I wake up once in the middle of the night, drinking a good deal of water and then staggering to the en-suite bathroom to ensure that the cycle has somewhere to continue. Amber’s awake when I come back to bed, propped up on an elbow and watching me return; some time later we fall asleep again, rather more entwined and deeply contented.

When I wake up for good, it’s without Amber’s company, and with a racing heart and tangled sheets soaked in cold sweat. Another nightmare, gone without any real memory of what it contained; they’ve become almost routine, and I don’t bother waiting for my heart to stop racing before I swing myself out of bed. Zidanya and Sara are gone by the time I’m showered and dressed again, possibly long-since or possibly because I find myself flatly unable to rush through getting clean. Even the fact that Vonne apparently spent the night in one of the spare rooms, which by all rights means I should be getting ready quickly so that I can be properly social and host-y, doesn’t get me moving faster; instead, I laze around for a bit in the steamy warmth, trying to draw the relaxation of it closer around me like it’s a cloak of some sort.

I don’t, at least, ask Amber if she wants to join me in the shower. There’s a line between acceptable indulgence and the rudeness of taking quite that long.

The smells of breakfast assail me when I walk into the common area. Not, for once, the smell of just a breakfast, but the smell of breakfast, narrowly defined in the sense of the breakfast I grew up with. It’s the smell of toast, of honey and fruit preserves; it’s the smell of molasses and sugar and oats, and of fresh fruit, and of tea. That last, I suppose, is new, but I’ve been growing used to it.

“You’re up! Good morning!”

“Good—oof.” I manage to stay on my feet, fielding Vonne’s tackling hug by turning the incipient fall into a staggering spin. Her second and third tails flicker back out of existence, and I can’t figure out whether I’m grateful that she was ready to catch us just in case or annoyed that she didn’t think I could manage it; after a moment I decide that the former makes way more sense, and I’m grinning when I put her down. “Good morning to you too. I hope the room was adequate? Sorry about zonking out on you.”

“Your friend is really smart. I had a blast! And it’s not like you didn’t help. Anyway! There’s plenty of breakfast!”

“Did you make this?” I lean on the counter, looking down the meters of food laid out. “I was about to say that you must have made this, and that that was unnecessary of you, but then I realized, there’s preservation runes on the countertop, right? So all of this stuff…”

“Mmmhm?”

“How long has it been waiting? A couple of hours?”

“Almost three! Still perfect. We all made it together. Your kitchen is incredible; I thought it was just the same as ours at home, but it’s really something special!” She hums in apparent thought. “I think this will stay about perfect for two more days. Maybe three, I’m not sure.”

“Huh.” I grab the plate that’s obviously mine and start loading it up. “It looks like this toast was, what, fried in egg?” There’s dry toast, too, and eggs both boiled and scrambled; the scramble looks moderately tempting, but I pass it by anyway.

“Soaked in egg and then fried! Your kitchen came with two kinds of preserves and a syrup you can put on it, but.” She leans in, slyly. “A gift came from Mama Vix. She says she wants to meet you.”

I blink a couple of times. There are, in fact, three jars of preserves on the counter, and one of them isn’t like the other two. “Let me guess. Cherries?” I try to inject some dryness into my tone, but there’s no use pretending I’m not both amused and touched at the gesture.

“Well, you did like them, in the end! And these are really different from the ones in the baked goods. You’ll see!”

I take her at her word, loading up the two pieces of egged-and-fried bread with preserves, honey, and a drizzle of oil. I grab the entirely recognizable bowl of oatmeal that’s been left for me, too; it’s got slices of a white circular cross-section of a fruit I don’t recognize, plus some assorted berries, and it smells of sweetness and molasses, more molasses than you get out of the raw sugar, so some has to have been added back in.

It’s all incredibly good. The cherry preserves are much more tart than the desserts were, almost to the point of sourness, and it contrasts the eggy bread perfectly, while the fruits give texture to the oatmeal and the sugar grants a depth of flavor. I ignore the tea, though; I know my near-obsessive avoidance of caffeine isn’t particularly necessary, not in the small quantities that tea has, but I’ve already had tea this week and the absolute last thing any jumpnav wants is to risk the neurological dependencies of stimulants.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Among all the other reasons, even when we aren’t a hundred percent happy with our brains the way they are, not a single one of us will risk losing the spark that is the Voidsight.

