Abbey House | 8:52 PM | First Day

"So let me get this straight," Ran said, lowering her brow.

We were back in the guesthouse, near the lounge, now abandoned by Kamrusepa and Linos as dinner was about to be served. The lighting of the entire sanctuary had changed abruptly at a little after 8PM, dimming to something more in line with a summer twilight. Long shadows were cast from the chairs by the still-lit fireplace, some reaching as far as the front door.

"You spent over an hour with one of the highest-ranking members here, some of that alone, and you still didn't ask about Samium? About the whole reason we're here to begin with."

"I thought you said I could 'bring it up if I felt like'?" I said, looking away and scratching my head.

"Well, yeah," she said, "but that was kind of assuming you wouldn't stumble right into a perfect opportunity right afterwards."

"There wasn't a good time," I protested.

"Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling there's not going to be a good time to say, 'hey, don't ask me how I know this, I hear you've been hiding the dying grandmaster of a banned discipline in your basement, would you mind if I had a quick chat with him'?" She crossed her arms. "You're going to have to go out of your comfort zone a bit to make this work."

I shifted a little, uneasy. "Are you angry with me?"

She rolled her eyes. "Don't be stupid, Su. Of course I'm not angry with you, I'm just..." She hesitated, biting her lip. "Confused. Worried."

"I'm not trying to run away from this, Ran," I said, trying to make my voice firm. "I'm the one who wanted to search for him to begin with. I'm not going to get cold feet at the last moment, after years, just because it's a little awkward."

"That's not what I mean," she said, frowning. "Listen-- I know you. When something is frightening you, you'll get over yourself and do it when push comes to shove, but that won't stop you putting it off to the last minute and making everything about the process a thousand times more frantic and miserable than it needs to be."

"That's hyperbole," I said.

She raised an eyebrow. "Do you deny it?"

I glanced to the side.

"What I'm afraid of," she continued, "isn't you outright not doing it. It's that you'll wait until the day we're supposed to leave, and then try to make things work in hurry. And it'll all fall to pieces."

"We have three more days," I said.

"Yeah, but without having even asked them about the situation, that's like saying we have plenty of time to cross a lake when we don't even have a boat."

I sighed.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Bring it up in the middle of dinner?"

"No, of course not," she said, shaking her head. "Just... Try to keep it in mind, alright? Don't squander the next chance, if it comes up. Otherwise, I'll have to ask for you, and that's going to provoke a lot more questions."

She wasn't wrong. It wasn't a given that they'd even let me see him, and I had a myriad of reasonable explanations for why I'd want to without even having to touch on anything complicated. For her, it could come across terribly.

I couldn't let myself be selfish. I had to think of Ran in all this, too. What it would mean if I threw all of these years work for both of us away.

"Neferuaten said she'd continue the tour tomorrow morning," I said, after a moments thought. "I'll bring it up then. I promise."

"Alright. Good, then." She sighed, then nodded. "Just don't let yourself get distracted, alright? That lady always makes you act like your brain is leaking out from your ears. You go from being the world's biggest contrarian to going all 'yes, grandmaster' to every word that comes out of her mouth, and asking questions like you're a primary school student."

I frowned, fiddling with my hair to try and disguise the fact I was blushing a bit. "She's smart."

She shook her head. "Smart people can make the people around them feel smart too, by knowing how to talk on their level. If someone makes you feel stupid when you speak with them, what you have isn't an intelligent person, it's someone who's good at appearing intelligent. And has some reason to want to."

"That's a really conspiratorial characterization, Ran."

"Whatever you say, genius." She slapped the side of her hand on my arm as she stepped past me. "Come on. Let's go."

𒊹

Maybe Ran was a little right about Neferuaten after all, because in the end, her estimate about preparing a second dinner quickly turned out to be wildly optimistic. You could blame it on a lot of things, like the fact that the guest house's kitchen was much smaller and difficult to work in compared to the one in the main building, or that the pantry it had was so under-stocked that a conjuration incantation had to be dug out of some dark corner just to supply the meat. Or you could (probably most accurately) blame the fact that there was no chef.

