For the first time in over two hundred years, the kitchen’s timebox was filled to bursting with snacks, meals, and desserts. In what Ondine had described as a manic episode, Grimsby had decided to cook all the ingredients they’d obtained as soon as possible. It made sense to him, as the timebox could preserve everything in perfect stasis until needed.
He carefully slid the last stack of pancakes onto the bottom shelf, shut the door with his hipbone, then re-activated the chronomancy rune with a wave of his metacarpals.
At last, he turned his back on the door of the timebox and slumped against it. Though he didn’t get physically exhausted these days, he could get mentally exhausted, even bored, which felt far worse.
“I now realize that cooking is the least enjoyable part of cooking,” he said.
Clonk was sitting at the kitchen table with his boots kicked up. He’d done nothing for the past six hours except provide occasional commentary. “So, what’s the best part?”
“Well, it used to be eating what I cooked,” Grimsby explained. “But now that that’s off the table… Hah hah…” He paused, waiting for Clonk to laugh at his joke, but the helm’s visor only stared at him. “Off the table.” Still nothing. Grimsby sighed and shook his head. “Anyway, I recently learned that I quite enjoy the part where everyone goes, ‘Mmm, wow, that’s delicious!’ and talks about how great of a chef I am.”
“Hmm,” Clonk said, then put his glove to the chin of his helm as if considering this. “I wish people would comment on how skilled I am at stabbing and slashing. Alas.”
“Please,” Grimsby said, throwing his skeletal hands in the air. “No one likes a braggart.”
Clonk shook his helm. “I only mean to say—do you ever feel taken for granted?”
“All the time,” Grimsby replied. “But that might be a mental complex.”
There was a prolonged silence in the kitchen as both of them considered this statement.
“Hmm,” Clonk repeated. “Now that you have cooked, and I have watched you cooking, what is next on our to-do list?”
Grimsby sighed. “As I told you earlier, you were supposed to find Ondine in the west wing and help her clean some stuff up.”
With a squeak, Clonk dropped his boots to the floor and stood. “I didn’t want to go by myself,” he said. “That place gives me the creeps.”
“Because of the rats?” Grimsby asked. “Or one rat in particular?”
“Obviously, but that’s not the only reason.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.” Grimsby held the kitchen door for Clonk, then followed him out into the hall and towards the west wing. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
“Aye,” Clonk said. “If we finish fast, I’ll still have time for stargazing. Pyralis is unnaturally bright this time of year, you know. The peak of summer and all that.”
“Nobody cares except you.”
“Gideon would care, I think.”
“I’m glad he’s such a charitable fellow,” Grimsby said, cackling. “Now, let’s go.”
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Though the west wing was dark other than dim sunlight that filtered through soot-stained windows, neither Grimsby nor Clonk used eyes to see and could easily navigate to Ondine’s old laboratory. Or at least what remained of it.
Grimsby was about to knock on the large wooden door when he paused, hearing faint voices inside the room.
“…it is only a matter of time,” Ondine was saying. “Sooner or later, you’ll need to tell him what happened. And what you will one day expect from him.”
“I choose later,” Lord Kelvan replied. “You say that as if the boy has some great love for this world. Once we are restored to life, he will help us. How could he not? I will grant him vengeance against those who wronged him, an outlet for all his resentments. Anyone who ever thought they were his better will kiss his boots or die. He will be as a Lord to them, a ruler of the new order we intend to build.”
Ondine chuckled. “You say that as if you think he cares for being a Lord or ruling.”
“Everyone loves power,” Kelvan said. “Or can be taught to love it. He’s still a child—it should not surprise us if he still has naive tastes. I’m more concerned about the short term than the long term. Soon, he will try to fix up this part of the castle for his little inn project, and I haven’t had enough time to mold him properly yet. It’s too soon for him to learn everything that happened here. I fear it would offend his fragile sensibilities. Thankfully, his departure has given us ample time to burn the evidence. Where the hell is Sir Clonk, anyway?”
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Clonk reached past Grimsby’s shoulder, knocked on the door, then shoved it open. Grimsby lingered at the threshold as Clonk entered.
Though Ondine had continued her alchemical research after becoming a ghost, her enthusiasm had waned in recent decades. So, the lab had fallen into ruin and disrepair like most of the castle. She had achieved both her most remarkable breakthrough and subsequent blunder in this very room.
The floor was covered in shattered glass, which crunched under Clonk’s steps, and puddles of various colors, which the knight avoided. Though Ondine could move physical objects, Grimsby knew it took her great force of will to do so. There had been quite a few accidents that Ondine hadn’t bothered to clean up.
Though the entrance to the lab was on the castle's ground floor, it had a vaulted ceiling and took up two floors, with fume hoods extending down from above to remove the toxic gases that were produced by most alchemy. But Grimsby’s attention was mostly taken by the line of vats against the far wall and the large glass beakers that filled the shelves. Though he could not smell anything these days, he remembered the smell of embalming fluid from when he had been fully alive, and the memory made him recoil in disgust.
“Ah, there you are,” Kelvan said, then turned his eyes past Clonk’s shoulder towards Grimsby. “How much of that did you hear, minion?”
