Zenith, Eighth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

My memories of the twenty four hours after Mera’s visit were more coherent than the day before, but that wasn’t saying much.

I slept, mostly. I woke up about every three hours to eat and drink as much as I could, relieved myself, and then was asleep not long after despite my occasional best efforts to at least read a book.

By the time lunch came around the next day, I was determined to at least get as far as outside, even if I didn’t manage to make it to the refectory. Kelly had the same idea, it turned out, and we spent a while supporting each other while leaning against the shop’s counter.

The hug was nice, and more than nice—and I could tell that she wanted me to pretend she wasn’t crying, so I did.

“I’m on Mera orders to chill,” I said without preamble once she’d loosened her grip on me. “No magic, no Skills, no metaphysics whatsoever.”

She took a moment to reply, which was as unlike her as having been silent up until then. “Same orders for me,” she said shakily. “We’ll just… do what she says, I figure?”

“Yeah.”

That conversation having apparently run its course with Kelly not having taken the onramp to talking about whatever she was struggling with, I let her gently chivvy me out the door and into the sunlight. The effect of it was almost offensive in how much it cheered me up, and I felt a bunch of muscles around my spine finally relaxing a little as we walked.

Slowly, ever so slowly; and even then I couldn’t do it on my own. I wound up leaning on Kelly, who seemed to be doing much better physically than I was, and she half-buried her face in my shoulder as we neared the refectory.

In for a pound, I thought to myself vaguely as I pushed the door open, and we stepped inside.

All of the two-person tables were occupied. The nearest one’s occupants had jolted in surprise as they saw us, and they were halfway through making some sort of gesture that might have meant they’d give us the table when a voice rang out and interrupted us.

“Avar—Kelly,” Kartom called. “Sophie. Join us?”

Kelly’s head lifted enough to look over there, something in the way she was holding her body easing as she did so. “Kartom,” she murmured, far too quietly for him to hear. “Let’s?”

“And Kan,” I agreed, maneuvering us that way. “And Ketana, and Kanatan. The whole K-crew.”

Nobody bothered us on our way to their table, and a kid whom I recognized but whose name I couldn’t find it in myself to remember had our food already on the table by the time we sat. My eyes stared at the plate for a long moment before I remembered that, yes, this was food, I was in the refectory to eat—

“Zenith’s blaze, Miss Sophie, is there a reason you’re just looking at the food?”

“Munchkin, give her some space.” Ketana reached down to ruffle her son’s hair, but Kanatan dodged with the awkward grace of childhood.

“Mama says that you did something awesome, but she won’t tell me what, and she and Papa have been out all day and don’t have any time, can you tell me what happened or what you did?”

I transferred my stare from the soup to Kanatan, deliberately breaking off a piece of bread and dipping it into the soup. Chewing steadily, I held his eyes as everyone else at the table tried to keep their giggles or chuckles under control. I swallowed around when he started to fidget, and spoke right before he was going to ask another question.

“Some people got into a bunch of trouble,” I said as calmly as I could. “We all helped them get back to safety, but one of them was dead before we could help them get back. Another one was sort of dead, but not all the way, or maybe just sort of… it’s complicated.” I trailed off, grimacing.

“But you were able to help her?”

“Yeah.” I smiled at him, my dour mood helpless in the face of an innocently inquisitive child. “It was mostly Cleric Veil, but I helped too, and I think she’s better now.”

He considered that carefully, thoughtfully. “It’s good to help people,” he said firmly, nodding his head. “You should eat your food. We all need to eat our food to stay strong and healthy. That’s what everyone says.”

“Good advice.” I nodded to him and took another bite of the soup, and then another, and around that point my stomach caught up to the fact that I had food in front of me and informed me that in the less-than-an-hour since I’d last eaten, my stomach had become a ravening void again.

I dimly heard Ketana murmuring something to her son and Kanatan marshaling enough presence of mind to thank me for answering his question and to apologize for disturbing my lunch, but it didn’t actually seem to need any response from me. This was reinforced by him dashing off towards the back room to go do something I didn’t catch, and I ate in a daze until something jarred me back into the moment.

It wasn’t being out of food, that was for sure. My bowl of soup had been replaced with another, bigger bowl of soup, and I’d gotten another loaf of the crusty bread to go with it. But there was a sudden tension in the air, and conversations around me had dropped out into silence. There was something like Meredith’s presence in the air, except this was a pressure that made it hard to breathe and had me feeling like my lungs were filling up with water, so I turned around and saw—

“Leash your domains immediately.” Kan’s voice carried across the hall, filling the building with a tone of command I’d never heard from him before. “Your disruptions are inappropriate and harmful to those overdrawn or in need of recovery.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“We don’t answer to mainlander children,” one of the two strangers snapped from the doorway. “Sit down, and—”

“Acceptance.” The other stranger’s voice was affectless, barely even a voice at all. There was something about it, something that jogged at my memory and promised that if I listened hard enough, I could—

“Down, Sophie,” Kelly murmured, placing her palm on the small of my back. “Mundane ears only. That’s Nameless and whoever its handler is, come from Payazh. Breathe; the feeling is true, but it’s not real.”

I tuned back in with, as medically ordered, my mundane ears only, just in time to hear the snappish stranger sputtering.

“—you can’t, we can’t—”

The other one didn’t say anything else, but the pressure I hadn’t even noticed drained out of the room in a way that felt almost literal. The relief at the table was palpable in everyone other than Kartom, who just looked even more intrigued than he had a moment before.

