Chapter 122: Chapter 122 – A Contemplative Meal

Six stories, it turns out, is time enough for all of us to be more than hungry by the time Zidanya’s has ended, and what an ending. Lily’s having been a goddess, maybe still being a goddess, that was more or less expected, and I guess so was Amber’s sheer sense of joy and fulfillment about her life. All of the rest, though?

I manage to keep my mouth shut, though. The social norms around this little event we’re having were explained to me in painstaking detail, and I haven’t forgotten them. We exchange stories, we eat lunch, we have parting words, and then Lily leaves, in that order and strictly limited to those; there’s no room for clarifying questions or exclamations.

She doesn’t bother with any flashiness, but she also doesn’t bother with subtlety. About five seconds after Zidanya’s ringing words have faded into the honestly nightmare-inducing thoughts that result, Lily looks me in the eye and tilts her head just the slightest amount. About two seconds later, after I’ve realized what she’s trying to communicate and have my Visor deployed, she brings lunch out with a surge of magic.

It’s an act of subtle beauty. I’d call it bragging, but it’s an act of mastery, and in a way that’s something that transcends braggadocio. I don’t understand anything about what she did; I can make some guesses, there was definitely either a pocket spatial dimension or teleportation involved, but now there’s a narrow, steaming bowl of hot soup in front of each of us and curved wooden platters covered in balls of rice that wrap around the bowl of soup. A gift, I think to myself; not the soup, not the rice balls, but the act itself and making sure that I was prepared to record it for later study. A gift that I had absolutely no way to evaluate the significance of, but it wasn’t trivial.

The bowls of soup are barely warm, for all that the soup itself is steaming. They’re ceramic and thick and well-insulated; I mimic the others in breathing deeply of the steam coming off of mine, feeling it clear my sinuses and fill my senses with the slightly-fermented, slightly-salty flavor of the soup. I sip it steadily, still taking my cues from Zidanya and Lily, and it’s a pleasant warmth in my stomach that seems to just heighten the anticipation and the hunger for more by the time we pop the first of our rice balls into our mouths.

My eyes go wide, then close, as everything stops for a moment. When I open my eyes again it’s to definite smirks on a few faces, and I give a sort of half-sheepish, half-defensively-disdainful scoff on reflex.

The rice ball is amazing. No, amazing isn’t a sufficient descriptor; it’s sublime, it’s possibly the best mouthful of food I’ve ever had in my life, an outright miracle in an uncaring universe inevitably headed for the Long Freeze.

The second rice ball isn’t any worse than the first. There’s salt in there, and vinegar, and a hint of sugar, and that’s just in the rice. There’s bits of something fatty and full of flavor, little shreds of it, interspersed deliciously with the rice. The bits give way, in the center, to something more substantial; it comes apart in my mouth, flaking apart and coating my tongue with sauce full of unfamiliar flavors.

It’s almost too much. Everyone else is studiously pretending not to notice, but I have to stop after each bite of food to process the arrayed flavors both similar and different, melding together in an overpowering sensory onslaught. Even so, there are tears gathering at the corners of my eyes and a gibber building in the back of my throat, and I’m on the edge of letting one or the other of those show a little too obviously for it to be ignored.

I keep it together through the meal, through a series of bites of food that looks identical on the outside but has a mounting intensity of flavor and texture. There’s a few sips of a thick, almost cloying broth that has an unfamiliar frigid bite that clears my palette like a blowtorch, and then two more clumps of rice. These two are less spherical and more oblong, and they’re sticky to the touch with some sort of soaked-through sauce. I follow the others in popping one into my mouth; it’s sweet, densely sweet, and tastes of fruit and gluten and something halfway between milky and nutty.

It’s new, but it’s manageably new. It’s enjoyable, it’s even delightful, but it doesn’t make me want to weep from the sheer magnitude of the experience and the intensity of the flavors.

There’s a sort of pause after we eat our second pieces of sweet fruity sticky rice, whatever the actual name of it is supposed to be. It lets me get my head on a bit straighter than it had been previously; I need that, because the parting words are supposed to be significant, they’re supposed to show respect by demonstrating insight into someone’s story, by demonstrating that I listened to it with real attention and focus.

Only one person’s story, though. That’s the thing about the parting remarks: we each say one thing to one person, and I more or less have to pick Lily, or rather, I have to pick Lady Lillit Sheid. It’s not just that she’s the one who’s going to be leaving, and therefore unable to be asked unofficial followup questions, though that’s true. It’s that Lily is Lady Lillit Sheid, and I’m the highest ranking person in our team by virtue of the directionality of the bindings, and isn’t that probably a kick in the teeth for Zidanya.

I mean, okay, I’ve got a few decades on Amber and Sara, and I can see the logic regardless for them and Vonne alike, but Zidanya? She’s got a thousand and a half years on me, vastly more power, and centuries as an Architect in this dungeon’s halls. She’s a peer of Lily’s—not an equal, but a peer nonetheless—and the only reason I was able to take her down is that she was crippled by her scenario’s constraints and wasn’t trying all that hard to kill me even before she threw the game. So the fact that I’m somehow considered senior to her is just one of the many things that is on my long, long list of grievances with regards to this benighted situation I’m in.

I tear my thoughts away from that before it devolves into iterating through the list. There’s some sort of social thing going on between the others, with Sara, Zidanya, Amber, and Vonne all exchanging meaningful looks of some sort while their body language shifts in a sort of unspoken conversation, in which the only person whose discourse I can follow is Amber’s. Lily, though, is poised and calm and still, with all of her attention settled firmly on me in a way that makes my throat go familiarly dry and my heart rate spike. I’m suddenly and quite intensely reminded that just as my clothes and cosmetics alike are carefully chosen to tread the line between acceptably formal and come hither ye predators to stalk your prey, Lily is attired in power, and at that thought I shiver under her gaze.