Grimsby walked into the lab and shut the door behind him. “Hear what?” he said. “You know my hearing ain’t so great, boss. Sorry to make you repeat yourself.”
Clonk looked towards him, the darkness in his visor full of meaning, but said nothing.
Grimsby stared back at him, then swiveled his skull towards Lord Kelvan. “We’re late because Sir Clonk wanted to host a cooking show with no audience.”
“I, personally, was quite entertained,” Clonk said, then walked towards one of the vats, reached in, and pulled out a human arm. Grasping it by the shoulder, he made it wave at Grimsby then give a thumbs up. He dropped it back into the embalming fluid with a plop.
Lady Ondine floated towards Grimsby. “So, in the interests of our newest arrival’s mental wellbeing, Lord Kelvan and I have decided…” She waved her hands towards the freak show of deranged, failed anatomical experiments and dismembered body parts scattered throughout the lab. “…all this must go before he returns.”
Clonk groaned, and the sound seemed to emanate from all his joints simultaneously. “I guess I’ll fire up the basement furnace, then,” he said. “Been a while since we had a good burning. Grimsby, will you load the cart with the smallest bits first? Those should be the easiest to get rid of.”
“Why do I feel like you got the easy job?” Grimsby said, but the knight had already marched out of the room.
“You know I’d help more if I could,” Ondine said, folding her ghostly hands before her translucent form.
“Same,” Kelvan said. “But I can’t. So, goodbye.” His mirror flew out the door.
Grimsby found a metal cart in the corner of the lab, which he began to load with some of the smaller body parts, organs, and appendages. Usually, when he found himself alone with Ondine, he felt lighter, abuzz with excitement. But now, the heart he no longer possessed was heavy. Metaphorically.
“Lady Ondine,” Grimsby said. “Don’t you think we owe Gideon the truth?” Though Grimsby had been annoyed with the kid for a day or two, he no longer felt that way. Now, the young wizard was his professional colleague and fellow minion, and there was a sense of fellowship between them. Or at least, he would have liked to think so.
“My experiments have obviously failed, and Kelvan no longer has the power he once wielded. Only a living wizard can ever hope to achieve what we need,” Ondine said. “Someday we’ll tell him the whole story. When he’s ready to hear it. If we dump it on him all at once, he’ll just run, and then we’ll be right back where we started.”
“Maybe he should run,” Grimsby said darkly as he lifted a preserved unicorn’s heart out of one of the vats and dropped it on the cart with a loud thump. “Why would he want to get involved in all this? He doesn’t owe us anything.”
“Admittedly, we were desperate,” Ondine said. “I was desperate. You know I’ve done things I regret, and so has Lord Kelvan. A young man like Gideon, who has never known death, who has never truly suffered—he couldn’t begin to understand us, and he hasn’t earned the right to judge us, either.”
The cart was full, or full enough, and Grimsby began to push it towards the door. “That’s where you’re wrong, my Lady,” he said. After he spoke, the words surprised him. He couldn’t even think of the last time he had talked back to her or disagreed. Perhaps it had been over a century. “Take a long look at the kid, and I think you’ll realize he’s already suffered plenty.”
Without looking back, Grimsby rolled the cart out of the lab. As he did so, an orc’s head rolled off and landed on the floor with a squelch. But he was far too lazy to go back and pick it up.
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After they burned the remnants of Ondine’s experiments—or at least, all the remnants that weren’t currently running around the castle or underneath it—Clonk headed up to the overlook with his telescope to wait for it to get dark. Grimsby went to the courtyard to sit on the steps and reflect.
A memory surfaced in his mind of the day the Crusaders of Celestra had come to the castle, what his fellow castle denizens sometimes called the “incident” or the “calamity.”
Before the Crusaders had stormed the castle, they’d stood outside the gates reading a list of Lord Kelvan’s crimes through a megaphone. The first crime they had listed, though not the most serious, had been the desecration of sacred remains.
A crime Grimsby had now helped to cover up from his innocent and naive fellow minion. He sat there mulling things over, trying to face the strange feeling that now burdened him. He had never felt it before, but he supposed it might be guilt.
“Hey!” a voice shouted from outside the castle gate. Grimsby sprang to his feet. He had no nerves, but it felt as if a bolt of lightning had tore through him. Had the Crusaders returned, then? Had Gideon tipped them off? Did the Crusaders of Celestra even still exist?
No, he thought, of course not. Kelvan had killed them all.
As Grimsby focused on the voice, he realized he recognized it, and his mood darkened even further. It appeared Gideon’s gambit had been successful. It remained to be seen what the cost would be to engage with the demonic creature who had so brazenly robbed them.
Grimsby strode forward and peeked through the gap between the castle gates, only to see a small human girl wearing clothes made of fur. Her face was covered in spots of dirt, and her hair was tangled with leaves. The druid had decided to come in human form.
“Hello,” Grimsby said warily. “Listen, kid, I’ve had a long day, and I’m not really in the mood—”
The child raised a piece of paper and pointed at it insistently.
“Tea,” the girl said. “Tea and dessert!”
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