Several larger, humanoid golems - faceless constructs that looked like mannequins wrought out of bronze - were summoned, and did help with some of the simpler aspects of the process, but Sacnicte, who had de-facto fallen into the role of cook, simply wasn't qualified as an executor for the process. Mehit ended up helping first, followed by Kamrusepa and Neferuaten, and ultimately several others in more peripheral roles. Yantho even reappeared towards the end, defying the former's instructions of rest to presumably make sure we hadn't somehow managed to burn the entire building to the ground.

The ultimate product of all this, while not bad, was undeniably basic. What you could charitably refer to as traditional Rhunbardic cuisine, and less charitably as an assemblage of ingredients roasted without much skill or creativity, with a great deal of fat layered on to compensate for these deficiencies. Roasted quail with bacon wrappings. Crudely spiced potatoes, some of which had been mashed. Parsnips, carrots and broccoli. Lots of gravy.

However, the food had come so late that most of us didn't seem to care. Even I - who obviously wasn't as eager as, say, Theo - entered what can only be described as a fugue state the moment the plate was put down in front of me.

We were crammed into the little dining room on the far side of the abbey house, which was clearly not intended for more than about 10 people at absolute maximum. We numbered 15. All of the students (save for Ezekiel, who apparently had reappeared at some point, but gone straight to his room with the intent of eating alone) plus Mehit, Neferuaten, Linos, and even Sacnicte and Yantho, since it was decided it would be unreasonable for them to prepare their own meals at such a late hour - though Linos told us that it was commonplace for the 'stewards of the sanctuary' to eat alongside the order's upper ranks anyway, to foster a sense of solidarity within the organization. (Whatever that meant.)

Finally, there was one man in attendance who I hadn't met yet. He was a Viraaki who looked a bit older than Neferuaten and Linos, but carried and dressed himself in a fashion you'd expect from a younger man. He was clad in a colorful, patterned robe of bright purple, with a navy sash across his waist. Hard lines adorned his face, which was gentle for a man, and it was rare that he wasn't smiling. His smiles were complicated, though. Laced with intermittent mischief and somberness.

This, I understood, was Durvasa (whose birthplace name escaped me), the Biomancer of the order who Neferuaten had mentioned earlier, and another member of the inner circle. He'd come along with Yantho, having been inspecting his injuries, though his conclusions hadn't been shared with the rest of us. He seemed friendly enough, though I'd barely spoken to him, since the size of the group had grown to the point where one collective conversation was functionally impossible. We hadn't even been able to fit around the same table, and had to drag one in from a bedroom and stick it on the end.

Incidentally, this had the unfortunate side of effect of turning my attempt at sitting towards the edge of the group to me sitting almost in the dead center. Again, though. Hunger was beating out even my self-consciousness.

As for everyone else in the sanctuary, including the rest of the order members, they'd apparently decided to either forgo dinner or were eating alone. No one seemed interested in asking too much about that.

"Phew, this is great!" Ptolema said, shovelling an entire quail breast into her mouth at once. "The meat tastes so rich!"

Kamrusepa, who was vegetarian and thus had been served served something even more low-effort, was making a valiant attempt at still pretending the order could do no wrong. "It has a very... Rustic charm," she said stiffly, slowly placing a sliced piece of parsnip in her mouth. "It was very gracious of you to put this nut roast together for me on such short notice."

I remembered her saying at some point that being served nut roast as a meat substitute was sort of like telling someone you didn't like the color of a dress, and so being given a potato sack to wear instead.

"Sorry if it's kinda crap," Sacnicte said, from way off to the side. "I don't cook much for other people. Or, hell. At all, really."

"It's not too bad," Seth said. He was the only one who wasn't eating much. Ptolema subtly shook her head at him.

Ran shrugged. "The potatoes are decent enough."

Theodoros said something that might've been, 'it's really good,' but his mouth was so full it sounded closer to "Mhtts urrleh ugg." Kamrusepa chuckled with amusement.

"I think it was a valiant effort," Mehit said, with sincerity. "Everyone did their best with what we had." Next to her, Lilith was slowly mashing up all of her potatoes with the back end of her fork, and drowning the resulting mush in gravy. She had very specific preferences when it came to the texture of her food.

"Frankly, if anyone ought to apologize, it's us," Linos said. "We went as far as having you all list your dietary preferences in your paperwork, but everyone's been so busy, no one thought to check that the cook had come in as she ought to have." He removed his glasses, rubbing his eyes. "It's absurdly embarrassing."

