#i kind of want to paint some shadowgast next | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ariadne-mouse · 2 years

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The Cottage of Forbidden Things

A Shadowgast ficlet using words from as many banned "sensitive" tumblr tags as possible in the most innocuous ways possible.

2082 words, rated G.

—

“Are you sure about this?”

Essek looked skeptically at the thatch-roofed cottage. His tastes had humbled considerably since moving his life outside of the Dynasty, but his noble refinement remained. His eyes lingered on the slightly lopsided door frame, the mud brick washed in milky paint, the crack in the wide, flat stone laid before the door as a stoop.

“It’s perfect,” Caleb answered, and when Essek saw how his eyes crinkled as he looked upon these same details, he voiced no further doubt.

The cottage was cool inside, and only had one room. There was a hearth with a stone chimney, a pot-bellied iron stove, a wooden farm table with two chairs, a small cupboard, and a bed with a beautiful patchwork quilt. Bunches of herbs and flowers hung from the eaves, perhaps for cooking or medicine. The most important feature, however, was—

“Hallo meine lieben Katzen!” Caleb cooed, going to lavish greetings upon not one, not two, but three cats who had all made themselves comfortable on the floor around the dying fire. “Aren’t you a charming little pussy cat. And you, and you. Oh, you are all wonderful.”

Essek smiled to himself. Yes, this place was not so bad, perhaps.

—

Something was tickling Essek’s chin. When he opened his eyes he saw it was not Caleb’s beard, but the whiskers of a cat — the one with grey fur as smooth as satin had curled up next to him and begun to lick its paw.

A cock’s crow sounded from somewhere in the distance. It was so early that the light from the small cottage windows was still grey. Caleb had stoked the little fire, and there was a kettle on the iron stove, simmering away with a wisp of steam. Caleb himself was not there, however. As Essek put his feet on the cold stone floor, he heard a thunk-clatter from outside. He quickly rolled on thick woolen stockings — a pair of Caleb’s he had been loaned — and went to investigate.

Caleb was chopping wood on a stump outside. He was clearly in his element, his motions fluid and practiced, alternating between splitting rounds of wood with the blade of the axe and using the butt of it to knock stubborn pieces apart. Essek was used to Caleb’s competency with somatics, but this was a different kind of elegance. He watched until Caleb gathered some wood in his arms and returned inside.

“Ah! You are up,” Caleb said, his cheeks pink from the morning chill. “I was surprised to see you sleep instead of trance, but our journey here has been long. Did you rest well?”

“I did,” Essek said, realizing as he said it that it was true. Despite the rickety bedframe, lumpy wool-and-chaff stuffing in the mattress, and heavy quilt, he had slept hard and woken refreshed.

“Good!” Caleb set the wood in a basket by the stove. He’d split the pieces smaller than they needed for the fireplace, the easier for feeding into the stove’s iron belly. He was dressed simply in a cotton spun shirt, trousers, suspenders, and leather boots. His shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up to the elbow, showing off the lean muscles of his forearms and the scars he had long since stopped trying to hide. Was this the archetypal heathen of the Empire? The image did not seem so offensive as Dynasty propaganda might suggest.

“And you?” Essek returned, pulling his focus back to the conversation.

Caleb leaned and cracked his back. “Pretty good! I am not getting any younger, and my body knows when it is sleeping in a new place, but ja.” He reached high on a shelf in the cupboard and took down a white ceramic pitcher. “There is a little milk here if you want some for tea.”

“I have never thought to put milk in tea before,” Essek said. “Is that traditional?”

“It is to one’s taste, I suppose,” Caleb said. “Some also put sugar. Here, let me make you a cup, and you can decide if you like it. Careful, it’s hot.”

Essek found he preferred tea without anything in it, but it wasn’t a hardship to drink what Caleb had prepared and watch him putter comfortably about the space. It was as though many old habits and muscle memories had awoken in his friend, telling him exactly where things might be kept and what to do with them. He brought eggs from the small coop outside, cut vegetables with a wooden-handled knife, and sliced several thick wedges of brown bread with butter for breakfast. It was simple fare, and strange to Essek’s Rosohnan palate, but satisfying.

“Do I have something on my face?” Caleb finally asked from across the table, noticing Essek observing him. “You are staring.”

“I just like to look at you,” Essek replied boldly, to see Caleb smile. It worked.

What also happened, however, was that Caleb decided to study Essek just as boldly. “You don’t have your earrings,” Caleb commented, surprised. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without them.”

Essek self-consciously thumbed at the empty piercings in his ears where several bits of jewelry usually sat, sleek and fashionable. “I didn’t want them to catch on the blankets,” he explained. That was partially true. He’d also felt a bit like a peacock in this quiet, mud-brick house, and had decided to try dressing down a little. His ears felt naked.

Caleb offered him the grace of not pushing further, though his gaze lingered.

They washed dishes outside in a basin of soapy water drawn from a nearby well with a bucket on a rope. Essek had offered to Prestidigitate everything clean, but Caleb seemed oddly intent on doing everything by hand. In fact, he hadn’t used magic since they arrived — he had even eschewed his talents for fire, choosing to light the stove and yellow wax candles with long-stemmed matches. Exchanging grace for grace, Essek did not question him on this.

—

“Essek!”

Caleb’s voice sounded from not too far away in the bushes.

With combat magic ready at his fingertips, Essek burst through the foliage, ready for anything.

