelashes innocently.
So, without much further protest, the three biggest cheats in the Mighty Nein started their next game. Molly let his cards dance through his fingers, teasing Nott with the opportunity to see their faces. Nott held her cards close to her chest, and Caleb swore at one point he saw her pulling the second card from the deck instead of the top. Jester, to her credit, played more casually, only taking a slight lead this time.
Until a handful of cards fell out of her sleeve.
Nott dove for them and Molly threw his cards up in surrender, ending the game.
"Sorry, I really don't know where those came from," Jester said, only able to keep the façade of sincerity for a moment before a smile split her face.
"Weird how those things happen, isn't it?" Molly asked, matching her grin as the three started to clean up the cards a second time.
The sigil before Caleb simmered, subtle magic radiating off the brand like water about to boil. It shouldn't take much longer now.
"Nott, can you pass us those books?" Molly asked. "Caleb's going to read to us soon."
"He is?" Nott asked with wide eyes, looking to Caleb.
Caleb's eyes dropped to the floor. "Um, ya, that was the plan. Unless you guys would rather—"
"Speaking personally," Molly interjected, "I can only lose so many card games in one day and welcome the change of pace."
"The book is a little boring," Jester said to Nott, "There's no romance," she explained solemnly. "But the magic is kind of interesting, I guess?"
Caleb gave Nott a rundown of the story thus far before Jester could butcher its nuance.
Beside them, Molly unwound his bandages and revealed the inflamed, scorched flesh beneath. It looked painful but considerably better than it had two days ago. Molly flexed his fingers experimentally and rotated his hands to inspect them.
Caleb held back a sigh of relief upon seeing how quickly the burns were healing. The was good.
The sigil on the ground sparked to life, sending that familiar, cool wave of magic washing over Caleb. Looking around to find he held the attention of all three listeners, he flipped open the book to where they'd left off.
"So the young wizard, Faust, spent the afternoon practicing the spell he learned," Caleb began. The story went on, spending too much time on the mundane actives of Faust's daily life with only a glimmer of the magic theory Caleb enjoyed. Jester broke out her sketchbook and doodled pictures of the four of them sitting there while Nott fiddled with the playing cards.
In time, Molly too took up a secondary activity. He pulled his crumpled coat out from behind his back and spread it out before him to again survey the damage. Frumpkin meowed in irritation and hopped off his lap. He passed Caleb without a glance and settled back down on Jester's legs.
"You know when I get better I can try and use Mend on that," Jester said quietly.
Caleb paused reading.
"I appreciate it, but I think I have a plan," Molly said. "If it doesn't work I'll take you up on that though."
Satisfied, Jester went back to drawing, and Caleb continued to read.
Molly's plan involved withdrawing the burnt sash along with a small, nondescript box from his pile of things stacked around his pallet. He flicked open the box with his thumb and withdrew a slender needle and a spool of thread. Preparing to thread the needle, he popped the end of the thread in his mouth and ran it across his lips. He met Caleb's gaze with raised eyebrows and an amused smile.
It was at that point Caleb realized he'd stopped reading a while ago.
He averted his gaze, trying to fight down the burning embarrassment from being caught staring, and began to read again. While Faust continued to practice his magic and go on with his unremarkable childhood, Caleb watched Molly in his periphery patch the burned holes in his coat with the unburned sections of the peach shawl, stitching them together in a repetitive, looping motion.
Faust's childhood plodded along at a snail's pace until his father died in a hunting accident.
"Yikes," Molly mumbled.
"Aw, I liked him," Jester said with a sigh.
"It seems a little out of the blue, ya?" Caleb said, frowning at the text. The jarring tone shift sent him off-kilter, and as Caleb continued reading, describing Faust's initial shock, denial, and then the heavy oppressive grief, an icy familiarity crept its way up his spine. Faust's two sisters recovered from the loss, but the grief changed Faust and his mother.
Caleb's hands paled and his palms went sweaty.
This was just a story.
Just fiction.
Faust's resulting depression from his father's death sprawled on through several more chapters that Caleb skimmed through, skipping entire paragraphs at times. Eventually, that depression turned to fear of his own mortality, so Faust dove back into his magical studies with a renewed fervor with the goal of finding a solution to his chilling existential dread.