"Y'think something might've gone wrong with the whole, uh, process?" Ptolema asked, pointing with her fork. "It's pretty hard to get here, you know."

"Well, the staff have it a little easier than you did," Linos replied. "But I do take your point."

"All of this does, however, raise the question of what is to be done tomorrow, assuming she does not appear in the interim," Kamrusepa said.

"Yantho'll take care of that," Sacnicte, with a dismissive gesture. "Assuming he's tired of pretending he's sick, or whatever."

That was surprisingly rude. The boy glared at her in response.

"Are you trained, Yantho?" Kamrusepa asked, pushing a parsnip around her plate. "In culinary matters, I mean."

He set down his fork for a moment, and took up his plate from where it was resting on the side of his chair. I haven't had any formal training, but I have a decent amount of experience. Really, I'm better suited as an assistant, but I can manage. He paused for a moment, before adding: Though, what happened to the pantry means we have less ingredient diversity than I'm used to, so it might not be up to everyone's standards.

Kamrusepa clicked her tongue. "Linos, are there any other conjuration runesheets for food in the sanctuary, beyond what we found?"

'Runesheet', in case it's not clear, was shorthand for an inscribed incantation, usually on a metal plate or series of plates. Because the words were all already present, they only needed activation by an arcanist to function, rather than any actual skill - you just said the words of initiation and termination. It was basically the same principle by which incantations were carved into scepters, only with the potential for greater complexity at the cost of even less control by the caster.

The most common use for runesheets was conjuration, as it required complete information down to the anatomic level to create something properly, which was a titantic amount of data. Almost everything basic in the modern era was conjured in rune-mills rather than produced conventionally, including essentially all raw ingredients. No one had grown crops or raised animals on any serious scale for centuries.

"I think there are a few others in our archive," he said, with a nod. "But not for anything fancy, I'm afraid. They were bought in case we were ever found by the oathkeepers and had to survive under siege, but I'm not sure anyone ever took the idea completely seriously. So it's just things like potatoes, rice, raw meat, maybe some salt..."

"You can go a long way with just meat and salt!" Ptolema said.

"Careful you don't turn into a caricature of yourself, there, Ema," Seth said, with a small smirk.

She ignored him.

Kamrusepa pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Tell you what, Yantho. Why don't I give you a hand for dinner, tomorrow? I used to work at a restaurant when I was younger, so I have a fair bit of experience myself."

"You used to work at a restaurant, Kam?" I asked. She'd never mentioned this before.

"Oh, yes," she said. "A very long time ago, though."

For some reason, there was a terseness in her voice that almost made it seem like she regretted the admission. Odd, for something so innocuous.

Yantho hesitated, then held up the plate again. That is very kind of you to offer, but that doesn't seem appropriate. You are a guest, and have other obligations.

"Please, it wouldn't be any trouble at all," she said, with a smile. "It'll be in the evening, so it should be well after our presentations are done, I presume?" She left the question open, her eyes turning to some of the authority figures in the room.

"I imagine so," Neferuaten said, after a moment. She was preoccupied with a conversation with Theodoros on the other side of the table which I could only make snippets out of. "Worst case, it could run long, but I very much doubt we'd keep going after dinnertime. The audience wouldn't tolerate it, I don't think."

"It's settled, then!" Kamrusepa said, cheerfully. "I'm sure that together we'll be able to make something lovely, Yantho. And quite a bit healthier, at that."

He looked a little embarrassed, but smiled, nodding his head.

It felt strange for us all to be sitting here with the leaders of the order, having such a casual and chatty dinner. It no doubt helped that most of the members present were already connected to one or more of our group, but still, it seemed like the disparity in status that had been obvious in the conversation with Linos a few hours ago had already melted away, giving way to what felt more like a normal conversation between adults than anything.

It was nice, in a way that took me by surprise. For the first time in days, I felt relaxed, and forgot about everything else on my mind.

The dinner went on like that for a while, until we'd polished off pretty much everything save for some of the vegetables. Sacnicte and Yantho stepped away to get dessert ready - some simple cakes and cream was all that there'd been time for - and everyone else started chatting even more vigorously. Wine also arrived at some point, and with it, a general loosening of tongues, although people weren't going that far. There was a child present, after all.