“So, you’re still here,” I say to Vonne between bites, and then flush a hot crimson. “I mean, not that I’m unhappy about that. I’m happy about that! You’re great!”

“Well recovered, my lord.” Amber is lounging on the couch, reading. She doesn’t look up at me, which doesn’t stop me from sputtering in her general direction, to her probable satisfaction.

“Seriously though.” I hide my discomfort at having to ask the question behind another bite of breakfast. “Are you going to spring something on me? Some underlying reason you were so eager to tag along back here?”

“Um.” Vonne leans down to scratch her foot, eyes shifting from side to side in what even I recognize is a shifty, guilty-looking expression. “If I said no, and then said that you should come meet Mama Vix today, would you believe me about the first part?”

“... um.” I think about it for a moment. “I mean, yeah, if you hadn’t looked so shifty. She gave me a gift, without a doubt has some really interesting stories, and invents magic. Why wouldn’t I want to meet her? I kind of expected Sara to be dragging me over there, actually.”

“Ask her to be your fifth.” Vonne blurts it out, and words pour out of her in a waterfall. “I mean, she might not say yes, but she won’t hold it against you if you ask even if she says no, and she’s amazing. Like really amazing, like I know people say I’m amazing but those people haven’t met Mama Vix. She does illusions and spatial magic and area control, and you need those because you need someone who can buy time and do battlefield control! And she’s nice and she’s sed so you can trust that she’s not gonna betray you, and I know that you don’t wanta bind anyone to you like a Magelord usually would so who else can you trust but a sed, really?”

“Breathe, lassie.” Amber hasn’t looked up from her novel, continues not doing so. “You will do your arguments no harm by an inhalation more than once in five sentences.”

Vonne’s face is an extraordinary mix of expressions that I can’t really make anything out of, so I do more or less the only thing that pops into my head; I put my now-finished breakfast aside and hug her, hard. “Stars, you’re kind of adorable, Vo-Vonne.” I stop myself just in time from calling her Vosha, brain gone stunned from what she’d said and distracted by how good her fur feels. I’m pretty sure that she hasn’t noticed, even if Amber has, so I soldier on. “Look, I said I’m okay with going to meet her. I’m not going to make any promises, but I’ll talk about it with the team.”

“You. I, you’re going to. Yes! Okay, great!” Vonne hugs me back, then slips out of the embrace like she’s made of liquid. “Wait right there! I mean it!”

I look at her, bemused, as she dashes for the door. She sticks her head out, and I pop my Visor open to try to see what’s going on, but the perception it grants me cuts off at the door; still, there’s definitely mana circulating through her body in some manner, so she’s doing something.

Has done something, a moment later. She comes dashing back, more or less diving into a chair, a grin on her flattened face that seems to reach from ear to ear. “Okay! Mama says, um. Well, Mama Vix says you’re invited for lunch.” She winces, an over-the-top, dramatic wince, and I tilt my head and raise an eyebrow at her. “Well, it’s just… she, um, really doesn’t want the opportunity to pass up. So she was kinda loud at me. But it’s okay, the headache will go away real fast!”

“Gavonne.” Amber crooks a finger at her. “Come here.” She ruffles Vonne’s hair when the sed obediently trots over, smirking a little. “You are a friend of my lord’s and an ally of mine, and in time I think we, too, could be friends. When you suffer from pain, and I am near?” She pauses, rather more dramatically than she usually is. “[Healing Touch].”

“Oh. Oh, that’s nice.”

Her eyes are still on me, or on me again; I think she looked at Amber for barely a fraction of a second.

I get the hint. “Alright. Khetzi can almost certainly get a message to the others. You’ve been awesome, and we don’t have anything planned, and I’m honestly really curious. So let’s meet this Vix.”

I have to clap my hands over my ears to avoid being deafened by the joyous squeal, but I’m grinning when I start ribbing her about making me need Amber’s ministrations myself.

Not that long ago, I think to myself in passing, I was bullshitting my way through fights, alone, or dissociating myself into activating a pylon through broken bones. Whatever problems or challenges meeting this Mama Vix is going to involve, they won’t be that, and I’ll be facing them with my companions, with my team.