"So he's doing all of this because he's scared of dying?" Molly asked, face screwing up in confusion at the very notion. "Besides, you said he was an elf right? He's still got, like, what, a thousand years on the rest of us anyway?"
"You could do a lot of things in a thousand years," Jester said thoughtfully. "Caleb, you could probably read all the books in all the libraries, you know?"
He shrugged. A thousand years probably wouldn't be enough for that, but it was possible.
"I think it might be kinda sad to be that old though," Jester continued, tapping her chin with her finger. "Everyone else is like a little kid to you at that point."
Caleb nodded at the insight. "I would imagine it would be frustrating at times."
"And sad," Nott said, fiddling with her flagon. "If all your friends don't live as long."
"Aww, I didn't even think of that," Jester said with a frown. "It must be awfully sad to be an elf."
"None of us get to pick our lot in life," Molly said.
"Just what we do with it," Caleb added quietly, and Molly hummed in agreement.
Caleb managed to read several more pages before the ritual ended and forced him to reup the spell.
Molly, Nott, and Jester rekindled a casual discussion sprinkled with yawning while Caleb mused on Faust's supposed goal. He probably desired immortality, and for a strong and ambitious enough wizard, several avenues existed in pursuit of that end.
The spell Caleb used to time travel might suffice. But that was old magic. Deep magic. Capricious and cruel with an alien intelligence about it bent on tormenting the user and inflicting twisted poetic justice. The more one demanded of it, the more that was demanded in return. It was why he'd broken his time jump into two pieces and sacrificed such a large amount of resources up front—to mitigate the price he paid after the transaction completed.
During his years of research, he hunted down a handful of tales of past users of that specific spell. Most faded into legends and folk tales, vastly overblown and unverifiable, but with a grain of truth still. One woman wished for immortality and was transformed into a mountain. One man wished for the death of his enemies, resulting in a flood that killed his loved ones as well. A third wizard, the elusive case Caleb based most of his own equations off of, attempted time travel and was successful, but was transported into the middle of the ocean with no means of returning.
The magic reminded him of the dodecahedron in a sense. Infinite and incomprehensibly powerful. Ancient power that tapped into some dizzying core facet of the universe mere mortals weren't built to endure.
But Caleb had, and he wasn't done yet.
As far as the immortality question went, besides Caleb's spell, some form of reincarnation perhaps? Or he'd heard rumors of some powerful magic users artificially creating younger bodies for themselves, but he couldn't vouch for the veracity of that either. Then maybe something darker, like vampirism?
Many wizards throughout history chased the same goal only to be killed by the price extracted by it.
It was a fool's errand.
But who was he to talk.
His ritual bubbled to completion, and Caleb read on. As the story progressed down its new path, his earlier anxiety faded in lieu of his own curiosity.
Faust, a young man now, ravenously sought out new magic, interacting with every adventurer who passed through the small farm town to increase his knowledge. The book went to great lengths to describe every wonderous traveler and during those long stretches of prose Jester drifted to sleep, sketchbook still open in her lap.
Nott scooted forward, lifting the book out of her lap with grace and skill only she was capable off before setting herself between Caleb and Jester. She leaned into him and flipped through the sketchbook, occasionally drawing something funny or profane amidst Jester's scrawling hand.
Faust made it to his first extended leave from home before Nott joined Jester in sleep. Her gentle weight pressed against his side, and every light exhale sent a lock of her dark hair fluttering away from her face just to be pulled back in with her inhale.
"Don't move," Molly whispered to Caleb, who stopped reading in confusion a moment before Molly leaned over Caleb's lap to reach for the sketchbook.
Caleb's breath caught at the sudden invasion of personal space, and he held the black book close to his chest. Frumpkin cracked a tired amber eye at the two of them.
With light fingers, Molly plucked the book out of Nott's lap and withdrew back into his pallet.
"You too?" Caleb asked.
Molly shrugged. "What can I say? I'm an opportunist," he said, punctuating it with a toothy grin.
"Should I—?" Caleb asked, looking down at the book.
"Oh, please continue," Molly said with an open gesture before returning his attention to the sketchbook. Caleb did and Molly took his turn to customize Jester's sketchbook.