“Zidanya.” Sara’s voice cuts across the moment like a scalpel, and with a subtle crook of Lily’s eyebrow I’m freed to look over at my companions. Sara as juniormost is interesting; she’s a more capable combatant than Vonne, along with being one of my companions, but Vonne probably has tiers on her along with her decades. Her turning to Zidanya means that they’re going with the less-orthodox question cycle based on interest, rather than continuing on seniority. An excellent choice, because there isn’t an acceptable way to dodge the fact that Amber technically outranks, per the nonsenseball rules of this story-sharing tradition, everyone else. Including Zidanya.

“Sara.” Zidanya’s voice is… pleased, I’m fairly confident, and Amber’s body language is all smug and joyful, and I have no idea why.

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“Since your story suggests that the Temples are more resilient to the fraying of…” Sara trails off for a moment, scowling. “The fraying of this border you spoke of, why does a Temple require surface-delvers?”

“Void Between, Temple or Dungeon. Betwixt these are filter and catchment, as I spoke; these drink and process that power which unravels all else it should touch, and from these flow mana and more. Yet Voidbleed bleeds; as Temple and Dungeon power pylons, so too their sanguine stabilization.” Zidanya’s smile is frosty. “A surprise, mayhap, to those in whom it gestates, an they fail to digest it. Those progress no further. Amber, what part of your training had Neza, or any other Cleric of the Forsaken?”

“None.” If Amber is fazed by Zidanya’s lightning-fast pivot from answering a question to asking one as specific as her answer was worrisome, well, my Paladin doesn’t let any of it show in her body language or voice. “I’ve never seen the Commander nor Her Ladyship nor Dame Tishu Va save distantly at High Table, and I was never graced with their personal attention in training. I was friends with two of the Clergy, and on good terms with the other seven I traveled with over the years; and of course I studied the history of the Goddess and Her rise and fall, along with her current theology in her form as the Forsaken. My instructor in those matters was an Acolyte, however, rather than a Cleric, and that is… that is all, I suppose.

“Vonne.” Amber leans on the table, opening her mouth, then closes it again, looking for a transition into her question or maybe a question in the first place. A moment later, she shakes her head, having changed her mind about what to say. “Tell me of your favorite puzzle?”

Vonne goes, in a heartbeat, from slouching to bolt-upright, eyes gleaming. “Huh? My favorite—oh wow, that is not what I thought you would ask! My favorite puzzle! Um. Um!” I don’t bother hiding my smirk as she stammers, embarrassed enough that even I can tell. “Okay, so, this is basically like asking me who my favorite team member is, and just cause the answer is Do doesn’t mean it’s okay to have one! But um.

“So, there’s a spell that lets you turn grid patterns into runic formations, right, and some of those runic formations have names or numbers or both. So you have these puzzles where when you answer them, you get a grid, right, and that’s also a word or a number and a number can be a word too. And my favorite one of those kinds of puzzles is the logic puzzles, the ones where you have to do inference jumps between constraints to make any progress. It’s like that Miracle puzzle you used in the ring, the Bombfinder variant! That was beautiful. But instead of just the solution, you get a grid-picture. That’s my favorite, even if it’s a category!” Vonne half-collapses back into her chair, fur rippling back down to flatness in waves. “Okay. Um. Sara!”

“Spark.”

Vonne’s face freezes in a rictus of embarrassment before it disappears into her arms. “Oh no, oh no.” She pulls her face out of her hands to look at Sara’s face, and something in there makes her spine unkink and the embarrassment give way to sheepishness. “Um. I had a question and now I forgot it. Oh! Okay, a different one. Um. Where in your story is you?”

There’s a pause. It’s not a particularly long one, but it’s long enough for me to notice Sara’s face twisting in disgust momentarily before returning to its usual studied neutrality. “My family,” she says calmly, “was instrumental in the Vanishing of the Blues, and in sabotaging the Bilateral Alliance.” At the somewhat croggled look on probably all of our faces, she shrugs minutely. “I have made what few amends can be made; the chain of continuity is severed, and all branches who had kept the faith have been dealt with, with Rei’s assistance.

“Amber.” Sara doesn’t give time for questions, which is well and good, since that’s not part of the ritual. “Is the current consensus of a Reca’s nature, that they are continuous miracles of Seidr, true?”

“No. As well you know; I hold no truck with him.” Amber frowns minutely, visibly wondering whether she should elaborate. She shrugs after a moment. “Seidr’s miracles are among the fixed natures of magic, as are all the miracles of the Gods. The Temples feed into the Gods, and the Temples draw from the Gods in return; when Kazir’s grace is granted through a pylon here, Kazir has no part in it, save to define the nature of his grace. Why should a Reca differ?”

There’s a contemplative silence after that, and Amber nudges me for a moment. I startle, then realize that oh right, it’s my turn, and if I don’t say something it’ll be implied that I think I’m senior to Lady Sheid, so I cough and feel my face and neck heating rapidly as I scramble to say something that isn’t inane.

“Lady of the Crossroads,” I say it quietly, a little questioningly, and the gleam in her eyes as she tilts her head and nods at me is an interesting answer in its own right to a question that I asked only by implication. “How’d you wind up here?”

“The ground broke open and drooled out rock hot enough to melt steel.” She snorts in undignified humor. “Everything I was, was linked to that land. Turns out a pond goes away fast when the heat turns that high. It wasn’t even caused by anything in particular; just happenstance, murder by geology averted only by my having a bit of my domain near enough to the Temple to get inside.” Something about that twists her face in something not entirely unlike a scowl. “Eh. Adam.

“Are you staying?”

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