“Here, look!” Caleb was on his knees, brandishing a small fruit. “There are wild strawberries here. Come, come, help me pick them.” What Essek had taken for urgency in his tone had only been excitement, and Essek willed his anxiety to dissipate.

“Yes, of course.” He folded himself neatly down on the mossy forest floor. “What should I do?”

“Well first, you must eat one,” Caleb insisted. He popped one into his own mouth and made a hum of pleasure. “I have not had these for a very long time. I can replicate them in the tower, of course, but picking them is what makes them perfect.”

Essek tried a strawberry and found it tender, tart, and sweet. Red juice stained his fingers like blood. He cupped his hands and Caleb piled berries into them one after the other until he held a small bounty. The knees of his trousers were wet from the morning dew, beads of water shining like mithril on the leaves.

“Let’s bring these back,” Caleb said, his own hands reddened too. “They will be good with cream, if I can get some from the farm down the road.”

—

Caleb did return with a little crock of cream, and a package of other goods he had been sent away with by their generous neighbors — bread, a sack of oats, apples, fresh butter, a single orange. The cats were begging at his feet as he whipped the cream into fluff, a vigorous process that took several long minutes of beating with a thin metal whisk.

“Ah, ah, nein, kleine katze,” Caleb scolded, grabbing a white-and-orange tabby cat that had jumped onto the table, stopping it before it could upset the bowl. “Here, here, as a little treat, just this once.” He set a saucer of leftover cream on the floor, and it was quickly surrounded by all three cats.

Essek watched Caleb enjoy these labors, and was again struck by how out of place he felt by comparison. Long, long ago, Caleb had claimed that the difference between them was thinner than a razor, and sometimes Essek flattered himself to believe it, but they truly had come from two opposing worlds.

The whisk clanged sharply on the edge of the bowl as Caleb stopped and stood stock-still. He cocked his head as though listening. Essek sat up, alarmed.

A moment passed, and then Caleb’s face changed from pensive to elated, and he spoke with a huge smile. “Wunderbar! Oh, that is such good news. I am so very happy for you both. For the three of you. We will visit soon.”

“What is it?” Essek asked.

Caleb clapped his hands together. “Big news, good news! Fjord and Jester have had a little girl! Jester says the babe came a little early, but everything is fine.”

Essek brightened. “All is well?”

“Ja, ja.” Caleb grabbed Essek’s hands and pulled him from his seat to joyfully spin him around, and Essek went, laughing. “We are uncles!”

The cats, who had been slumped and sprawled spread-eagle in front of the hearth in a milk-drunk stupor, all scattered with yowls of complaint.

When they stopped their spin, Caleb brought Essek in for a tight squeeze, and Essek leaned into it warmly — a reaction it had taken some time to learn, and now seemed impossible to resist.

“Should we go?” Essek inquired. “Did they need anything?”

Caleb shook his head. “Jester’s request was actually to wait a few days. They are all very tired. But ja, soon.”

Crash!

The ceramic pitcher of milk smashed into pieces on the floor, the third cat — tortoiseshell, mischievous — fleeing the clay shards but quickly returning to lap at the milk.

Caleb made a cry of dismay. “Ah, we will need to replace that for our hosts.”

“I can fix it, if you wish,” Essek offered, rescuing the trailing edge of the lace table runner from the mess.

“With Prestidigitation? Is it that versatile?”

“Jester taught me Mending,” Essek replied. Sometimes he thought it was futile for a man such as himself to know how to fix things, rather than break them, to help rather than hurt, but he treasured the time she had spent teaching him for its own sake.

Caleb deliberated. Essek thought he might be weighing his evident desire to avoid using magic against his sense of duty as a guest of this house. Duty won out, and he nodded. “Then please. Danke.”

Essek mended the pitcher and vanished the spilled milk.

“You are very needy,” Caleb scolded the cat, who did not look repentant in the slightest. “Tsch, no biting.”

There was a harsh braying noise from outside in the distance.

“What was that?” Essek craned his neck to look out the window.

“Oh, the neighbors down the road have a donkey,” Caleb waved his hand. When Essek looked at him blankly, he tried again. “An ass?”

Essek blinked. “Excuse me?”

Caleb’s lips twitched with amusement. “An animal like a horse, but small and stubborn and very loud, like that.”

“Ah.”

Essek enjoyed strawberries and whipped cream more than he had the tea with milk, and scraped the bottom of the bowl with his spoon to collect every last bite.

—

A shower of rain that evening notified them that there were holes in the roof. This didn’t seem to bother Caleb overly much, and he put a bucket there to catch the worst drips.

“We can fix it in the morning,” Caleb said, after a peek outside confirmed how wet it was.

He sat next to Essek on the bed and undid the knot of his bootlaces. They had been sharing the space well, comfortable in their proximity, but it always felt very intimate to undertake the simple acts of preparing for rest together. Their humble surroundings made this feeling even more stark, somehow. Magnified.

Once they settled under the heavy quilt, the only light was from the fire’s embers, and the only sounds were the rain on the roof and the occasional plink of a drop in the bucket.

“Caleb,” Essek murmured into the hush of night.

“Mm?”

“I’m glad we came here.”

Caleb, dark-blind, fumbled until he found Essek’s hand, then drew it to his lips and brushed a kiss to his knuckles.

“I’m glad you are here with me.”

And Essek did not sleep this time, but tranced instead, listening to the quiet sounds of the cottage and of Caleb’s even breathing for a long time.

#an interesting challenge of incorporating specific words #shadowgast #critical role #ariadne writes cr #tumblr snippets #banned tags #op

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