Ketana rose from her chair to join her husband, the two of them stepping out from behind the table. They walked unhurriedly towards the two strangers, both of them somehow staying in step with each other despite her comparatively miniscule stature, and I took a moment to actually look at the two interlopers.

It took some doing. The more personable one, or rather, the one who was more person-like, was easy enough to see, but my eyes were sliding off of the other one like I was trying to stare at a seam in reality from too far away to make it out.

They were both a browned bronze, like seafarers who’d spent long enough on the ropes to have the sun baked into their skin. The one I gathered was Nameless was a couple of inches short of five feet, and it moved like it was teleporting through the intervening space rather than transiting it; the other was about five and a half feet and moved with a liquid grace that suggested imminent violence.

“The half-step is named,” Kartom murmured to me, seeing where I was looking. “He is arrogant, but powerful.”

“Named what?”

“Ah. His name is forbidden to you, as I suspected. In Sylvan, he is called The Crack In The Keel—this is a better translation than the Shemmai one, Dambreaker.”

Kan and Ketana had, in the meantime, made their stately progress towards the two strangers, who’d paused a few steps into the refectory. Their body language was superficially unworried, but there was a singing tension in my friend’s—and I was fairly confident Kan was a friend—shoulders that I hadn’t seen before.

“I am Ketana. This is Kan, my life partner and second of my work-party. On behalf of the Stone Team of Kibosh, we offer you guest-right within the village; will you add the length of your stay to the thousand years that bind our ships?”

Nameless seemed to consider that carefully, like it was dissecting it for every shade of meaning. While it did so, Levali—whom I hadn’t seen approaching them, despite her burden—set a chest-high table down halfway between the two parties, placing an intricate candle and four small glasses of water in a careful arrangement around the center.

“Stone holds its power,” Nameless said in an utterly toneless voice. “Water from your barrels, fire from your hearths.”

“Handler?”

“We accept the gift of water from your barrels,” the other stranger—guest, now—said huffily as Kartom hissed in a tone of appreciation, “and the warmth of fire from your hearths. May the stones you raise hold against all storms.”

“Handler is his title,” Kartom murmured to the table. “It is perfectly correct, but he must by his nature chafe at being merely that; Ketana insults by design.”

“What’s the deal with the stone thing?” I looked around the table, seeing that nobody was surprised about anything that was happening. “Shouldn’t it be James or Meredith or one of the Pillars welcoming them?”

“It’s a whole thing with them.” Kelly frowned. “They don’t talk to Clerks much, and Esse is out killing things in the dungeon to drain it down as far as she can, now that there’s one less team.”

“They recognize the Stone Team, as they recognize no other,” Kartom elaborated. “Captain Morei might be the one to greet them, were it not for Nameless’s presence; she and it share a profound antipathy, as a consequence of their diametrically opposed perspectives and approach towards identity and divinity.”

“Everyone wants this kind of thing to go smoothly,” Kelly said. “So probably the two of them knew when they were going to be here and where they were going to go, and everyone who might have gotten in the way of things going smoothly isn’t here, right?”

I looked around, actively looked, for the first time since I’d arrived. I hadn’t noticed their absence then, but I did now; neither Morei was present, and also gone were the people I generally thought of as the powerhouses of Kibosh. “Farmer, Esse, Ketka’s team, Zqar, Rafa, and Hitz,” I murmured. “First time that I’ve seen none of them at a meal.”

The four people at the center of everyone’s attention were standing at the table, and all four of them reached out and did some sort of pinch-and-twist thing to bits of the candle. It went up in a surprisingly impressive pillar of fire, like the six-wick braided candles I’d made as a child, and the four of them all put one hand up, palm facing the flame. With their other hands, they drank the water in the glasses, and the conversations around the dining hall started back up.

Their own conversation was inaudible, and their lips were blurred, not that I could have read them regardless. That bothered me, and it took me a moment to identify why, but eventually I realized that it was simply that I’d already grown used to the openness with which everyone in Kibosh talked about everything. More than once, I’d overheard James going through the nitty-gritty of his office and responsibilities to anyone who asked over lunch, and the herders consistently seemed to use patrol schedules and herd assignments as pedagogical exercises for children.

It took me a bit to realize that another thing was bothering me: nobody was leaving the building. Increasingly, as the candle at the foursome’s table burned down, people had empty plates and empty bowls, until those were whisked away and their tables were clear; and still nobody was leaving.

“I haven’t been paying any attention,” I murmured as if to myself, “but is there a social reason why nobody can exit while they’re around?”

“And miss out on the chance for juicy gossip?” Kelly’s return murmur was performatively incredulous. “Why would anyone do that? It would be different if it were breakfast.”

“When a titanwood rises and walks by its roots,” Kartom offered, “predator and prey alike track its passage.”

“Very poetic. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I overheard the phrase,” he told me smugly, “and, as some others, have retained it for appropriate use.”

“Well, good job doing—”

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and my attention snapped back over—they’d all four of them taken a step back. Without a gesture on any of their parts, the veiling magic dropped and we could both hear and see them fully again.

“We regret that we cannot fulfill your request,” Kan said firmly, “but this stone will not yield to the rain. If your winds take you to war against those who defend the surface against that which would shatter it, you will not have our support. If you will instead fight by their side, we will render what aid we can.”

The four of them started walking towards the exit, and the room started to fill with shifting and murmuring as people got ready to follow suit. “We… will discuss the matter,” I heard Handler say grudgingly, and then they were gone, and I followed suit soon after to sleep the day away.