I stared into the space where Orykson had been, then sighed and tucked away the contract. I was exhausted, and my emotions were running all over the place. I could check it over in the morning, then with Meadow, and then contemplate signing off on it. Doing it now was just unduly rash.
I wandered back down to the room that Kene and I had booked, then stepped into Dusk’s realm. I probably could have done it while I was up top, but I didn’t want to risk straining my spirit, especially after already flexing it against Orykson and under the scanner.
The night passed restlessly, and the following morning, Kene seemed to notice that something was off.
“What’s wrong?” they asked as we started making breakfast.
I froze in mid-step, and my tail flicked one way, then the other.
“Malachi, are you okay?” they asked, turning to face me completely.
“If…” I started, then trailed off. A moment later, I started again.
“If I learned something that could make things bad, even dangerous, for you if I told you, and lying to you meant that things would be less likely to go that way… Would you want me to tell you? Or would you rather I keep quiet, and keep you safe by lying to you.”
Kene paused, and a moment later, the corner of their lip quirked up.
“And here I was expecting it to be something like a bad dream where you caught me in bed with someone else. When you’re concerned, it’s not something light, is it?”
I gave them a helpless shrug and wrapped my tail around my stomach for comfort.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault,” Kene said. “But I don’t know yet. Give me a moment to think about it, okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed. We cooked together, making some scrambled eggs with sliced tomatoes and salt, as well as toast with butter and honey. It was only midway through breakfast that Kene finally spoke again.
“It doesn’t eliminate the risk of harm completely, does it?”
“No,” I said. The hag was probably good to her word, but there was no contract or bargain, just threats. She could decide to start seriously attacking Kene at any point, even if I never told them.
“I think… I want to know. Even if it makes things worse for me, I’d rather know and be prepared than to be ignorant because it makes the harm less likely.”
I nodded and then told Kene everything – waking up in the middle of the night, the talk with the hag, calling out to Orykson, and the contract that Orykson had offered me. By the time I finished, Kene’s face was a riot of different emotions all at once.
“I… Okay. Wow. That’s a lot,” Kene said, then their face grew angry. “That thrice cursed hag threatened me in an attempt to control you. If she really is willing to play along and save herself, then why, by all the primes, is she doing that?”
“Pain,” I said. “She’s afraid of the tattoos, and said they would activate to contain her.”
“That’s… true,” Kene said. “But I am bonded to them, they are mine. They’re complicated and powerful, and I can’t control all of their functions until and unless I’m as powerful as they are, but I can bloody well stop it from lashing back at her, and she should know that.”
They closed their eyes, and I thought that Kene must be reaching within, to try and speak to the hag, but when their eyes opened, they were just Kene’s.
“And now she’s gone dormant. She’s sleeping, like she did when I was younger and she was weaker.”
They stood up and stormed out of the house, cursing like a sailor. I followed them, but kept at a distance, allowing them to work off some steam. They began tending the herb boxes in a rather aggressive manner, plucking out weeds and pouring water over them in a torrent, rather than a drizzle.
After a few minutes, they’d worked through enough of their anger to come back in, wash their hands, and finish breakfast. Before they sat down, I pulled them into a gentle hug, and they slumped their weight against me.
“I hate her,” Kene whispered, and I could feel their tears dampening my shirt. “Primes, I hate her. She took away my childhood and forced me to grow up too quickly. I spent my entire childhood thinking I was living on a clock. I advanced, she advanced. It was like everything I ever did was to just add a few more grains of sand in a draining hourglass.”
They took in a deep, shuddering breath, and I gently rubbed their back, supporting their weight.
“In a way, I feel like I still am living on a time limit. I bond my tattoos to keep her contained, then I immediately have to turn over freedoms to her or die. I get a shred of hope from the sepulcher, and she develops enough consciousness to be a person, instead of just a parasite. It’s like everything I do, no matter what, she’s one step ahead. She can’t even leave the person I love alone, she has to hook her claws into you too.”
I held onto them and let them get their emotions out, then when the food had grown cold, and their tears had dried up, I gently led them to their seat, then moved my chair next to them.
“It’s not hopeless, no matter how much it feels like it is,” I said. “I…”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
I paused.
“If I need to, I’ll sign the deal with Orykson.”
“You shouldn’t have to owe someone favors without an end date or great conditions just because of me,” Kene said, and I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I care about you. I… I love you. And I’ll do more than this, if I have to. But I mean, there’s no way to tell that this is even going to be needed. Maybe Meadow or Ikki knows of a way to give the hag a body and enough of a soul that it can solidify itself.”
Kene’s jaw worked for a second, and then they spoke, very quietly.
“And what is that doesn’t work? They don’t know, and Orykson’s treasures fail, or we don’t get to them in time? You shouldn’t even be dating me, I’m a pressure cooker that’s about to explode.”
“Don’t even talk like that,” I said firmly. “If it doesn’t work out, then we’ll work on a new way to manage it. But we won’t know unless we try this way. And if the worst comes…”
“I could kill her,” Kene said. “I don’t know how the sepulcher works exactly, but Meadow and my grandmother both thought it could fix me. I don’t think that’s going to have changed, just because she’s more sapient. Maybe it has, but…”
“You could kill her,” I agreed, uncomfortable with the idea.
Kene was quiet, but my thoughts were loud.
I didn’t like having to kill someone just so that Kene could live, but this was different.