Ran and I ended up talking to Ptolema about something inane, Linos was trying to comfort Theo after he was shaken up earlier, Bardiya was engaged in some conversation with the two servants way on the side of table, and Kamrusepa was unsubtly trying to network with Neferuaten in a more brazen manner than she'd tried with Linos, earlier.

Durvasa, despite his arrival, had barely had a presence during the dinner, other than making a few introductions upon his arrival. Instead, he'd only been quietly conversing with Ophelia, who had ended up sitting next to him. I was left feeling a little unsure why he'd come.

At one point, he caught my eye and gave me a curious, inquisitive look.

"So," Linos asked during a lull in the conversation, taking a small gulp from his wine glass. "If you don't mind me asking, what drew all of you to study arcane healing? I know about Theo and a little about Utsu, but I'm ashamed to admit my knowledge of the rest of you just about starts and ends at your credentials."

"I've talked to you about everybody before, dad," Theo said, sounding embarrased.

"Well, yes," he said, seeming to enjoy this reaction. "but I want to hear it first hand."

"It is a bit of an intense question for the time of night, don't you think?" Neferuaten commented, scooping up the last of her peas. "Let them relax. They'll be more than enough grilling tomorrow, I imagine."

"Oh, come on! Don't make me out to be such a villain," Linos protested, though his smile made it clear he wasn't truly offended. "They don't have to answer. And besides, this whole, uh--" He spun his finger in a circle. "This whole event isn't just about them giving us a lecture. It's supposed to be a chance for us to meet some of the brightest people in the new generation! I don't want some pre-prepared line like we'll get at the event. I'm curious."

"Well," Kamrusepa said, eagerly. "Personally, I think I was drawn to it because of a period of illness I had as a child. I was stuck in bed for a few weeks, wasting away, and it got me thinking about the human condition for the first time. About how much we exist at the whims of our fragile biology, even to this day, and how much we stood to gain by changing that."

"You never told us that before, Kam!" Ptolema said. "Whaddya catch?"

She looked a little annoyed at this question. "What does it matter what I caught? It's irrelevant to the explanation." She hesitated. "I caught the Umbrican Flu. Type of gastroenteritis, nasty thing. They only developed a treatment for it a decade ago."

Personally, my on-the-spot suspicion was that Kamrusepa hadn't caught anything at all. That backstory sounded like it had been designed at a board meeting. Neferuaten looked as though she suspected something too, since she was chuckling to herself.

"What about you, Ptolema?" she asked. "If you're going to pick at me, then surely you don't mind sharing."

"Oh, I dunno, really," she said, with a shrug. "I'd love to say it was something deep, like to do with my mom or whatever. But I always wanted to do something where I could help people, and I did really well at dissections in biology during secondary school." She scratched the back of her head. "Everyone started saying I'd be a great surgeon, and my dad had already decided I should be an arcanist, so it just kinda happened."

"You make it sound easy to come this far, when you put it like that," Linos said.

"Hey, I'm not saying I don't work hard!" Ptolema said. "Once I decide I'm gonna do something, I give it my all, y'know?"

A few chuckles and giggles spread through the table at this. Ptolema blushed a bit, crossing her arms.

"My whole family have been healers for decades," Seth said, still slowly picking away at his chicken. "My old man was a Biomancer, and half of my mom's side of the family were Thanatomancers." He shrugged. "No reason to break with tradition, right?"

"Must've been rather uncomfortable, having those expectations placed on you," Bardiya said.

"Eh." He shrugged. "It's not like they forced me. And growing up around this stuff can help you a ton. I mean-- Look how many people here have family who are healers. Me, Theo, Lilith, Su..."

Ran coughed to herself.

"What about you, Su? Why'd you take it up?"

"Oh, uh." My eyes flicked downwards. "I don't know, really. I've always been good with numbers and have a pretty good memory, so becoming an arcanist felt like a given. And I suppose I liked the idea of doing research that might help others, too. "

"Really?" He frowned a little. "That's it?"

I made an awkward smile. "You sound disappointed."

"No! No, nothing like that." He looked a little embarrassed, then broke into a grin, glancing away. "I guess I just figured you'd have an answer that was... I dunno, more profound, since you're usually so high-mined."

He had probably been expecting an answer to do with my grandfather.