The night flowed on in a blur of chapters and the candles dripped lower. Caleb's voice filled the space, steadily dropping in volume to not wake their sleeping companions. The sound of Molly's pencil against Jester's sketchbook joined it, and occasionally he pitched in a comment of his own. In time again, the words blurred on the page and shifted back to Xhorhasian.
Caleb looked from the sleeping Jester and Nott to Molly. "Maybe that's all for tonight?"
Molly looked up at that and raised an eyebrow. "Really, but it was just getting interesting."
"You...enjoy this book?" Caleb asked. It was slow-paced even for his standards, so he could blame Jester or Nott for dozing off.
Molly tilted his head from side to side as he chewed on his answer. The jewelry strung from his horns clinked against his shoulders. "Well, it certainly helps pass the time, so yeah I suppose I am enjoying it. Plus you've got a nice reading voice, so…" he trailed off, rubbing the back off his neck.
"Oh, uh, yeah thanks," Caleb mumbled, averting his gaze to the floor. He traced the rune back into the salt, feeling each valley of the worn wood against his finger. "It's nice..." he said at last, "reading to people—reading with people, I mean. "
"You know…this doesn't have to be a onetime deal, Caleb," Molly said. "Whenever we're on the road we end up with a lot of downtime, and I'm sure the others wouldn't object."
Caleb let out a huff of laughter and ran a hand over the book's aged cover. "Oh, I'm sure they'd object to this book. Especially Beauregard. Too slow paced."
"Something more exciting then. I'm sure Ice Haven has multiple bookshops."
The serenity that notion brought washed through Caleb. He could imagine shopping the aisles with them again so clearly—Jester and Nott causing mischief, Beau feigning apathy but still finding something that interested her, Fjord ending up in the erotica section on accident and being trapped in conversation with an overeager patron. Then after, all of them circled around a fire between destinations, firing off wisecracks and the occasional poignant insight while they worked their way through a fantasy series they all liked more than they let on.
But he couldn't have that. Not in this life.
He pushed the thoughts out of his mind but not quickly enough to stop his heart from aching at the echoes of such soft domesticity.
The ritual finished, and Caleb continued on, lowering his voice further. His throat ached from overuse and his voice grew rougher as the evening progressed, but Caleb didn't mind. This was the least he could do for them.
As Faust returned from his excursion, Molly's head began to nod, and before the chapter's end his grip went slack, and his head lolled to the side. The pencil rolled across the page, coming to rest in the crease of the sketchbook. His jewelry caught the candlelight, reflecting little stars against the surrounding cargo and walls that drifted with his shallow breathing. Fading plum makeup framed his dark eyelashes, and even his sleeping expression managed to project a good-natured mischievousness.
This was how he was meant to be.
Not cold and still.
In his years of travel Caleb never encountered another person who wore living quite as well as Mollymauk Tealeaf. Life just suited him.
Caleb averted his eyes, realizing he'd been staring too long again. In his defense, Mollymauk was hard not to stare at—though Caleb was positive that was the intended effect.
He closed the book softly and placed it back on the stack, then with a hummed word and wave of his hands, doused the candles.
…
Caleb woke the next morning to find his voice nearly gone and the wind on the upper deck too biting to consider spending the day exposed to the elements. One by one the uninjured members of the Mighty Nein drifted to the alcove after exhausting any other attempts at entertaining themselves.
Caleb read through the fae book in silence and left the others to their own devices, which mostly included Jester teaching their friends new cards games then proceeding to cheat at them. This continued for a matter of hours until Jester introduced a game that involved slapping the back of others' hands and Beau went too overboard.
By noonday, his voice returned, and he found a handful of folktales scattered throughout the fae book and made the mistake of mentioning his surprise. The party spent the next ten minutes persuading him to read one or two aloud until he submitted to their demands.
He filled the rest of the day and the early evening with daring tricksters, mercurial fae, and a series of lessons learned. When the night drew to its natural conclusion, everyone retreated to bed save for Yasha and Caleb, who had the next deck watch.