I didn’t get a say, not really.
This was Kene’s fight, and while I could do everything in my power to help them, if Kene decided that they were going to kill the hag to save themselves, I wasn’t sure I could stop them, nor would I want to, if that was the only option left.
As much as I thought every person’s life was precious, I was still human, and Kene’s life mattered more to me than the hag’s.
Even if Kene had other options, and chose to kill the hag anyways, as revenge, would I stop them?
I didn’t know.
Killing her for revenge felt wrong, very wrong.
But I wasn’t some universal arbiter of justice, and I was sure that plenty of people would say that Kene was justified in their actions.
I took a breath.
At the end of the day, it would be up to Kene to make that choice, not me, and I had confidence in Kene’s choices.
“If I have to, I will,” Kene finally said. “But I’d rather just have her… gone. Gone for good. Never have to deal with her again.”
“I can understand that,” I agreed, reaching down and squeezing their hand. They squeezed back.
It took us a while longer to finish breakfast and clean up, and then Kene went to go practice magic. With the extra months of practice that they had over me, even the tribulation-stone hadn’t been enough to stop them from making progress, and their healing and alchemy had taken leaps and bounds.
I tried to not be jealous. I’d made this choice for power, and I’d have to live with it. If Kene was rushing ahead of me, well, they’d always been ahead of me.
I forcibly calmed the swishing of my tail and went to go look over the contract with Orkyson with fresh eyes. I didn’t see any obvious traps or loopholes hidden in it – it seemed to be what Orykson had described.
There were more details in the complete contract, of course, like defining the where and how I would be helping in the settlement of Chrysite – a minimum term of three months of good faith employment under Elio’s supervision, wherein I’d be subject to local law and the overall laws of the Mossford Alliance.
But apart from simply filling in the details, it seemed to be reasonable. A part of me found that surprising, but another part of me wasn’t that shocked. After all, Orykson’s contract for my apprenticeship had been played on the level, and while having ten percent of any money I received garnished to repay him was annoying, it wasn’t the end of the world. While he’d made it clear he thought I was a fool, he hadn’t done anything drastic to me.
And after our talk last night, I thought he probably could have. He might not be the end-all-be-all in Mossford, but I did believe him that he was invaluable to the continued survival of Mossford as a state.
At least for now. The fact that Kijani didn’t have someone acting as a counterweight was interesting. I knew that it had unified a few years – or maybe decades? – before I’d been born, but I’d spent all my life just knowing it as just another country, not as anything radical and strange.
As the day wore on, and night rose, I was worried I might be in for another conversation with the hag, but thankfully, she seemed to still be dormant. I was glad – while telling Kene had been a weight off of my shoulders, I was not ready for another restless night.
The rest of the travel followed a more normal routine, with me whiling the days away. Without a job to occupy my time, like how I’d been a butcher in Puinen, I spent a lot of time reading.
The book that Kene had given me some time ago, about the introductory spells used in witchcraft, was an interesting read. Witchcraft was more of a general approach to magic that focused slightly more on the ritualistic side of things, like potion craft, as well as emphasizing a connection between the self and magic, the self and nature, and nature and magic.
Most of the enchantments in the book were simple ones, like setting up some old fashioned lightning enchantments, and I thought I’d read that passage before, but I was finally able to really sink my teeth into it. I might not be able to practice, since I was still on magical bedrest, but I did learn a lot.
There were a few first and second gate spells in the book, including a version of Enhance Plant Life. This version looked different than mine, so I went to ask Kene about it.
“Hmm? What does yours look like?”
I wrote it out, and they leaned in.
“Oh, interesting. It looks like it’s in the style of most Kijani spellforms, rather than the Mossford one. As far as I can tell, the effects are exactly the same. Even the core of the spell is the same. See how they match here, here, and here? It’s just design and orientation.”
“Huh,” I said. “I do think Meadow is from Kijani, and she gave me the spell, so I suppose it makes sense…”
I also finally got an answer to a question that had been rattling around in the back of my mind, while reading through the spell-design portions of the witchcraft book.
For a while, I’d been wondering why I couldn’t simply sketch out Analyze Mana-Garden with my third gate mana. After all, it was all death mana, and my lower gates did get stronger when I opened a new gate.
The analogy the book used was complicated and involved concentrations of alchemical ratios, which I thought I kind of understood, but I wasn’t sure.
So I asked Kene.
“Think of it like color,” they said. “Your first gate is a really, really dull red color. Your second gate opens into a slightly-less-dull orange. The pressure from opening the gate turns your really dull red into a slightly-less-dull red. Then you open your third gate and get kinda-bright yellow, kinda-bright orange, kinda-bright red, and so on and so forth. Your first gate is still going to be red, no matter how bright it gets.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said, nodding slowly. “But you’re going to tell me there’s exceptions, right?”
“Of course,” Kene said. “This is just an analogy. And while red is always going to stay red, spell engineers spend a lot of time and effort on trying to work out ways to strip down spells and rewrite them entirely to create versions of them at lower gates. Less research the other way, but there is some.”
I snapped my fingers.
“That’s why the library was so happy with me testing Harvest Distance for them. There’s a higher gate spell that does something similar, but this one is way more accessible.”
“Exactly!” Kene said.
I thanked him, then continued reading, and it seemed like no time at all before we were approaching Delitone for the second time in my life.