"I could invent something, if you wanted." I took my first sip of the wine that had been served to me. I didn't actually like drinking - I hated anything that interfered with my thinking - but it had felt strange to turn it down when no on else had. "Or talk about why I studied Thanatomancy specifically."

"Eh, no, it's okay. I feel kinda weird about it now." He let out a stiff laugh, then looked to my left. "What about you, Ran?"

"No comment," she said, not looking up from her food.

"Knowing her," Kamrusepa said, her tone teasing, "she probably took it up just so she could spend more time with Su."

Ran shot her an obscenely icy glare, which produced some more laughs from around the table.

"I know you're kidding around, but I think that'd be really sweet!" Ptolema said. "I wish I had a friend who'd go that far for me."

"We're not that close," Ran said, slicing a parsnip down the center. "Don't get the wrong idea."

"Y-Yeah," I said. "We barely talked for nearly half a decade when I was studying in Mekhi."

"I do remember when I spotted the two of you together during a visit of hers," Neferuaten said off-handedly.

"Oh-ho, this sounds like a funny story," Kamrusepa said, with an eager smile.

"It's not, really." Neferuaten looked in my direction, a small smile on her face. "Do you mind if I tell it, you two?"

"Uh, I suppose it's fine," I said.

Ran only offered a shrug,

"It was during the summer," she said, pouring herself a little more wine from an adjacent bottle. "I was in the market shopping for some odds and ends, when, as I passed by one the largest bookstores in the city, I saw the two of them carrying an absolutely colossal number of tomes - far more than they could clearly manage, dropping one every few moments and having to stop to pick it up. Utsushikome herself looked on the verge of tears, and miss Hoa-Trinh was trying desperately to calm her down." She set the bottle back down. "I approached them and, after a little awkward discussion, discerned that, after a discussion about how scholarly texts were much more inexpensive in Tem-Aphat compared to Sao on account of our laws against placing them over two luxury debt, Utsushikome had volunteered to obtain every book for the next two school years for her... Though sadly had overestimated their ability to transport them."

"Aww!" Ptolema said. "That's so sweet!" Ophelia, who seemed to be paying attention to the conversation for the first time in a while, giggled a little at a resolution to the story.

"That sounds just like Utsu," Linos said. "She's always been generous."

My face flushed. "Ahah, well... She's making it sound more melodramatic than it was..."

That, and that wasn't quite the reality of what had happened. We'd actually been on the way to return the books, since I'd stupidly bought them for Ran without asking a few days earlier, only for it to turn out they were different editions than the ones in the Arcanocracy with disparate formatting, making them useless for her. Ran had told Neferuaten a version of the truth that made me look like less of an idiot.

She kept looking downwards at her plate, through all of this, holding a standard dour expression.

"Still, you must admit, Su. The two of you do always seem to do everything together," Kamrusepa said. "It doesn't seem unthinkable to me you'd be planning your lives around one another. Were they like that when they were young, Theo?"

"Mm? Oh, uh." He hesitated, glancing at me briefly in the awkwardness of the moment. "Well, I went to a different tertiary school... But yes, they've always seemed close, I suppose. People at university always used to think they were, er..." He cleared his throat, having grown increasingly quiet as he trailed off.

"What were you saying, there?" Kamrusepa asked. She seemed to find all of this very amusing.

"N-Nevermind," he said.

By this point, I feeling so embarrassed that I'd sunk a bit into my chair.

"Let's, uh, not linger to much on the point, hm?" Linos said, seeming to pick up on this. "Anyone else want to share their reasons? Who do we have left--Ophelia, Bardiya..."

"It was largely a product of circumstance, in my case," Bardiya said, his tone as formal as ever. "I originally became an arcanist for entirely different reasons - I'd planned to be an artificer, following after my father. But events in my later teenage years led me to take up the curative arts, at first in an informal capacity. As chance would have it, I turned out to be better at it than I expected."

"Oh? What sort of events?" Linos asked. "This sounds interesting."

His eagerness to move the conversation away from me was kind, and honestly, I felt relieved regardless of the result. But it had probably prevented him from drawing the obvious conclusion from the context. A few of our class were already going a little stiff-faced. We knew Bardiya. We knew where this was going.

He raised an eyebrow. "I'm referring to the revolution, of course," he said.