He emerged onto the deck, pulling his heavy coat close to block out the wind, and realized with a start the land disappeared around them. An inky expanse of water surrounded them on all sides, reflecting the heaven full of stars above. Walking to the railing and holding his transmuter's stone close to increase his vision, he could just make out a strip of black on the horizon where the stars ended. A chill ran up his spine.
He knew this place. This was the lake, Erdeloch. Sometime today they'd sailed past Rexxentrum.
They'd passed his old home too, and he didn't even notice. How could he not have noticed?
The answer bubbled unbidden to the forefront of his mind: good stories and good friends.
That wasn't an excuse though. It couldn't be. His knuckles tightened on the rail, turning white as the bones beneath.
This was getting dangerous in a way he hadn't anticipated.
…
The next several days passed with Caleb trying to keep himself aloof but being drawn back in by the tieflings' constant demands for entertainment. All the while Nott stuck to his side like a loving, stubborn piece of lint. By the ninth day of the journey, the weather shifted from brisk to frigid, and heavy snow suffocated the jagged surrounding landscape.
Fjord was less than pleased.
Chunks of black ice bobbed in the river now with serrated edges threatening to saw them in two. Captain Whitney stationed a rotation of some of her magically-inclined crew members at the forefront of the boat, where they used cantrips to melt and push the bulk of the ice out of the way. Despite the crew's efforts, The Yohimbe still scraped against stray chunks of ice. It made a deafening, groaning sound that caused all of the barge's interior inhabitants pause and listen. Waiting to see if any of it breached the hull.
Along with the weather, Jester and Molly's condition decayed. Nurse shifts now demanded two people, one to stay with them and one to go off and fetch necessities.
Caleb and Nott entered the alcove laden with two additional down blankets, relieving Beau and Yasha of their shift. Yasha exited last, shooting one last worried look over her shoulder before vanishing back into the creaking boat.
Molly watched them enter, stroking Frumpkin in his lap. The gnarled burns along his arms had faded and the swelling around his ankle was barely noticeable. Despite the obvious improvements, Molly looked paler than before. He broke into a wet cough that sounded like his insides were grating together. Frumpkin yawned, preparing to move, but Caleb commanded him to stay on Molly. The familiar shot him a bored expression before shutting his eyes again.
"That sounds bad," Caleb murmured, stepped forward as Nott skittered past him to Jester.
Molly tried to shrug, but the action made him cringe in pain. "I've felt better," he admitted, the looked to Jester with eyebrows knitted together in concern. "But she's the one we should be worried about."
Jester reclined in an uneasy sleep. Her blue skin was flushed dark, sweat beaded on her forehead and heat radiated from her in palpable waves.
Nott set her blanket down and pulled it over Jester, who awoke with a moan and blinked the sleep out of her eyes.
"What time is it? Are we there yet?" she asked, voice rough from more than sleep.
"Not yet," Caleb said, stepping forward to hand the other blanket to Molly. He shook his head, nodding to Jester. "Hopefully soon," Caleb continued as he gave the blanket to her. "Depends on the ice."
Nott and Caleb continued to settle in, making sure everyone still had water and refreshing Jester's cold compress. Only a sliver of the black book remained, and Caleb hoped that would last them for the final leg of the journey. He drew his ritual on the floor and concentrated on it, trying not to think about what could happen if the ice trapped them in.
While he performed his ceremony, Jester drifted off again. Her lungs wheezed with every shallow breath, making Caleb wish he had dabbled in healing magic.
Molly withdrew his coat to continue his earlier work. He successfully attached the patches to the shoulders, but Caleb realized with surprise he wasn't done yet. During the time since Caleb last saw the coat, Molly had sewn a speckling of little stars and triangles into the peach fabric.
He watched the needle weave in and out of the fabric in patterns he couldn't understand, leaving a trail of teal shapes behind it. Caleb took a moment to regard the rest of the coat's sprawling embroidery with a newfound respect. He'd always just assumed Molly conned it off some poor sap. Or stole it. How many hours had he poured into that coat over the years?
"You're not upset at having to redo all that work?" Caleb asked, taking a pointed look at the now-blank shoulders of the garment.
"Why? It's just a coat," he said, cocking his head in confusion.
"But that must've taken hours," Caleb insisted.
"Oh for sure it did," Molly conceded, "But I always knew stuff like this would happen. Shit's inevitable. Besides, what's my other option? Not wear it? Better to get some use out of it. Plus I get to try out new things this go around," he said with a little grin.
Caleb shook his head. Of course, Molly wouldn't care. He had the miraculous ability to make the best of a situation in his own way. It was incredible. Caleb would've been envious of the trait if he didn't find it so admirable.
He watched Mollymauk continue his delicate work, threading the needle in and out with a quiet finesse Caleb hadn't seen him display off the battlefield.
Or maybe he had, and he just hadn't noticed until now.
The spell completed with a fizz, distracting Caleb from his thoughts. He took a deep breath to re-center himself on the task before him and opened the book.
Faust was a young man now, grown strong in the magical arts despite his humble upbringing. He took a dip into necromancy, though it did little to further his ultimate goal.
Besides them, Jester twisted in her sleep, unable to find comfort in any position. She didn't even wake when Faust started his short-lived affair with the local priest—they'd have to read that bit back to her once she felt better.
The book trailed on, and Caleb grew nervous about the amount of story they needed to cover in comparison with the measly three chapters remaining. This wasn't part of a series, was it? He fought the urge to skip ahead and plowed forward.
All at once a plague swept through Faust's village, bringing his fear of his own mortality to a fever pitch in a matter of days.
"Plagues are a nasty business," Molly said.
"They need to quarantine people off," Caleb murmured, but it was too late. None of the surrounding villages would offer aid or allow in refugees for fear of their own safety, so without healing or escape all the villagers could do was wait for their time, fueling Faust's frenzied quest.
One of Faust's sisters succumbed to the illness, dying in a matter of days, which shattered something in the man. He dug through the family tomes, hunting down the whispers of a dark ritual he'd tried to push out of his mind.
The book never named the ritual, nor did it specify what components Faust collected from the piles of bodies as part of his 'dark harvest'. The entire description of the ritual was filled with atypical vagueness for the book thus far.
Still, Caleb read faster as his mind began to race with a morbid, intellectual curiosity. His gut churned as he deduced what unholy end this was leading up to.
Then Faust killed the priest—taking the warm heart from his chest.
Molly and Nott expressed their disappointment quite vocally while Caleb realized maybe it was for the best Jester was asleep for the ending. She wouldn't have liked this bit.
After the dissent quieted, Caleb continued. There were only several pages left now, and a cold, heavy feeling weighed on his chest.
The scene of Faust performing the profane ritual was the vaguest of all: only a mere sentence or two and a brief mention of the family amulet. The book didn't specify the necklace's purpose, but Caleb knew regardless. There was only a page left now.
Upon completion, Faust transformed into something 'dark and evil' and dragged himself home, half-mad from the process. One paragraph left.
He opened the door, only to find his mother hovering over his remaining sister's body. Her blood leaked out from the gaping hole in her chest. Faust's mother, equally arcane and horrible, looked up, locking eyes with him.
Then the book ended.
"That was it?" Nott said, leaning over Caleb's arm to see for herself.
"Yeah, yeah…I guess that's how it ends," Caleb said, frowning at the text.
"You know," Molly said, resting his coat on his knee. "I change my mind. I don't think I liked that story."
"First it was boring and then it was bad," Nott said, nodding her head. "Sorry, Caleb. I can't hide my truth," she said, giving him a little pat on the knee.
"No, don't apologize to me," Caleb said, swallowing in vain to dislodge the unease that settled on him. "It changed into a tragedy pretty quickly at the end there."
His companions agreed and continued to complain about the last few chapters, but Caleb's thoughts drifted. Sure, the ending was executed poorly, but he should've seen it coming.
All powerful magic had a cost.
Before Caleb could ruminate further, Fjord stepped into the alcove, snow dusting his hair and shoulders. He surveyed the group with a relieved grin before nodding towards the upper deck.
"We're here"
…
Can you believe Molly's out there going at his coat without an embroidery hoop? The absolute madman.
As always, thank you for your lovely support in all its forms, including by not limited to: 420 kudos. Commenters are the sunrises outside of my windows in the morning, my clearance rack that still has clothing in my size, my nat 20s on attack rolls during boss fights.